Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988


Jane Mayer - 1988
    Then came the Iran-Contra scandal, and his once-charmed presidency began coming apart. This explosive book provides the first authoritative account of Reagan's second term White House--a book that is both a gripping narrative and a carefully documented investigation. 8-page photo insert.

Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads and the Rise of a New White Culture


James Ridgeway - 1990
    Updated to incorporate information on the Oklahoma City bombing and the militia movement, this in-depth study of the rise of white supremacists and religious fundamentalists traces the history of such movements, their tactics, and their impact.

Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS


Joby Warrick - 2015
    Little did he know that among those released was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a man who would go on to become a terrorist mastermind too dangerous even for al-Qaeda and give rise to an Islamist movement bent on dominating the Middle East.     Zarqawi began by directing hotel bombings and assassinations in Jordan from a base in northern Iraq, but it was the American invasion of that country in 2003 that catapulted him to the head of a vast insurgency. By identifying him as the link between Saddam and bin Laden, the CIA inadvertently created a monster. Like-minded radicals saw him as a hero resisting the infidel occupiers and rallied to his cause. Their wave of brutal beheadings and suicide bombings continued for years until Jordanian intelligence provided the Americans with the crucial intelligence needed to eliminate Zarqawi in a 2006 airstrike.     But his movement endured, first called al-Qaeda in Iraq, then renamed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, seeking refuge in unstable, ungoverned pockets on the Iraq-Syria border. And as the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, ISIS seized its chance to pursue Zarqawi's dream of a sweeping, ultra-conservative Islamic caliphate.      Drawing on unique access to CIA and Jordanian sources, Joby Warrick weaves together heart-pounding, moment-by-moment operational details with overarching historical perspectives to reveal the long trajectory of today's most dangerous Islamic extremist threat.From the Hardcover edition.

Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997


Salman Rushdie - 1997
    Selected by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, these novel excerpts, stories, and memoirs illuminate wonderful writing by authors often overlooked in the West. Chronologically arranged to reveal the development of Indian literature in English, this volume includes works by Jawaharlal Nehru, Nayantara Sahgal, Saadat Hasan Manto, G.V. Desani, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Kamala Markandaya, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Ved Mehta, Anita Desai, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Satyajit Ray, Salman Rushdie, Padma Perera, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Rohinton Mistry, Bapsi Sidhwa, I. Allan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor, Sara Suleri, Firdaus Kanga, Anjana Appachana, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Githa Hariharan, Gita Mehta, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Ardashir Vakil, Mukul Kesavan, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai.

Fireworks: The Lost Writings


Jim Thompson - 1988
    Containing many "lost" pieces, it is a compendium of suspense from the pulp magazines of the '20s to his last efforts in the '70s. Fine.

Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn


Nicholas von Hoffman - 1988
    Cohn, Senator Joe McCarthy's special assistant on the House on American Activities Committee. He was also friend of famous people such as J. Edgar Hoover & Ronald Reagan, scourge of liberals & socialists, tax-dodger extraordinaire, homosexual & ultimately AIDs victim.AcknowledgmentsI Can Fix Anything, but...Mama's BoyCome Cohn or Come SchineIf You're Indicted, You're InvitedA Late Hit...Source NotesIndexAbout the Author

CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys: How and Why Us Agents Conspired to Assassinate JFK and RFK


Patrick Nolan - 2013
    Across the globe, violent coups have been orchestrated, high-profile targets kidnapped, and world leaders dispatched at the hands of CIA agents. During the 1960s, on domestic soil, the methods used to protect their interests and themselves at the expense of the American people were no less ruthless. In CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys, Patrick Nolan fearlessly investigates the CIA’s involvement in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy—why the brothers needed to die and how rogue intelligence agents orchestrated history’s most infamous conspiracy.Nolan furthers the research of leading forensic scientists, historians, and scholars who agree that there remain serious unanswered questions regarding the assassinations of John F. Kennedy fifty years ago and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. He revisits and refutes what is currently known about Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, and offers readers a compelling profile of the CIA’s Richard Helms, an amoral master of clandestine operations with a chip on his shoulder.Bolstered by a foreword by Dr. Henry C. Lee, one of the world’s foremost forensic authorities, CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys is an unmatched effort in forensic research and detective work. As the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination approaches, Nolan has made a significant contribution to the literature on that fateful day in Dallas as well as shed light on that dark night at the Ambassador Hotel. Readers interested in conspiracy, the Kennedy family, or American history will find this book invaluable.

Enemies: A History of the FBI


Tim Weiner - 2012
      We think of the FBI as America’s police force. But secret intelligence is the Bureau’s first and foremost mission. Enemies is the story of how presidents have used the FBI as the most formidable intelligence force in American history.   Here is the hidden history of America’s hundred-year war on terror. The FBI has fought against terrorists, spies, anyone it deemed subversive—and sometimes American presidents. The FBI’s secret intelligence and surveillance techniques have created a tug-of-war between protecting national security and infringing upon civil liberties. It is a tension that strains the very fabric of a free republic.

