"Applebee's America" cracks the twenty-first-century code for political, business, and religious leaders struggling to keep pace with the times. A unique team of authors -- Douglas B. Sosnik, a strategist in the Clinton White House; Matthew J. Dowd, a strategist for President Bush's two campaigns; and award-winning political journalist Ron Fournier -- took their exclusive insiders' knowledge far outside Washington's beltway in search of keys to winning leadership.They discovered that successful leaders, even those from disparate fields, have more in common than not.Their book takes you inside the reelection campaigns of Bush and Clinton, behind the scenes of hyper-successful megachurches, and into the boardrooms of corporations such as Applebee's International, the world's largest casual dining restaurant chain. You'll also see America through the anxious eyes of ordinary people, buffeted by change and struggling to maintain control of their lives.Whether you're promoting a candidate, a product, or the Word of God, the rules are the same in Applebee's America.- People make choices about politics, consumer goods, and religion with their hearts, not their heads.- Successful leaders touch people at a gut level by projecting basic American values that seem lacking in modern institutions and missing from day-to-day life experiences.- The most important Gut Values today are community and authenticity. People are desperate to connect with one another and be part of a cause greater than themselves. They're tired of spin and sloganeering from political, business, and religious institutions that constantly fail them.- A person's lifestyle choices can be used to predict howhe or she will vote, shop, and practice religion. The authors reveal exclusive new details about the best "LifeTargeting" strategies.- In this age of skepticism and media diversification, people are abandoning traditional opinion leaders for "Navigators." These otherwise average Americans help their family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers negotiate the swift currents of change in twenty-first-century America.- Winning leaders ignore conventional wisdom and its many myths, including these false assumptions: Voters only act in their self-interests; Republicans rule exurbia; and technology drives people apart. "Wrong, wrong, and wrong."- Once you squander a Gut Values Connection, you may never get it back. Bush learned that hard lesson within a year of winning reelection."Applebee's America" offers numerous practical examples of how leaders -- whether from the worlds of politics, business, or religion -- earn the loyalty and support of people by understanding and sharing their values and goals.

    

    Because SOG operations suffered extraordinary casualties, they required extraordinary soldiers. So when Capt. Thom Nicholson arrived at Command and Control North (CCN) in Da Nang, SOG's northernmost base camp, he knew he was going to be working with the cream of the crop. As commander of Company B, CCN's Raider Company, Nicholson commanded four platoons, comprising nearly two hundred men, in some of the war's most deadly missions, including ready-reaction missions for patrols in contact with the enemy, patrol extractions under fire, and top-secret expeditions "over the fence" into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. Colonel Nicholson spares no one, including himself, as he provides a rare glimpse into the workings of one of the military's most carefully concealed reconnaissance campaigns.From the Paperback edition.

    It’s a shame no one bothered to write a more perfect Constitution—one that didn’t trigger more than two centuries of arguments about what the darn thing actually says.Until now. Perfection is at hand. A new, improved Constitution is here. And you are holding it.But first, some historical context: In the eighteenth century, a lawyer named James Madison gathered his friends in Philadelphia and, over four long months, wrote four short pages: the Constitution of the United States of America. Not bad.In the nineteenth century, a president named Abraham Lincoln freed an entire people from the flaws in that Constitution by signing the Emancipation Proclamation.  Pretty impressive.And in the twentieth century, a doctor at the Bethesda Naval Hospital delivered a baby—but not just any baby. Because in the twenty-first century, that baby would become a man, that man would become a patriot, and that patriot would rescue a country . . . by single-handedly rewriting that Constitution.Why? We think of our Constitution as the painstakingly designed blueprint drawn up by, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, an “assembly of demigods” who laid the foundation for the sturdiest republic ever created. The truth is, it was no blueprint at all but an Etch A Sketch, a haphazard series of blunders, shaken clean and redrawn countless times during a summer of petty debates, drunken ramblings, and desperate compromise—as much the product of an “assembly of demigods” as a confederacy of dunces.No wonder George Washington wished it “had been made more perfect.” No wonder Benjamin Franklin stomached it only “with all its faults.” The Constitution they wrote is a hot mess. For starters, it doesn’t mention slavery, or democracy, or even Facebook; it plays favorites among the states; it has typos, smudges, and misspellings; and its Preamble, its most famous passage, was written by a man with a peg leg. Which, if you think about it, gives our Constitution hardly a leg to stand on.[Pause for laughter.]Now stop laughing. Because you hold in your hands no mere book, but the most important document of our time. Its creator, Daily Show writer Kevin Bleyer, paid every price, bore every burden, and saved every receipt in his quest to assure the salvation of our nation’s founding charter. He flew to Greece, the birthplace of democracy. He bused to Philly, the home of independence. He went toe-to-toe (face-to-face) with Scalia. He added nightly confabs with James Madison to his daily consultations with Jon Stewart. He tracked down not one but two John Hancocks—to make his version twice as official. He even read the Constitution of the United States.So prepare yourselves, fellow patriots, for the most significant literary event of the twenty-first, twentieth, nineteenth, and latter part of the eighteenth centuries. Me the People won’t just form a More Perfect Union. It will save America.

