Better to have hostile identities framed by democracy than democrats indifferent to identity.In a vigorous, insightful challenge to the left and right alike, Natan Sharansky, as he has proved repeatedly, is at the leading edge of the issues that frame our times.

    that the science is settled. Author Lawrence Solomon an internationally renowned environmentalist shows these men have faced a vicious campaign of intimidation by those who, like Al Gore, seek to pervert science and silence dissent to advance their own political agenda. Some have been intimidated into silence. Others have seen their funding denied and their labs shut down as a result of political pressure. But the testimony of their work remains too powerful to deny. Extensively footnoted including URLs to crucial scientific papers (and lively e-mails detailing the inside politics of global warming) and lavishly illustrated with charts and graphs, The Deniers will do more than spark controversy. The Deniers is destined to become the most reliable and provocative sourcebook on the real global warming debate.

    Bush and Barack Obama during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Before Robert M. Gates received a call from the White House in 2006, he thought he’d left Washington politics behind: after working for six presidents in both the CIA and the National Security Council, he was happy in his role as president of Texas A&M University. But when he was asked to help a nation mired in two wars and to aid the troops doing the fighting, he answered what he felt was the call of duty. Now, in this unsparing memoir, meticulously fair in its assessments, he takes us behind the scenes of his nearly five years as a secretary at war: the battles with Congress, the two presidents he served, the military itself, and the vast Pentagon bureaucracy; his efforts to help Bush turn the tide in Iraq; his role as a guiding, and often dissenting, voice for Obama; the ardent devotion to and love for American soldiers—his “heroes”—he developed on the job. In relating his personal journey as secretary, Gates draws us into the innermost sanctums of government and military power during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, illuminating iconic figures, vital negotiations, and critical situations in revealing, intimate detail. Offering unvarnished appraisals of Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Presidents Bush and Obama among other key players, Gates exposes the full spectrum of behind-closed-doors politicking within both the Bush and Obama administrations. He discusses the great controversies of his tenure—surges in both Iraq and Afghanistan,  how to deal with Iran and Syria, “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” Guantánamo Bay, WikiLeaks—as they played out behind the television cameras. He brings to life the Situation Room during the Bin Laden raid. And, searingly, he shows how congressional debate and action or inaction on everything from equipment budgeting to troop withdrawals was often motivated, to his increasing despair and anger, more by party politics and media impact than by members’ desires to protect our soldiers and ensure their success. However embroiled he became in the trials of Washington, Gates makes clear that his heart was always in the most important theater of his tenure as secretary: the front lines. We journey with him to both war zones as he meets with active-duty troops and their commanders, awed by their courage, and also witness him greet coffin after flag-draped coffin returned to U.S. soil, heartbreakingly aware that he signed every deployment order. In frank and poignant vignettes, Gates conveys the human cost of war, and his admiration for those brave enough to undertake it when necessary. Duty tells a powerful and deeply personal story that allows us an unprecedented look at two administrations and the wars that have defined them.

    The cause of their failure was a complete mystery.Five months later, a seemingly unrelated event occurred. A computer security firm in Belarus was called in to troubleshoot some computers in Iran that were caught in a reboot loop—crashing and rebooting repeatedly. At first, technicians with the firm believed the malicious code they found on the machines was a simple, routine piece of malware. But as they and other experts around the world investigated, they discovered a virus of unparalleled complexity and mysterious provenance and intent. They had, they soon learned, stumbled upon the world’s first digital weapon.Stuxnet, as it came to be known, was unlike any other virus or worm built before: It was the first attack that reached beyond the computers it targeted to physically destroy the equipment those computers controlled. It was an ingenious attack, jointly engineered by the United States and Israel, that worked exactly as planned, until the rebooting machines gave it all away. And the discovery of Stuxnet was just the beginning: Once the digital weapon was uncovered and deciphered, it provided clues to other tools lurking in the wild. Soon, security experts found and exposed not one but three highly sophisticated digital spy tools that came from the same labs that created Stuxnet. The discoveries gave the world its first look at the scope and sophistication of nation-state surveillance and warfare in the digital age.Kim Zetter, a senior reporter at Wired, has covered hackers and computer security since 1999 and is one of the top journalists in the world on this beat. She was among the first reporters to cover Stuxnet after its discovery and has authored many of the most comprehensive articles about it. In COUNTDOWN TO ZERO DAY: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon, Zetter expands on this work to show how the code was designed and unleashed and how its use opened a Pandora’s Box, ushering in an age of digital warfare in which any country’s infrastructure—power grids, nuclear plants, oil pipelines, dams—is vulnerable to the same kind of attack with potentially devastating results. A sophisticated digital strike on portions of the power grid, for example, could plunge half the U.S. into darkness for weeks or longer, having a domino effect on all other critical infrastructures dependent on electricity.

