When the U.S. went to war with Iraq, Lagouranis-who joined the Army prior to September 11-was tapped to be an interrogator in places like Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. He believed in his mission, but he soon discovered that pushing the legal limits of interrogation was encouraged. Under orders, he-along with numerous other soldiers-abused and terrorized hundreds of prisoners by adding "enhancements" to "Fear Up Harsh," an official tactic designed to terrify prisoners into revealing information. This is an unflinching first-hand account of how one man struggled with his own conscience and ultimately broke the silence surrounding interrogation practices. The first Army interrogator to step forward and publicly denounce these tactics, Lagouranis reveals what went on in Iraqi prisons-raising crucial questions about American conduct abroad.

    The leading Republican candidates campaigned as isolationists. The charismatic Willkie, newcomer and upstager, was a liberal interventionist, just as anti-Hitler as FDR. After five days of floor rallies, telegrams from across the country, multiple ballots, rousing speeches, backroom deals, terrifying international news, and, most of all, the relentless chanting of "We Want Willkie" from the gallery, Willkie walked away with the nomination. The story of how this happened — and of how essential his nomination would prove in allowing FDR to save Britain and prepare this country for entry into World War II — is all told in Charles Peters' Five Days in Philadelphia. As Peters shows, these five action-packed days and their improbable outcome were as important as the Battle of Britain in defeating the Nazis.

    Arnett’s clear-eyed coverage incurred the wrath of President Lyndon Johnson and officials on all sides of the conflict. Writing candidly and vividly about his gambles and glories, Arnett also shares his fears and fights in reporting against the backdrop of war. Arnett places readers at the historic pivot-points of Vietnam: covering Marine landings, mountaintop battles, Saigon’s decline and fall, and the safe evacuation of a planeload of 57 infants in the midst of chaos. Peter Arnett’s sweeping view and his frank, descriptive, and dramatic writing brings the Vietnam War to life in a uniquely insightful way for this year’s 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. Arnett won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for his Vietnam coverage. He later went on to TV-reporting fame covering the Gulf War for CNN. Includes 21 dramatic photographs from the AP Archive and the personal collection of Peter Arnett. About the Author Peter Arnett started as an intern at his local newspaper at age 18, but knew even then his interest was in covering the world. Less than a decade later, he was traveling the globe for The Associated Press, the first of several major American news organizations he would work for. His Vietnam War coverage for the AP won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1966. Arnett joined CNN at its birth in the early 1980s, earning a television Emmy for his live television coverage of the first Gulf War from Baghdad in 1991. Born in New Zealand in 1934, he later became an American citizen and now lives in Fountain Valley, CA. About The Associated Press The Associated Press is the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world to all media platforms and formats. Founded in 1846, AP today is the most trusted source of independent news and information. On any given day, more than half the world's population sees news from AP.

    It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America’s giant military bureaucracy, steered by elitist generals and blueblood diplomats who favored troop build-ups and napalm bombs over winning the trust of the people. Through dozens of interviews and access to neverbefore-seen documents―including long-hidden love letters―Boot recasts this cautionary American story, tracing the bold rise and the crashing fall of the roguish “T. E. Lawrence of Asia” from the battle of Dien Bien Phu to the humiliating American evacuation in 1975. Bringing a tragic complexity to this so-called “ugly American,” this “engrossing biography” (Karl Marlantes) rescues Lansdale from historical ignominy and suggests that Vietnam could have been different had we only listened. With reverberations that continue to play out in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Road Not Taken is a biography of profound historical consequence.

    Conquest is an essential work of history from one of our most gifted historians.