    The only sound was the sound of the wind.'Seventy years after the bombing of Hiroshima, Eric Schlosser's powerful, chilling piece of journalism exposes today's deadly nuclear age. Originally published in the New Yorker and now expanded, this terrifying true account of the 2012 break-in at a high-security weapons complex in Tennessee is a masterly work of reportage. 'Schlosser's reportage is as good as it gets' GQ

    It is an area of great contrasts -- geographically beautiful, yet the underlying crust of the region is cracked along great tectonic fault lines. These natural fault lines pale in comparison to the borders made by man, which have added further layers of complexity to a region where war is frequent, horrors are unspeakable, and history is unfathomable. It is not an area of the world that many would care to visit -- unless they had been there before.Simon Winchester, a seasoned reporter, visited the region twenty years ago. During the recent Kosovo crisis, he remembered that first trip and the people he met, and he decided that parallel journeys might well be a device for explaining with sympathy the true nature of this fractured region. Two great capitals, Vienna and Istanbul, whose ceaseless imperial rivalries in the past played so profound a role in shaping the savage divisions of the region today, would anchor his second journey to the region.With the war under way, he enlisted the aid of a linguist friend and set off from Vienna on a long, scimitar-shaped adventure through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, and Turkey, arriving at the Golden Horn just as the war was officially declared over. With luck, and through valuable personal contacts, Winchester managed to be in Macedonia on the day the NATO forces moved in to assume control of Kosovo -- and because the commanding general was an old friend, he rode in with the liberating columns of troops and armor.This is not a book about the war, but rather an intimate portrait of the region painted while the war was going on. It is also an attempt to understand what has led this region to violence -- now, in the past, and inevitably again in the future. Written with a keen sense of time and place, The Fracture Zone is at once current and timeless. It goes behind the headlines and gives us a true picture of a region that has always been on the brink. Simon Winchester's remarkable journey puts all the elements together -- the faults, the fractures, and the chaos -- and makes sense out of a seemingly senseless place.