The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI


Betty Medsger - 2014
    Edgar Hoover had created and was operating, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, his own shadow Bureau of Investigation. It begins in 1971 in an America being split apart by the Vietnam War . . . A small group of activists—eight men and women—the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, inspired by Daniel Berrigan’s rebellious Catholic peace movement, set out to use a more active, but nonviolent, method of civil disobedience to provide hard evidence once and for all that the government was operating outside the laws of the land.             The would-be burglars—nonpro’s—were ordinary people leading lives of purpose: a professor of religion and former freedom rider; a day-care director; a physicist; a cab driver; an antiwar activist, a lock picker; a graduate student haunted by members of her family lost to the Holocaust and the passivity of German civilians under Nazi rule.Betty Medsger's extraordinary book re-creates in resonant detail how this group of unknowing thieves, in their meticulous planning of the burglary, scouted out the low-security FBI building in a small town just west of Philadelphia, taking into consideration every possible factor, and how they planned the break-in for the night of the long-anticipated boxing match between Joe Frazier (war supporter and friend to President Nixon) and Muhammad Ali (convicted for refusing to serve in the military), knowing that all would be fixated on their televisions and radios.Medsger writes that the burglars removed all of the FBI files and, with the utmost deliberation, released them to various journalists and members of Congress, soon upending the public’s perception of the inviolate head of the Bureau and paving the way for the first overhaul of the FBI since Hoover became its director in 1924.  And we see how the release of the FBI files to the press set the stage for the sensational release three months later, by Daniel Ellsberg, of the top-secret, seven-thousand-page Pentagon study on U.S. decision-making regarding the Vietnam War, which became known as the Pentagon Papers.             At the heart of the heist—and the book—the contents of the FBI files revealing J. Edgar Hoover’s “secret counterintelligence program” COINTELPRO, set up in 1956 to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the United States in order “to enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles,” to make clear to all Americans that an FBI agent was “behind every mailbox,” a plan that would discredit, destabilize, and demoralize groups, many of them legal civil rights organizations and antiwar groups that Hoover found offensive—as well as black power groups, student activists, antidraft protestors, conscientious objectors. The author, the first reporter to receive the FBI files, began to cover this story during the three years she worked for The Washington Post and continued her investigation long after she'd left the paper, figuring out who the burglars were, and convincing them, after decades of silence, to come forward and tell their extraordinary story.  The Burglary is an important and riveting book, a portrait of the potential power of non­violent resistance and the destructive power of excessive government secrecy and spying.

Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK?


Mark Lane - 1991
    In 1966, Lane was therst to expose the flaws in the Warren Commission's official report, and his bestselling book Rush to Judgment revealed that Oswald could not have acted alone. Now he continues his ground-breaking investigation. 15 photographs.

The Psychopathic God


Robert G.L. Waite - 1977
    . . . Even though a thousand books are written on Hitler, this will long remain the best."--H. Stuart Hughes The Psychopathic God is the definitive psychological portrait of Adolph Hitler. By documenting accounts of his behavior, beliefs, tastes, fears, and compulsions, Robert Waite sheds new light on this complex figure. But Waite's ultimate aim is to explain how Hitler's psychopathology changed German--and world--history. With The Psychopathic God we can begin to understand Hitler as never before.

The Big Book of Scandal: Trashy but True Tales from the Tawdry Worlds of Celebrity, High Society, Politics, and Big Business!


Jonathan Vankin - 1998
    Witness the exploits of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Elvis, Liz, Di, Tricky Dicky and Bill Clinton!

Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence


Bryan Burrough - 2015
    The FBI combated these & other groups as nodes of a single revolutionary underground dedicated to the violent overthrow of the USA. Burrough's Days of Rage recreates an atmosphere almost unbelievable decades later, conjuring a time of native-born radicals, often nice middle-class kids, smuggling bombs into skyscrapers & detonating them inside the Pentagon & the Capitol, at a Boston courthouse & a Wall Street restaurant. The FBI’s response included the formation of a secret task force, Squad 47, dedicated to hunting the groups down. But Squad 47 itself broke laws in its attempts to bring the revolutionaries to justice. Its efforts ended in fiasco. Drawing on interviews about their experiences with members of the underground & the FBI, Days of Rage is a look into the hearts & minds of homegrown terrorists & federal agents alike, weaving their stories into a secret history of the '70s.

The Making Of A Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era


David Halberstam - 1965
    involvement in Vietnam_the Kennedy/Diem era_remains as fresh and stimulating today as when it was first published in 1965. In the introduction to this edition, historian Daniel J. Singal provides crucial background information that was unavailable when the book was written.

The Forever War


Dexter Filkins - 2008
    We go into the homes of suicide bombers and into street-to-street fighting with a battalion of marines. We meet Iraqi insurgents, an American captain who loses a quarter of his men in eight days, and a young soldier from Georgia on a rooftop at midnight reminiscing about his girlfriend back home. A car bomb explodes, bullets fly, and a mother cradles her blinded son.Like no other book, The Forever War allows us a visceral understanding of today’s battlefields and of the experiences of the people on the ground, warriors and innocents alike. It is a brilliant, fearless work, not just about America’s wars after 9/11, but ultimately about the nature of war itself.