Wilde argues that under capitalism the majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism-are forced, indeed, so to spoil them: instead of realizing their true talents, they waste their time solving the social problems caused by capitalism, without taking their common cause away. Thus, caring people seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see in poverty, but their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it because, the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

    Created in the wake of the greatest tragedy to occur on U.S. soil, the Department of Homeland Security was handed a sweeping mandate: make America safer. It would encompass intelligence and law enforcement agencies, oversee natural disasters, commercial aviation, border security and ICE, cybersecurity, and terrorism, among others. From 2009-2013, Janet Napolitano ran DHS and oversaw 22 federal agencies with 230,000 employees. In How Safe Are We?, Napolitano pulls no punches, reckoning with the critics who call it Frankenstein's Monster of government run amok, and taking a hard look at the challenges we'll be facing in the future. But ultimately, she argues that the huge, multifaceted department is vital to our nation's security. An agency that's part terrorism prevention, part intelligence agency, part law enforcement, public safety, disaster recovery make for an odd combination the protocol-driven, tradition-bound Washington D.C. culture. But, she says, it has made us more safe, secure, and resilient. Napolitano not only answers the titular question, but grapples with how these security efforts have changed our country and society. Where are the failures that leave us vulnerable and what has our 1 trillion dollar investment yielded over the last 15 years? And why haven't we had another massive terrorist attack in the U.S. since September 11th, 2001? In our current political climate, where Donald Trump has politicized nearly every aspect of the department, Napolitano's clarifying, bold vision is needed now more than ever.

    This piece of history is set in 1969 West Germany. The reality of what happened in the Cold War on the border between the opposing forces of East and West makes this a great read; it's an important part of our military history. Rick Fontain, the main character, is found just out of high school working for Bell Systems when he is summoned by his friends and neighbors. During his induction into the US Army he is given an aptitude test. The test results change the path of his life forever. He is encouraged to become an officer but the extra time, in addition to his two years, is a no go for Rick. He opts for training on the Redeye, the first ever hand held surface to air missile system designed for close combat for the infantry. What Rick doesn't know is that he is being watched from afar. His progress is being scrutinized and he is being evaluated for recruitment into the CIA. The style of the author, Fortin, is written in the first person. We travel with Bill on a journey that follows the army life of Rick though short snippets of his, at times, humorous and MASH-like journey. The style of headers detailing the timeframe of where and when things were taking place are unique and are always appreciated by the reader always pushing to find out where and when what would happen next. His journey from boot camp continues when he is stationed near the Fulda Gap. Not a well known place, but its stragetic position to the free world was an important post that kept Europe safe during those tense 30 plus years. Rick and his team would become one of the greatest deterrents to an invasion from Mother Russia. Fortin brings all the key elements together to make a fabulous story: mystery; intrigue; love; suspense; bravery and reality. It is a snap shot in history back to when the world was at the brink. Redeye Fulda Cold is a historical expression of our military tradition. The story ends leaving the reader wanting to see a sequel novel to find out where Rick goes next. Author Bill Fortin has deftly combined fictional characters and people he served with in the United States Army to recount some important but little-known events during the Cold War. His story takes the reader to the people and places of the late 1960s European Military Community and a series of carefully crafted CIA military operations designed to thwart a possible Russian invasion through the infamous Fulda Gap.

    From the Middle Ages onwards the island of Britain has been shaped by the unique dynamic between Edinburgh and London, exchanging inhabitants, monarchs, money and ideas, sometimes in a spirit of friendship and at others in a spirit of murderous dislike.Tom Devine's seminal new book explores this extraordinary history in all its ambiguity, from the seventeenth century to the present. When not undermining each other with invading armies, both Scotland and England have broadly benefitted from each other's presence - indeed for long periods of time nobody questioned the union which joined them. But as Devine makes clear, it has for the most part been a relationship based on consent, not force, on mutual advantage, rather than antagonism - and it has always held the possibility of a political parting of the ways.With the United Kingdom under a level of scrutiny unmatched since the eighteenth century Independence or Union is the essential guide.