    Whether you are a candidate for office or just helping a campaign, the Political Campaign Desk Reference will make your team stronger. From planning the early stages of the campaign and asking the basic questions to mapping out the campaign’s winning message and building a budget and time line, the Political Campaign Desk Reference covers it all. An entire chapter dedicated to fundraising will help every organization become better at raising money. If you have The Political Campaign Desk Reference, be glad. If your opponent has The Political Campaign Desk Reference, then get a copy for yourself.

    Smallpox. Incurable and horrifying Ebola-related fevers. For two decades, while a fearful world prepared for nuclear winter, an elite team of Russian bioweaponeers began to till a new killing field: a bleak tract sown with powerful seeds of mass destruction—by doctors who had committed themselves to creating a biological Armageddon. Biohazard is the never-before-told story of Russia’s darkest, deadliest, and most closely guarded Cold War secret.   No one knows more about Russia’s astounding experiments with biowarfare than Ken Alibek. Now the mastermind behind Russia’s germ warfare effort reveals two decades of shocking breakthroughs . . . how Moscow’s leading scientists actually reengineered hazardous microbes to make them even more virulent . . . the secrets behind the discovery of an invisible, untraceable new class of biological agents just right for use in political assassinations . . . the startling story behind Russia’s attempt to turn a sample of the AIDS virus into the ultimate bioweapon. And in a chilling work of real-world intrigue, Biohazard offers us all a rare glimpse into a shadowy scientific underworld where doctors manufacture mass destruction, where witnesses to errors are silenced forever, and where ground zero is closer than we ever dared believe.

    missteps: a Taliban commander, a U.S.-backed warlord, and a housewife trapped in the middle of the fighting. With its intimate accounts of life in small Afghan villages, and harrowing tales of crimes committed by Taliban leaders and American-supported provincial officials alike, No Good Men Among the Living lays bare the workings of America’s longest war and the truth behind its prolonged agony. A thoroughly original exposé of the conflict that is still being fought, it shows just how the American intervention went so desperately wrong.

    The trail of two key figures, an accused Pakistani mastermind and his American operative, traces the rise of a complex, international threat.

    In 1972 he was sent to Northern Ireland to report on 'Bloody Sunday' and in the aftermath of 9/11, he focused on Al Qaeda, breaking stories in the period up to the July bombings and the plot to blow up passenger planes mid-Atlantic.In "Talking to Terrorists" Taylor wrestles with a range of complex questions: What are terrorists like? What motivates them? Should governments talk to them? When does interrogation become torture? In this journey from Northern Ireland's Bogside to the notorious Guantanamo Bay, he uncovers this lethal phenomenon, unavoidably at the centre of our lives.PRAISE FOR PETER TAYLOR:'A disturbingly insightful book' SCOTSMAN'His longevity and willingness to take risks places him in the pantheon of investigative reporters' INDEPENDENT'Peter Taylor [has] delivered some of the most outstanding television journalism from Northern Ireland ... with courage and boundless curiosity' SCOTSMAN'A fearless critic of authority ready to expose the abuse of human rights in the face of official denial and attempts at censorship. Taylor's reputation is reinforced' BELFAST TELEGRAPH

    Mayor Rudoph Guiliani had barely escaped with his life in the collapse of the first tower. Fires burned furiously near the site as the other buildings verged on collapse. Air Force fighter jets criss-crossed the sky to ward off other attacks. And yet in those moments after the calamity, and in the following days and months, Mayor Guiliani not only steered the city through the crisis, but did so with an assurance and authority that was hailed around the world as a model of courageous leadership. In this book, Guiliani describes vividly the chaos and horror of the twin-towers catastrophe, and explains how the rules of management he enforced as Mayor enabled him to gain control of the emergency. These are also the rules, Guiliani makes clear, that anyone in a leadership position - from the head of a large corporation to the owner of a corner shop - can use to inspire others and achieve concrete results.