    . . . Almost every page could make you say, I didn’t know that!"Tampa Tribune"Gannon’s love for Florida comes through in a marvelous narrative style [that] doesn’t bog down in dates and reams of facts that historians find interesting, but others don’t."--Miami Herald"First rate . . . desperately needed . . . entertaining . . . fun!"--Orlando Sentinel"Gannon is a lifelong student of the history of his state, an acclaimed teacher, a masterful and tireless raconteur, and a superb stylist. Florida: A Short History showcases each of these strengths and talents and contains the latest archaeological and historical scholarship."--Florida Historical QuarterlyAs if Ponce de León, who happened on the peninsula in 1513, returned today to demand a quick reckoning (“Tell me what happened after I was there, but leave out the boring parts!”), Michael Gannon recounts the longest recorded history of any state in the nation in twenty-seven brisk, fully illustrated chapters.From indigenous tribes who lived along spring-fed streams to environmentalists who labor to "Save Our Rivers," from the first conquistadors whose broad black ships astonished the natives to the 123,000 refugees whose unexpected immigration stunned South Floridians in 1980, the story of the state is as rich and distinctive as the story of America.And it’s older than most people think. As Gannon writes, “By the time the Pilgrims came ashore at Plymouth, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal. It was a town with fort, church, seminary, six-bed hospital, fish market, and about 120 shops and houses. Because La Florida stretched north from the Keys to Newfoundland and west to Texas, St. Augustine could claim to be the capital of much of what is now the United States.”Gannon tells his fast-marching saga in chronological fashion. Starting with the wilderness of the ancient earth, he fills the landscape with Indians, colonists, pioneers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and the panorama of Florida today--“the broad superhighways that wind past horse farms, retirement communities, international airports, launch pads, futuristic attractions, and come to rest, finally, amidst the gleaming towers of Oz?like cities.” This revised edition concludes with a look into the twenty-first century, including “in-migration,” restoration of the Everglades, education, the work force, and the infamous 2000 presidential election.Michael Gannon is distinguished service professor emeritus of history at the University of Florida. Among other honors, he has received the first Arthur W. Thompson Prize from the Florida Historical Society and the decoration Knight Commander of the Order of Isabel la Católica from King Juan Carlos I of Spain. He is the author of the best-selling Operation Drumbeat and editor of The New History of Florida.

    The colonists were fighting for rights they felt they deserved, not only as British citizens, but as human beings. The belief that rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were God given and not dependent upon any government or ruler gave the revolutionaries the courage to fight against overwhelming odds and eventually win their freedom. Inside you will read about... ✓ A Series of Oppressions ✓ Death and Taxes ✓ Out of Many, One ✓ War in Earnest ✓ Voices of Liberty ✓ Independence And more! The new government they created for the United States of America would be unlike anything seen before in world history, and their fight has continued to change the world to this day.

    Within just one month, during a holiday called Tet, the Communists would launch the largest single attack of the war--and he would be right in the thick of it. . . .In Vietnam, Richard Burns operated in live-or-die situations, risking his life so that other men could keep theirs. As a Pathfinder--all too often alone in the middle of a hot LZ--he guided in helicopters disembarking troops, directed medevacs to retrieve the wounded, and organized extractions. As well as parachuting into areas and supervising the clearing of landing zones, Pathfinders acted as air-traffic controllers, keeping call signs, frequencies, and aircraft locations in their heads as they orchestrated takeoffs and landings, often under heavy enemy fire.From Bien Hoa to Song Be to the deadly A Shau Valley, Burns recounts the battles that won him the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and numerous other decorations. This is the first and only book by a Pathfinder in Vietnam . . . or anywhere else.From the Paperback edition.

    In a groundbreaking 2007 interview with ABC News, John Kiriakou called waterboarding torture—but admitted that it probably worked. This book, at once a confessional, an adventure story, and a chronicle of Kiriakou’s life in the CIA, stands as an important, eloquent piece of testimony from a committed American patriot.In February 2002 Kiriakou was the head of counterterrorism in Pakistan. Under his command, in a spectacular raid coordinated with Pakistani agents and the CIA’s best intelligence analyst, Kiriakou’s field officers took down the infamous terrorist Abu Zubaydah. For days, Kiriakou became the wounded terrorist’s personal “bodyguard.” In circumstances stranger than fiction, as al-Qaeda agents scoured the streets for their captured leader, the best trauma surgeon in America was flown to Pakistan to make sure that Zubaydah did not die. In The Reluctant Spy, Kiriakou takes us into the fight against an enemy fueled by fanaticism. He chillingly describes what it was like inside the CIA headquarters on the morning of 9/11, the agency leaders who stepped up and those who protected their careers. And in what may be the book’s most shocking revelation, he describes how the White House made plans to invade Iraq a full year before the CIA knew about it—or could attempt to stop it. Chronicling both mind-boggling mistakes and heroic acts of individual courage, The Reluctant Spy is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the inner workings of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, the truth behind the torture debate, and the incredible dedication of ordinary men and women doing one of the most extraordinary jobs on earth. From the Hardcover edition.

