Book picks similar to
Quest for Status: Chinese and Russian Foreign Policy by Deborah Welch Larson
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Two Among the Righteous Few: A Story of Courage in the Holocaust
Marty Brounstein - 2011
There, people from around the world visit daily to learn about the tragic period of history from 1933 to 1945 known as the Holocaust. The museum serves as an education, research, and historical center in remembrance of the six million Jews across Europe who were murdered at the hands of the Nazi Party machine led by Adolf Hitler. A special section of Yad Vashem is dedicated to those who carried out acts of courage to save the lives of Jews during the Holocaust. Remembered there is a couple from Dieden of the Netherlands, Frans and Mien Wijnakker. Two Among the Righteous Few: A Story of Courage in the Holocaust is the remarkable tale of how Frans and his wife, Mien, saved the lives of at least two dozen Jews in southern Holland during World War II. They were Catholics who led a simple life in a small town, but they took risks and displayed bravery to help others in dire need, instilling hope during one of the most horrific points of history.
Reagan's Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster
Martin Anderson - 2009
In penning this book, New York Times bestselling authors Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson drew upon their unprecedented access to more than eight million highly classified documents housed within the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California—unseen by the public until now. Using his top secret clearances, Martin Anderson was able to access Ronald Reagan’s most privileged exchanges with subordinates and world leaders as well as the tactical record of how Reagan fought to win the Cold War and control nuclear weapons. The most revelatory of these documents are the minutes of Reagan-chaired National Security Council meetings, the dozens of secret letters sent by Reagan to world leaders, and the eyewitness notes from Reagan-Gorbachev summits. Along with these findings, the authors use Reagan’s speeches, radio addresses, personal diaries, and other correspondence to develop a striking picture of a man whose incisive intelligence, uncanny instincts, and quiet self-confidence changed the course of history. What emerges from this treasure trove of material is irrefutable evidence that Reagan intended from his first days in office to bring down the Soviet Union, that he considered eliminating nuclear weapons his paramount objective, and that he—not his subordinates—was the principal architect of the policies that ultimately brought the Soviets to the nuclear-arms negotiating table. The authors also affirm that many of Reagan’s ideas, including his controversial “Star Wars” missile-defense initiative, proved essential in dissolving the Soviet Union and keeping America safe.Riveting and eye-opening, Reagan’s Secret War provides a front-row seat to history, a journey into the political mind of a remarkable leader, and proof that one man can, through the force of his deep convictions, bring about sweeping global change.
Moral Fiber - A Practical Guide to Living Our Values
Shawn Vij - 2019
Taking an innovative and secular approach to business Ethics, moral fiber shows us how living our values unlocks a more purposeful life and career. This book helps us to re-discover the inherent core values, such as fairness, respect, compassion, and honesty, and then how to genuinely Act on them daily.This practical guide is filled with tips, tales, and tools to identify and eliminate toxic behaviors and motivators, as well as priceless lessons from top industry leaders and powerful research from academics. TESTIMONIALS“[Shawn] shares with us how compassion, gratitude and wisdom opens our inner door, unlocking a more purposeful life and career.” — HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA“Moral Fiber takes us on a beautiful journey of how capitalism and compassion must co-exist to improve our human condition.” — JOHN MACKEY, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, WHOLE FOODS MARKET“At a time of great uncertainty, Moral Fiber is a welcome tonic and an authentic reminder of how having capitalism with compassion elevates us all.” — JENNIFER REINGOLD, FORMER MANAGEMENT WRITER, FORTUNE MAGAZINE, FAST COMPANY AND BUSINESSWEEK“Moral Fiber drops us head-first into a world of awakening.” — THOMAS DONALDSON, PROFESSOR OF BUSINESS ETHICS, WHARTON SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA“In Moral Fiber, Vij creatively shows us how our core values can be a key to personal happiness and professional success.” — HOWARD C. CUTLER, M.D., NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLING AUTHOR OF THE ART OF HAPPINESS
Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World
Clive Hamilton - 2020
The party is not interested in democracy. It sees only a bitter ideological struggle with the West, dividing the world into those who can be won over, and enemies. Many political and business elites have already been lured to their corner; others are weighing up a devil’s bargain. Through its enormous economic power and covert influence operations, China is now weakening global institutions, aggressively targeting individual corporations, and threatening freedom of expression from the arts to academia. At the same time, Western security services are increasingly worried about incursions into our communications infrastructure. In a landmark study combining meticulous research with unique insights, Hidden Hand exposes the Chinese Communist Party’s global program of subversion, and the threat it poses to democracy. We have already missed too many warning signs – now it is time to wake up.