    Having grown up in rural Ireland and watched her friends join the Irish Republican Army, Richardson knows from firsthand experience how terrorism can both unite and destroy a community. As a professor at Harvard, she has devoted her career to explaining terrorist movements throughout history and around the globe. From the biblical Zealots to the medieval Islamic Assassins to the anarchists who infiltrated the cities of Europe and North America at the turn of the last century, terrorists have struck at enemies far more powerful than themselves with targeted acts of violence. Yet Richardson understands that terrorists are neither insane nor immoral. Rather, they are rational political actors who often deploy carefully calibrated tactics in a measured and reasoned way. What is more, they invariably go to great lengths to justify their actions to themselves, their followers, and, often, the world.Richardson shows that the nature of terrorism did not change after the attacks of September 11, 2001; what changed was our response. She argues that the Bush administration’s “global war on terror” was doomed to fail because of an ignorance of history, a refusal to learn from the experience of other governments, and a fundamental misconception about how and why terrorists act. As an alternative, Richardson offers a feasible strategy for containing the terrorist threat and cutting off its grassroots support. The most comprehensive and intellectually rigorous account of terrorism yet, What Terrorists Want is a daring intellectual tour de force that allows us, at last, to reckon fully with this major threat to today’s global order.

    Nearly one thousand people were killed, looting was widespread, and torch-bearing protestors marched on the Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street. These were the Gordon Riots: the worst civil disturbance in British history, triggered by an act of Parliament designed to loosen two centuries of systemic oppression of Catholics in the British Isles. While many London Catholics saw their homes ransacked and chapels desecrated, the riots marked a crucial turning point in their fight to return to public life. Over the next fifty years, factions battled one another to reform the laws of the land: wealthy English Catholics yearned to rejoin the political elite; the protestant aristocracy in Ireland feared an empowered Catholic populace; and the priesthood coveted old authority that royal decree had forbidden. Kings George III and George IV stubbornly refused to address the "Catholic Question" even when pressed by their prime ministers--governments fell over it--and events in America and Europe made many skeptical of disrupting the social order. But in 1829, through the dogged work of charismatic Irish lawyer Daniel O'Connell and with the support of the Duke of Wellington, the Roman Catholic Relief Act finally passed. It was a watershed moment, opening the door to future social reform and the radical transformation of the Victorian age.The King and the Catholics is a gripping, character-driven example of narrative history at its best. It is also a distant mirror of our own times, reflecting the dire consequences of state-sanctioned intolerance and showing how collective action and the political process can triumph over wrongheaded legislation.

    The author evaluates the casualties of the war on terror in this story of pre-emptive imprisonment for an act of terrorism never committed, of a terrorist cell that may not even have been a cell.

    Quickly absorbed into the local community and privy to the secrets of both the Protestant and Catholic paramilitaries, Myers gained a unique perspective into both sides of the sectarian violence.Devoid of any political agenda, Myers describes the streets of Belfast at its bloodiest with searing clarity, capturing every inch of the city's disturbing violence. Flirting with death at every turn, Myers comes of age as the world around him falls apart, fueled by the psychotic rage, senseless murder, and unrelenting terror that surround Northern Ireland's loyalist gangs, paratroopers, police force, and, of course, average citizen.Part unofficial history, part personal memoir, Watching the Door is raw, provocative, and darkly funny, offering an unbridled account of sex, death, and violence in Northern Ireland by one of its most dynamic witnesses.

    Now, senior advisor and military analyst Thomas P.M. Barnett explores our possible long- and short-term relations with such nations and regions as Iran, Iraq, and the Middle East, China and North Korea, Latin America and Africa, while outlining the strategies to pursue, the entities to create, and the pitfalls to overcome. If his first book was "a compelling framework for confronting twenty-first century problems" (Business Week), Barnett's new book is something more - a powerful road map through a chaotic and uncertain world to "a future worth creating."

    His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, slum housing, mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity.