    In December 1917, a freighter carrying 3,000 tons of explosives sailed from Brooklyn bound for the trenches of World War I—en route, a cataclysmic disaster awaited . . .Entering World War I’s fourth demoralizing year, the Allies hoped to break the grueling stalemate by sending thousands of fresh American troops and more munitions than ever to the trenches of France. Before the French freighter Mont-Blanc set sail from Brooklyn on December 1, 1917, with a staggering 3,000 tons of explosives, the captain banned his crew from lighting a single match, and secured the volatile cargo with copper nails because they don’t spark when struck. For four harrowing days, the floating powder keg bobbed up the Eastern seaboard, plowing through a wicked snowstorm and waters infested with German U-Boats, which had already torpedoed a thousand Allied ships that year alone. On December 6, the exhausted crew finally slipped into Halifax Harbour—just as the relief ship Imo was rushing to leave. At 8:45 a.m., the Imo struck the Mont-Blanc’s bow, knocking over barrels of airplane fuel. Fire swept across the decks, sending the Mont-Blanc’s crew scurrying to their lifeboats, while Halifax longshoremen, office workers, and schoolchildren walked down to watch it burn.At 9:04:35 a.m., the Mont-Blanc erupted, leveling 2.5 square miles of Halifax, killing 2,000 people, and wounding 9,000 more—all in one-fifteenth of a second.In this definitive account, bestselling author John U. Bacon recreates the recklessness that caused the tragedy, the selfless rescue efforts that saved thousands, and the inspiring resilience that rebuilt the town. Just hours after the explosion, Boston alone sent 100 doctors, 300 nurses, and a million dollars. The explosion would revolutionize ophthalmology and pediatrics; transform Canada and the U.S. from adversaries to allies; and show J. Robert Oppenheimer, who studied Halifax closely, how much destruction an atomic bomb could inflict on a city. Bacon brings to light one of the most dramatic events of the twentieth century, exploring the long shadow the world’s first “weapon of mass destruction” still casts on our world today.The Great Halifax Explosion includes 25 black-and-white photos.

    After its founding in 509 BCE, Rome grew from an unremarkable Italian city-state to the dominant superpower of the Mediterranean world. Through it all, the Romans never allowed a single man to seize control of the state. Every year for four hundred years the annually elected consuls voluntarily handed power to their successors. Not once did a consul give in to the temptation to grab absolute power and refuse to let it go. It was a run of political self-denial unmatched in the history of the world. The disciplined Roman republicans then proceeded to explode out of Italy and conquer a world filled with petty tyrants, barbarian chieftains, and despotic kings.But the very success of the Republic proved to be its undoing. The republican system was unable to cope with the vast empire Rome ruled. Bankrolled by mountains of imperial wealth and without a foreign enemy to keep them united, ambitious Roman leaders began to stray from the republican austerity of their ancestors. Almost as soon as they had conquered the Mediterranean, Rome would become engulfed in violent political conflicts and civil wars that would destroy the Republic less than a century later.The Storm Before the Storm tells the story of the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic--the story of the first generation that had to cope with the dangerous new political environment made possible by Rome's unrivaled domination over the known world. The tumultuous years from 133-80 BCE set the stage for the fall of the Republic.The Republic faced issues like rising economic inequality, increasing political polarization, the privatization of the military, endemic social and ethnic prejudice, rampant corruption, ongoing military quagmires, and the ruthless ambition and unwillingness of elites to do anything to reform the system in time to save it--a situation that draws many parallels to present-day America. These issues are among the reasons why the Roman Republic would fall. And as we all know, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

    By exploring the moral sentiments of entire societies and their leaders, and how such attitudes changed under the impact of total war, Burleigh presents readers with a fresh and powerful perspective on a conflict that continues to shape world politics. Whereas previous histories of the war have tended to focus on grand strategy or major battles, Burleigh brings his painstaking scholarship and profound sensibility to bear on the factors that shaped choices that were life-and-death decisions. These choices were made in real time, without the benefit of a philosopher's reflection, giving a moral content to the war that shaped it as decisively as any battle. Although the Nazis and the Japanese had radically different moral universes from those of their Allied opponents, as rejected in the atrocities they committed, the Western Allies found themselves aligned with a no less cruel dictatorship after rejecting the option of appeasing aggression. The war was the sum total of myriad choices made by governments, communities, and individuals, leading some to enthusiastically embrace evil and others to consciously reject it, with a range of more ambiguously human responses in between. Spanning both major theaters and ranging across these issues and more, from the "predators" (Mussolini, Hitler, and Hirohito) to appeasement, from the rape of Poland, Barbarossa, and strategic bombing to the complexities of justice and retribution, "Moral Combat" sheds a revealing light on how entire nations changed under the shock of total war. Emphasizing the role of the past in making sense of the present, Burleigh's book offers essential insights into the choices we face today--in some circles it is always 1938 and every aggressor is a new Hitler. If we do go to war, we need to know what it will mean for the individuals who command and fight it. Original, perceptive, and astonishing in scholarship and scope, this is an unforgettable and hugely important work of Second World War history.

    During that time, the Revolution came closer to being lost than at any time in the previous half dozen. The British still held New York, Savannah, Wilmington, and Charleston; the Royal Navy controlled the seas; the states--despite having signed the Articles of Confederation earlier that year--retained their individual sovereignty and, largely bankrupt themselves, refused to send any money in the new nation's interest; members of Congress were in constant disagreement; and the Continental army was on the verge of mutiny.William Fowler's An American Crisis chronicles these tumultuous and dramatic two years, from Yorktown until the British left New York in November 1783. At their heart was the remarkable speech Gen. George Washington gave to his troops evcamped north of New York in Newburgh, quelling a brewing rebellion that could have overturned the nascent government.