The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers
Richard McGregor - 2010
The country has undergone a remarkable transformation on a scale similar to that of the Industrial Revolution in the West. The most remarkable part of this transformation, however, has been left largely untold—the central role of the Chinese Communist Party. As an organization alone, the Party is a phenomenon of unique scale and power. Its membership surpasses seventy-three million, and it does more than just rule a country. The Party not only has a grip on every aspect of government, from the largest, richest cities to the smallest far-flung villages in Tibet and Xinjiang, it also has a hold on all official religions, the media, and the military. The Party presides over large, wealthy state-owned businesses, and it exercises control over the selection of senior executives of all government companies, many of which are in the top tier of the Fortune 500 list. In The Party, Richard McGregor delves deeply into China's inner sanctum for the first time, showing how the Communist Party controls the government, courts, media, and military, and how it keeps all corruption accusations against its members in-house. The Party's decisions have a global impact, yet the CPC remains a deeply secretive body, hostile to the law, unaccountable to anyone or anything other than its own internal tribunals. It is the world's only geopolitical rival of the United States, and is steadfastly poised to think the worst of the West. In this provocative and illuminating account, Richard McGregor offers a captivating portrait of China's Communist Party, its grip on power and control over China, and its future.
The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate
Robert D. Kaplan - 2012
Kaplan, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts, offers a revelatory new prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. In The Revenge of Geography, Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world’s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe’s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan’s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century’s looming cataclysms.
The Lincoln Assassination
John Butler Ford - 2015
But there is far more to the story, including the bizarre scheme that Booth first concocted to kidnap Lincoln and trade him for Confederate soldiers held in Northern prisons. Here is the full story of the plot, the bumbling plotters that Booth recruited, Lincoln's lingering death, the manhunt for the assassin, and the trial of the conspirators. It is essential knowledge of a tragedy that shaped America for a century to come.
The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower
Robert B. Baer - 2008
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Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
Ha-Joon Chang - 2007
Using irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of examples, Chang blasts holes in the "World Is Flat" orthodoxy of Thomas Friedman and other liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, today's economic superpowers—from the U.S. to Britain to his native Korea—all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry. We have conveniently forgotten this fact, telling ourselves a fairy tale about the magic of free trade and—via our proxies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization—ramming policies that suit ourselves down the throat of the developing world.Unlike typical economists who construct models of how the marketplace should work, Chang examines the past: what has actually happened. His pungently contrarian history demolishes one pillar after another of free-market mythology. We treat patents and copyrights as sacrosanct—but developed our own industries by studiously copying others' technologies. We insist that centrally planned economies stifle growth—but many developing countries had higher GDP growth before they were pressured into deregulating their economies. Both justice and common sense, Chang argues, demand that we reevaluate the policies we force on nations that are struggling to follow in our footsteps.
There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
Fiona Hill - 2021
Fiona Hill grew up in a world of terminal decay. The last of the local mines had closed, businesses were shuttering, and despair was etched in the faces around her. Her father urged her to get out of their blighted corner of northern England: “There is nothing for you here, pet,” he said. The coal-miner’s daughter managed to go further than he ever could have dreamed. She studied in Moscow and at Harvard, became an American citizen, and served three U.S. Presidents. But in the heartlands of both Russia and the United States, she saw troubling reflections of her hometown and similar populist impulses. By the time she offered her brave testimony in the first impeachment inquiry of President Trump, Hill knew that the desperation of forgotten people was driving American politics over the brink—and that we were running out of time to save ourselves from Russia’s fate. In this powerful, deeply personal account, she shares what she has learned, and shows why expanding opportunity is the only long-term hope for our democracy.