    Only minutes after United 175 plowed into the World Trade Center's South Tower, people in positions of power correctly suspected who was behind the assault: Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. But it would be 18 months after September 11 before investigators would capture the actual mastermind of the attacks, the man behind bin Laden himself. That monster is the man who got his hands dirty while Osama fled; the man who was responsible for setting up Al Qaeda's global networks, who personally identified and trained its terrorists, and who personally flew bomb parts on commercial airlines to test their invisibility. That man withstood waterboarding and years of other intense interrogations, not only denying Osama's whereabouts but making a literal game of the proceedings, after leading his pursuers across the globe and back. That man is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and he is still, to this day, the most significant Al Qaeda terrorist in captivity. In The Hunt for KSM, Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer go deep inside the US government's dogged but flawed pursuit of this elusive and dangerous man. One pair of agents chased him through countless false leads and narrow escapes for five years before 9/11. And now, drawing on a decade of investigative reporting and unprecedented access to hundreds of key sources, many of whom have never spoken publicly -- as well as jihadis and members of KSM's family and support network -- this is a heart-pounding trip inside the dangerous, classified world of counterterrorism and espionage.

    As a teenager he was an outcast, fleeing enemies on a mountain in northern Mongolia, an exile, a nobody. Yet it took only twenty years for Genghis to build the largest land empire in history: four times the size of Alexander’s, twice the size of Rome’s. How did he do it? What lessons does his life reveal about the nature of leadership? What is “greatness” in leadership? What traits did Genghis possess exactly? Might they apply in other times and other places — even here and today?John Man re-examines the life of Genghis Khan to discover the qualities, characteristics and strategies that made him the great leader that he was. The answers are sometimes surprising. Far from being just the tyrant that history records, he was a leader of exceptional vision and modernity. And many of the secrets of his success are as useful in today’s competitive business world as they were in rallying the Mongol hordes.

    . . is grounded by a shadow play of macabre references to horrors that ghost around the edges of the narrative, many eerily similar to some of the more infamous real life reports that have emerged in recent years."-- The Irish Times Combining the spirit of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim with a bawdy evisceration of hypocrisy in old-school Catholic education, The Brothers' Lot is a comic satire that tells the story of the Brothers of Godly Coercion School for Young Boys of Meager Means, a dilapidated Dickensian institution run by an assemblage of eccentric, insane, and often nasty celibate Brothers. The school is in decline and the Brothers hunger for a miracle to move their founder, the Venerable Saorseach O'Rahilly, along the path to Sainthood.When a possible miracle presents itself, the Brothers fervently seize on it with the help of the ethically pliant Diocesan Investigator, himself hungry for a miracle to boost his career. The school simultaneously comes under threat from strange outside forces. The harder the Brothers try to defend the school, the worse things seem to get. It takes an outsider, Finbar Sullivan, a young student newly arrived at the school, to see that the source of the threat may in fact lie inside the school itself. As the miracle unravels, the Brothers' efforts to preserve it unleash a disastrous chain of events.Tackling a serious subject from the oblique viewpoint of satire, The Brothers' Lot explores the culture that allowed abuses within church-run institutions in Ireland to go unchecked for decades.

    Now he travels with his eighty-nine-year-old father--a comical, wily, courageous, and infuriating former British intelligence officer--along the border they call home. On Stewart's four-hundred-mile walk across a magnificent natural landscape, he sleeps on mountain ridges and in housing projects, in hostels and farmhouses. With every fresh encounter--from an Afghanistan veteran based on Hadrian's Wall to a shepherd who still counts his flock in sixth-century words--Stewart uncovers more about the forgotten peoples and languages of a vanished country, now crushed between England and Scotland. Stewart and his father are drawn into unsettling reflections on landscape, their parallel careers in the bygone British Empire and Iraq, and the past, present, and uncertain future of the United Kingdom. And as the end approaches, the elder Stewart's stubborn charm transforms this chronicle of nations into a fierce, exuberant encounter between a father and a son. This is a profound reflection on family, landscape, and history by a powerful and original writer."The miracle of The Marches is not so much the treks Stewart describes, pulling in all possible relevant history, as the monument that emerges to his beloved father." -- New York Times Book Review

    The author of 'Holy War, Inc.' draws on his personal meetings with Osama Bin Laden as well as interviews with some of his most intimate acquaintances, describing the terrorist's self-presentation as a soft-spoken cleric & offering insight into how he garners the fanatical loyalty of hundreds of thousands of followers.