    It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship-far subtler than twentieth-century strains-that is rapidly rising to challenge the West.When British producer Peter Pomerantsev plunges into the booming Russian TV industry, he gains access to every nook and corrupt cranny of the country. He is brought to smoky rooms for meetings with propaganda gurus running the nerve-center of the Russian media machine, and visits Siberian mafia-towns and the salons of the international super-rich in London and the US. As the Putin regime becomes more aggressive, Pomerantsev finds himself drawn further into the system.Dazzling yet piercingly insightful, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an unforgettable voyage into a country spinning from decadence into madness.

    C. Grayling's lucid and stimulating books, based on the idea that philosophy should engage with the world and make itself useful, are immensely popular.The Challenge of Things joins earlier collections like The Reason of Things and Thinking of Answers, but this time to collect Grayling's recent writings on the world in a time of war and conflict. In describing and exposing the dark side of things, he also explores ways out of the habits and prejudices of mind that would otherwise trap us forever in the deadly impasses of conflicts of all kinds.Whether he is writing about the First World War and its legacy, free speech, the advantages of an atheist prime minister or the role of science in the arts, his essays are always enlightening, enlivening and hopeful.

    As one of the primary authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, John Farmer is proud of his and his colleagues? work. Yet he came away from the experience convinced that there was a further story to be told, one he was uniquely qualified to write. Now that story can be told. Tape recordings, transcripts, and contemporaneous records that had been classified have since been declassified, and the inspector general?s investigations of government conduct have been completed. Drawing on his knowledge of those sources, as well as his years as an attorney in public and private practice, Farmer reconstructs the truth of what happened on that fateful day and the disastrous circumstances that allowed it: the institutionalized disconnect between what those on the ground knew and what those in power did. He details ?terrifyingly and illuminatingly?the key moments in the years, months, weeks, and days that preceded the attacks, then descends almost in real time through the attacks themselves, portraying them as they have never before been seen. Ultimately, Farmer builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version not only is almost entirely untrue but serves to create a false impression of order and security. The ground truth that Farmer captures suggests a very different scenario?one that is doomed to be repeated unless the systemic failures he reveals are confronted and remedied.

    In this important book, Hal Brands explains why grand strategy is a concept that is so alluring--and so elusive--to those who make American statecraft. He explores what grand strategy is, why it is so essential, and why it is so hard to get right amid the turbulence of global affairs and the chaos of domestic politics. At a time when grand strategy is very much in vogue, Brands critically appraises just how feasible that endeavor really is.Brands takes a historical approach to this subject, examining how four presidential administrations, from that of Harry S. Truman to that of George W. Bush, sought to do grand strategy at key inflection points in the history of modern U.S. foreign policy. As examples ranging from the early Cold War to the Reagan years to the War on Terror demonstrate, grand strategy can be an immensely rewarding undertaking--but also one that is full of potential pitfalls on the long road between conception and implementation. Brands concludes by offering valuable suggestions for how American leaders might approach the challenges of grand strategy in the years to come.

    The oldest son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founding member of Hamas and its most popular leader, young Mosab assisted his father for years in his political activities while being groomed to assume his legacy, politics, status . . . and power. But everything changed when Mosab turned away from terror and violence, and embraced instead the teachings of another famous Middle East leader. In Son of Hamas, Mosab Yousef—now called “Joseph”—reveals new information about the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization and unveils the truth about his own role, his agonizing separation from family and homeland, the dangerous decision to make his newfound faith public, and his belief that the Christian mandate to “love your enemies” is the only way to peace in the Middle East.