Press Kit
K.C. Sivils is a USA Today bestselling author, historian, and award-winning educator whose career in education spanned nearly four decades. During his years in the classroom, he received multiple awards for excellence in teaching and taught history courses ranging from the standard curriculum to specialized electives devoted to World War II, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War.
His approach to history has always extended beyond textbooks. Sivils led multiple student trips to Europe, taking students to battlefields, memorials, museums, and historic sites associated with World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Those experiences reinforced a lifelong interest in examining history through the lives of the people who experienced it and the political systems and ideas that shaped their world.
Sports and coaching were also central to his career as an educator. Sivils spent 25 seasons as a head basketball coach during a 39-year career in education, recording more than 500 varsity victories. He also earned a master’s degree in sport psychology from Louisiana State University. His combined background in history, coaching, and sport psychology provides a distinctive perspective on the use of elite athletics as a tool of political competition and national prestige.
As K.C. Sivils, he is the author of the Inspector Thomas Sullivan thriller series and The Devil’s Spies, a Cold War thriller. He is also the author of From Order to Chaos, a nonfiction historical series exploring the development of crime noir, its writers, stories, cultural influences, and historical roots.
Games Behind the Iron Curtain: Sports, Politics, and the Cold War brings together several threads of Sivils’s life and work: history, education, athletics, and the Cold War. Drawing on decades spent teaching history and coaching competitive athletics, he examines how communist governments transformed international sport into an arena for ideology, national prestige, propaganda, and political competition. Sivils continues to write both fiction and nonfiction, with a particular interest in crime, twentieth-century history, and the Cold War.
K.C. Sivils is a USA Today bestselling author, historian, and award-winning educator whose career in education spanned nearly four decades. During his years in the classroom, he received multiple awards for excellence in teaching and taught history courses ranging from the standard curriculum to specialized electives devoted to World War II, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War.
His approach to history has always extended beyond textbooks. Sivils...