Events in Austria and Prussia are discussed, along with the role of the Poles and Czechs and Panslavism, which Engels was against. (Summary by Wikipedia)

    Fluorescent tubes on the ceiling hummed with blue light. The woman smiled and explained in a soothing voice that there were some “procedures” they had to go through. “We’re just going to put you under for a few minutes,” she said. One of the officials told me to turn around..“Do I have a choice?” I lowered my pants, exposing most of my left butt cheek.  The woman came up from behind me, and I felt a sharp prick as she pushed in the needle and rammed the solution into my muscle. When she finished, I sat down. “Which agency do you work for? CIA?” asked the other male official. “I operate independently,” I said. I started to feel good. Very good. I had the urge to laugh, even though nobody had said anything funny. “I’m a lone wolf. And I make burgers for a living. I’m a burger-making lone wolf.”I must have blacked out for some of it. When I opened my eyes again, the two men were there, but the woman was gone. I wiped my nose, and my hand came away bloody. I suddenly felt so sick and dizzy I thought I’d had a stroke. “What the fuck?In Pyongyang in 1994, Robert Egan was given Sodium Pentathol, or “truth serum,” by North Korean agents trying to determine his real identity. What was he doing in the world’s most isolated nation---while the U.S. government recoiled at its human-rights record and its quest for dangerous nukes? Why had he befriended one of North Korea’s top envoys to the United Nations? What was Egan after? Fast-paced and often astounding, Eating with the Enemy is the tale of a restless restaurant owner from a mobbed-up New Jersey town who for thirteen years inserted himself into the high-stakes diplomatic battles between the United States and North Korea.Egan dropped out of high school in working-class Fairfield, New Jersey, in the midseventies and might have followed his father’s path as a roofing contractor. But Bobby had bigger plans for himself, and after a few years wasted on drugs and petty crime, his life took an astonishing turn when his interest in the search for Vietnam-era POWs led to an introduction in the early nineties to North Korean officials desperate to improve relations with the United States. So Egan turned his restaurant, Cubby’s, into his own version of Camp David. Between ball games, fishing trips, and heaping plates of pork ribs, he advised deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Han Song Ryol, and other North Koreans during tumultuous years that saw the death of Kim Il-sung and the rise of Kim Jong-il, false starts toward peace during the Clinton administration, the Bush “Axis of Evil” era, and North Korea’s successful test of a nuclear weapon in 2006. All the while, Egan informed for the FBI, vexed the White House with his meddling, chaperoned the communist nation’s athletes on hilarious adventures, and nearly rescued a captured U.S. Navy vessel---all in the interest of promoting peace.Egan parses U.S. foreign policy with a mobster’s street smarts, and he challenges the idea that the United States should not have relations with its adversaries. The intense yet unlikely friendship between him and Ambassador Han provides hope for better relations between enemy nations and shows just how far one lone citizen can go when he tries to right the world’s wrongs.

      The death of the great Tatar emperor Tamerlane in 1405, writes historian John Darwin, was a turning point in world history. Never again would a single warlord, raiding across the steppes, be able to unite Eurasia under his rule. After Tamerlane, a series of huge, stable empires were founded and consolidated— Chinese, Mughal, Persian, and Ottoman—realms of such grandeur, sophistication, and dynamism that they outclassed the fragmentary, quarrelsome nations of Europe in every respect. The nineteenth century saw these empires fall vulnerable to European conquest, creating an age of anarchy and exploitation, but this had largely ended by the twenty-first century, with new Chinese and Indian super-states and successful independent states in Turkey and Iran.  This elegantly written, magisterial account challenges the conventional narrative of the “Rise of the West,” showing that European ascendancy was neither foreordained nor a linear process. Indeed, it is likely to be a transitory phase. After Tamerlane is a vivid, bold, and innovative history of how empires rise and fall, from one of Britain’s leading scholars. It will take its place beside other provocative works of “large history,” from Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers to David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations or Niall Ferguson’s Empire.

    Most comprehensive histories devote a few chapters to the early history of India and an increasing number of pages to the more recent period, giving an impression that early history is mere background and that Indian civilization finds its fulfillment in the nation-state. Thomas R. Trautmann believes that the deep past lives on and is a valuable resource for understanding the present day and for creating a viable future. The result is a book that is short enough to read in a few sittings, but comprehensive in coverage--5,000 years of India in brief.

    What Thubron reveals is an astonishing diversity, a land whose still unmeasured resources strain to meet an awesome demand, and an ancient people still reeling from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution.

    In order to join this unit they have to commit to being in the army for ten years, rather than the three years a normal soldier serves.Talpiots are taught advanced level physics, math and computer science as they train with soldiers from every other branch of the IDF. The result: young men and women become research and development machines. Talpiots have developed battle ready weapons that only Israel's top military officers and political leaders know about. They have also dramatically improved much of the weapons already in Israel's arsenal.Talpiot has been tasked with keeping Israel a generation ahead of a rapidly strengthening and technologically capable Iran. Talpiots contribute to all of the areas that will be most important to the IDF as Iran becomes even more powerful including missile technology, anti-missile defense, cyber-warfare, intelligence, satellite technology and high powered imaging. Talpiot soldiers have also been a major factor in the never ending fight against Israel's other enemies and many have left the R&D lab to fly fighter planes, serve in the field as commanders of elite army ground units and at sea commanding Israel's fleet of naval ships.After leaving the army, Talpiots have become a major force in the Israeli economy, developing some of Israel's most famous and powerful companies.Israel's Edge contains dozens of interviews with Talpiot graduates and some of the early founders of the program. It explains Talpiot's highly successful recruiting methods and discloses many of the secrets of the program's success. The book also profiles some of the most successful businesses founded by Talpiot graduates including CheckPoint, Compugen, Anobit, recently bought by Apple, and XIV, recently bought by IBM. No other military unit has had more of an impact on the State of Israel and no other unit will have more of an impact in the years ahead. The soldiers of Talpiot are truly unsung heroes.

    Between 1931 and 1945 Japanese troops rampaged through one defeated country after another, executing civilians, despoiling cities, massacring prisoners and cruelly exploiting prisoners of war and native populations. This carefully constructed history charts this brutal swathe of destruction, objectively examines individual crimes and details the reasons behind Japan's unprecedented disregard for accepted humanitarian principles. Japanese troops behaved with considerable brutality in their war against China a campaign designed 'to punish the people of China'. The Nanking massacre of December 1937 was just one example of the appalling series of atrocities the Japanese inflicted on the conquered Chinese. Japan also excelled in the mistreatment of prisoners of war. Allied troops unfortunate enough to fall into Japanese hands were abused, humiliated, starved and forced to serve as slave labor. This sweeping indictment of atrocities committed by the forces of the Rising Sun is a detailed and carefully documented study and one which throws light onto one of the most disturbing episodes of World War II.