Stalingrad: The Battle that Shattered Hitler's Dream of World Domination
Rupert Matthews - 2012
The relentless and unstoppable German advances that had seen the panzers sweep hundreds of miles into Russia was finally brought to a halt. The elite German 6th Army was first fought to a standstill, then surrounded and forced to surrender.Over 1.5 million people lost their lives during the six months of fighting, many of them civilians caught up in the campaign. For the first time in the war, the German army had been defeated on the field of battle. Before Stalingrad the Russians never won; after Stalingrad they could not lose.This book looks at the titanic struggle that ended in the total destruction of the second city of the Soviet Union, the greatest battle the world has ever seen.
The Skripal Files: The Life and Near Death of a Russian Spy
Mark Urban - 2018
Sergei had been living a quiet life in England since 2010, when he was expelled from Russia as part of a spy swap; he had been serving a lengthy prison sentence for working secretly for the British intelligence agency MI6. On this Sunday afternoon, he and his daughter had just finished lunch at a local restaurant when they started to feel faint. Within minutes they were close to death.The Skripals had been poisoned, not with a familiar toxin but with Novichok, a deadly nerve agent developed in southern Russia. Was this a message from the Kremlin that traitors would not escape violent death, even on British soil? As Sergei and Yulia fought for their lives, and the British government and their allies sought answers, relations between the West and Russia descended to a new low.The Skripal Files is a remarkable and definitive account of Sergei Skripal's story, which lays bare the new spy war between Russia and the West. Mark Urban, the diplomatic and defense editor for the BBC, met with Skripal in the months before his poisoning, learning about his career in Russian military intelligence, how he became a British agent, his imprisonment in Russia, and the events that led to his release. Skripal's first-hand accounts and experiences reveal the high stakes of a new spy game that harks back to the chilliest days of the Cold War.
The Denisovans: The History of the Extinct Archaic Humans Who Spread Across Asia during the Paleolithic Era
Charles River Editors - 2020
A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism
Jeffrey D. Sachs - 2018
The subsequent turn toward nationalism and "America first" unilateralism did not made America great. It announced the abdication of our responsibilities in the face of environmental crises, political upheaval, mass migration, and other global challenges. As a result, America no longer dominates geopolitics or the world economy as it once did.In this incisive and passionate book, Jeffrey D. Sachs provides the blueprint for a new foreign policy that embraces global cooperation, international law, and aspirations for worldwide prosperity. He argues that America's approach to the world must shift from military might and wars of choice to a commitment to shared objectives of sustainable development.A New Foreign Policy explores both the danger of the "America first" mindset and the possibilities for a new way forward, proposing timely and achievable plans to foster global economic growth, reconfigure the United Nations for the twenty-first century, and build a multipolar world that is prosperous, peaceful, fair, and resilient.
The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder
Peter Zeihan - 2014
Empires were abolished and replaced by a global arrangement enforced by the U.S. Navy. With all the world's oceans safe for the first time in history, markets and resources were made available for everyone. Enemies became partners.We think of this system as normal - it is not. We live in an artificial world on borrowed time.In The Accidental Superpower, international strategist Peter Zeihan examines how the hard rules of geography are eroding the American commitment to free trade; how much of the planet is aging into a mass retirement that will enervate markets and capital supplies; and how, against all odds, it is the ever-ravenous American economy that - alone among the developed nations - is rapidly approaching energy independence. Combined, these factors are doing nothing less than overturning the global system and ushering in a new (dis)order. For most, that is a disaster-in-waiting, but not for the Americans. The shale revolution allows Americans to sidestep an increasingly dangerous energy market. Only the United States boasts a youth population large enough to escape the sucking maw of global aging. Most important, geography will matter more than ever in a de-globalizing world, and America's geography is simply sublime.