    Spanning ten historic years, from the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 to ‘Joe-1’, the first Soviet atomic bomb test in August 1949, Atomic is the first fully realised popular account of the race between Nazi Germany, Britain, America and the Soviet Union to build atomic weapons.Drawing on declassified material such as MI6's Farm Hall transcripts, coded Soviet messages cracked by American cryptographers in the Venona project, and interpretations by Russian scholars of documents from the Soviet archives, Atomic presents a brilliant new account of the race to build humankind's most destructive weapon.Rich in personality, action, confrontation and deception, Jim Baggott’s book tells an epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding.

    As Andrew Meier explains in this utterly compelling account, the most recent Chechen war actually broke out on New Year's Eve in 1994 when Boris Yeltsin sent hundreds of tanks to the center of the city of Grozny in an effort to quell popular demands for independence from Russia. Six years later, Meier, braving great personal danger, traveled to the scene of one of the largest civilian massacres carried out by Russian troops, reporting on the carnage in which over 60 Chechen civiliansincluding a pregnant woman and many elderlywere brutally slaughtered in one of the war's most horrific "mop-up" operations. Days after a Chechen woman became the conflict's first female suicide bomber, Meier visited this war-torn province, encountering, among others, kidnappers, Wahhabi Islamists aligned with the Taliban, and a stream of Russian mothers arriving at the morgue to identify their fallen soldier sons. Chechnya is Meier's stunning report from a region where the death toll has already exceeded 100,000 people, and a book that attempts to comprehend what compels men to shoot children in the back.

    In Where There's a Will, Stephen M. Silverman shows just how different with a peek at the wills of the richest, most celebrated people of all time, and he provides the intimate scoop on what their heirs had to say about it. Discover what secret pact Clark Gable made in 1942 and took to his grave - only to be exposed when his will was read. Learn why it took more than a year for Liza Minnelli to raise the $37,500 needed to bury the ashes of her mother, Judy Garland, and what treasures were left to the heirs of Babe Ruth, James Dean, John Jacob Astor, Ernest Hemingway, and Ayn Rand once those wills cleared probate. From Marilyn Monroe and Andy Warhol to John Lennon, Jim Morrison, John Steinbeck, Rita Hayworth, and Jack Dempsey, Where There's a Will . . . is an utterly engrossing read sure to captivate tycoons and gossip addicts alike with its fascinating tales of how the other half bequeaths.

    Brown tries to fake to his flight instructor that he has flown before. On his twenty-first birthday, Brown is on his way home after logging eighty-five missions in a P-47 fighter over Italy, France, and Germany. Brown’s stories surrounding his training and combat experiences in World War II reveal brushes with death, continuous peril and, ultimately, a coming of age for a young man whose freshman year in college becomes instead a heroic engagement with one of the fiercest enemies his country has ever encountered. Ever dutiful to the mother who tells him to “write it down, Jamie,” Brown notes his experiences in the journal she provides and adds detail later to deliver a firsthand account of life as a pilot in the final months of combat within the European Theater. Serving as Tail-End Charley – the last man out – in most of the missions he flew, Brown’s job was to record results for the interrogation officers afterward. But Brown offers much more insight in this memoir. Follow his triumphs and travails with colleagues who become lifelong compatriots during an indelible period in American history.

    But Vidal was also a terrific conversationalist; indeed Dick Cavett once described him as “the best talker since Oscar Wilde.” Vidal was never more eloquent, or caustic, than when let loose on his favorite topic: the history and politics of the United States.This book is made up from four interviews conducted with his long-time interlocutor, the writer and radio host Jon Wiener, in which Vidal grapples with matters evidently close to his heart: the history of the American Empire, the rise of the National Security State, and his own life in politics, both as a commentator and candidate.The interviews cover a twenty-year span, from 1988 to 2008, when Vidal was at the height of his powers. His extraordinary facility for developing an argument, tracing connections between past and present, and drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of America’s place in the world, are all on full display. And, of course, it being Gore Vidal, an ample sprinkling of gloriously acerbic one-liners is also provided.