Short Takes

It's not often you get a book from inside Mossad, the super-secret Israeli intelligence agency, but that's what Michael Flamini has just bought for St. Martin's. The book by former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, tentatively titled 13 Years That Changed the World, will look at the period from the first Gulf War to the present, from his special perspective at the heart of Arab-Israeli relations. Flamini got world rights, except for the U.K. and Commonwealth (bought by Orion in London), from agent Lynne Rabinoff....The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum, has signed again with Doubleday's Kris Puopolo for a big new book called The Anti-Civilization, which describes how Soviet Communism was forcibly imposed on the whole of Eastern Europe after WWII; U.S., Canadian and open market rights were bought from agent Georges Borchardt.... Rodale's Leigh Haber bought a memoir by veteran ABC-TV newswoman Lynne Sher, who will tell of some of the highlights of her 30-plus years on the job. The seller was Esther Newberg at ICM.