    Neither Jefferson nor the other Found­ers could ever have envisioned the modern national security state, with its tens of thousands of "privateers"; its bloated Department of Homeland Security; its rust­ing nuclear weapons, ill-maintained and difficult to dismantle; and its strange fascination with an unproven counterinsurgency doctrine. Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war, with all the financial and human costs that entails. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan, along the way exploring the disturbing rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight our constant wars for us, and even the changing fortunes of G.I. Joe. She offers up a fresh, unsparing appraisal of Reagan's radical presidency. Ultimately, she shows us just how much we stand to lose by allowing the priorities of the national security state to overpower our political discourse. Sensible yet provocative, dead serious yet seri­ously funny, Drift will reinvigorate a "loud and jangly" political debate about how, when, and where to apply America's strength and power--and who gets to make those decisions.From the Hardcover edition.

    Based on years of archival research and interviews with the last surviving aides and Roosevelt family members, Nigel Hamilton offers a definitive account of FDR’s masterful—and underappreciated—command of the Allied war effort. Hamilton takes readers inside FDR’s White House Oval Study—his personal command center—and into the meetings where he battled with Churchill about strategy and tactics and overrode the near mutinies of his own generals and secretary of war.  Time and again, FDR was proven right and his allies and generals were wrong. When the generals wanted to attack the Nazi-fortified coast of France, FDR knew the Allied forces weren’t ready. When Churchill insisted his Far East colonies were loyal and would resist the Japanese, Roosevelt knew it was a fantasy. As Hamilton’s account reaches its climax with the Torch landings in North Africa in late 1942, the tide of war turns in the Allies’ favor and FDR’s genius for psychology and military affairs is clear. This intimate, sweeping look at a great president in history’s greatest conflict is must reading.

    At the heart of the story is Barry Goldwater, the renegade Republican from Arizona who loathed federal government, despised liberals, and mocked “peaceful coexistence” with the USSR. Perlstein's narrative shines a light on a whole world of conservatives and their antagonists, including William F. Buckley, Nelson Rockefeller, and Bill Moyers. Vividly written, Before the Storm is an essential book about the 1960s.

    Within weeks it would be the talk of the nation.For the first time, The Lost Tribe of Coney Island unearths the incredible true story of the Igorrotes, a group of “headhunting, dog eating” tribespeople brought to America from the Philippines by the opportunistic showman Truman K. Hunt. At Luna Park, the g-string-clad Filipinos performed native dances and rituals before a wide-eyed public in a mocked-up tribal village. Millions of Americans flocked to see the tribespeople slaughter live dogs for their daily canine feasts and to hear thrilling tales of headhunting. The Igorrotes became a national sensation—they were written up in newspaper headlines, portrayed in cartoons, and even featured in advertising jingles, all fueled by Truman’s brilliant publicity stunts.By the end of the summer season, the Igorrote show had made Truman a rich man. But his genius had a dark side and soon he would be on the run across America with the tribe in tow, pursued by ex-wives, creditors, Pinkerton detectives, and the tireless agents of American justice.Award-winning journalist Claire Prentice brings this forgotten chapter in American history to life with vivid prose and rich historical detail. The book boasts a colorful cast of characters, including the mercurial Truman Hunt; his ambitious, young Filipino interpreter, Julio Balinag; Fomoaley Ponci, the tribe’s loquacious, self-important leader; Luna Park impresarios Fred Thompson and Elmer “Skip” Dundy; and Frederick Barker, the government man dead set on bringing Truman to justice.At its heart, The Lost Tribe of Coney Island is a tale of what happens when two cultures collide in the pursuit of money, adventure, and the American Dream. It is a story that makes us question who is civilized and who is savage.

    Lee and Jefferson Davis, and much more.

     George McGovern has been a leading figure of the Democratic Party for more than fifty years. From this true liberal comes a thoughtful examination of what being a Democrat really means. McGovern admonishes current Democratic politicians for losing sight of their ideals as they subscribe to an increasingly centrist policy agenda. Applying his wide- ranging knowledge and expertise on issues ranging from military spending to same-sex marriage to educational reform, he stresses the importance of creating policies we can be proud of. Finally, with 2012 looming, McGovern's "What It Means to Be a Democrat" offers a vision of the Party's future in which ideological coherence and courage rule.