At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives. Distracted by the war in Iraq, the US military become mired in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country it did not understand. But no president wanted to admit failure, especially in a war that began as a just cause. Instead, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they knew there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory. Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public’s understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains “fast-paced and vivid” (The New York Times Book Review) revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government’s strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. All told, the account is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who knew that the US government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground. Documents unearthed by The Washington Post reveal that President Bush didn’t know the name of his Afghanistan war commander—and didn’t want to meet with him. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.” His successor, Robert Gates, said: “We didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda.” The Afghanistan Papers is a “searing indictment of the deceit, blunders, and hubris of senior military and civilian officials” (Tom Bowman, NRP Pentagon Correspondent) that will supercharge a long-overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered.

    The result is an informative, insightful, and engaging account of a highly sensitive and still largely secret aspect of Arab society. Sex is entwined in religion, tradition, politics, economics, and culture, so it is the perfect lens through which to examine the complex social landscape of the Arab world. From pregnant virgins to desperate housewives, from fearless activists to religious firebrands, from sex work to same-sex relations, Sex and the Citadel takes a fresh look at the sexual history of the region and brings new voices to the debate over its future.  This is no peep show or academic treatise but a highly personal and often humorous account of one woman’s journey to better understand Arab society at its most intimate and, in the process, to better understand her own origins. Rich with five years of groundbreaking research, Sex and the Citadel gives us a unique and timely understanding of everyday lives in a part of the world that is changing before our eyes.

    The overwhelming majority of the dead were Palestinians, including some 500 children. Another 13,000-odd Palestinians were wounded, and 17,200 homes demolished. These statistics are sadly familiar, as is the political rhetoric from Israeli and Palestinian authorities alike.What is less familiar, however, is a sense of the ordinary Gazan society that war lays to waste.One of the few voices to make it out of Gaza was that of Atef Abu Saif, a writer and teacher from Jabalia refugee camp, whose eyewitness accounts (published in the Guardian, New York Times, and elsewhere) offered a rare window into the conflict for Western readers. Here, Abu Saif’s complete diaries of the war allow us to witness the events of 2014 from the perspective of a young father, fearing for his family’s safety. In The Drone Eats with Me, Abu Saif brings readers an intimate glimpse of life during wartime, as he, his wife, and his two young children attempt to live their lives with a sense of normalcy, in spite of the ever-present danger and carnage that is swallowing the place they call home.

    Her mother, the beautiful Alia, taught her daughter the skills she needed to survive. A plastic smile. Saying yes. Burying in boxes in her mind the horrors she glimpsed around her. Learn to erase your memories, she instructed. He can read eyes.In this richly visual memoir, Salbi describes tyranny as she saw it--through the eyes of a privileged child, a rebellious teenager, a violated wife, and ultimately a public figure fighting to overcome the skill that once kept her alive: silence.Between Two Worlds is a riveting quest for truth that deepens our understanding of the universal themes of power, fear, sexual subjugation, and the question one generation asks the one before it: How could you have let this happen to us?

    Thirty thousand murdered since 2006; police chiefs shot within hours of taking office; mass graves comparable to those of civil wars; car bombs shattering storefronts; headless corpses heaped in town squares. And it is all because a few Americans are getting high. Or is it? The United States throws Black Hawk helicopters and drug agents at the problem. But in secret, Washington is confused and divided about what to do. Who are these mysterious figures tearing Mexico apart? they wonder. What is El Narco? El Narco draws the first definitive portrait of Mexico's drug cartels and how they have radically transformed in the last decade. El Narco is not a gang; it is a movement and an industry drawing in hundreds of thousands from bullet-ridden barrios to marijuana-growing mountains. And it has created paramilitary death squads with tens of thousands of men-at-arms from Guatemala to the Texas border. Journalist Ioan Grillo has spent a decade in Mexico reporting on the drug wars from the front lines. This piercing book joins testimonies from inside the cartels with firsthand dispatches and unsparing analysis. The devastation may be south of the Rio Grande, El Narco shows, but America is knee-deep in this conflict.

    Col. Jonathan Netanyahu, brother of Israel's current prime minister, was killed in battle during Israel's 1976 daring hostage rescue mission in Africa, his personal reflections live on in these letters written to his family and friends. 21 illustrations.

    Then, on the morning of September 11th, 2001, the phone rang. It was her husband, Ron, calling from his office in the second tower. "Sweets, I'm ok. I'm ok. Don't worry. It's not my building," he said. Kristen didn't know what he was saying. He told her to turn on the television. He continued. "I see them. They're right there. Right across from me. And they're jumping. My God, they're jumping." The call ended abruptly and Kristen watched with horror as the second tower exploded. A huge, brilliant, red fireball. In that frozen instant, she felt in her heart that he had been killed. This is the deeply personal, often shocking and ultimately inspirational story of a woman left to pick up the pieces of a life shattered by terrorism. With no husband by her side or father for her child, Kristen had to find the strength within herself to embark on a journey that would lead first to the creation of the 9/11 Commission and then to her role as one of the country's most outspoken activists and critics of the current administration.

    Beset by body-double rumors and false alarms during a nine-month search, the Bush administration needed positive identification of the prisoner before it could make the announcement that would rocket around the world. At the time, John Nixon was a senior CIA leadership analyst who had spent years studying the Iraqi dictator. Called upon to make the official ID, Nixon looked for telltale scars and tribal tattoos and asked Hussein a list of questions only he could answer. The man was indeed Saddam Hussein, but as Nixon learned in the ensuing weeks, both he and America had greatly misunderstood just who Saddam Hussein really was. Debriefing the President presents an astounding, candid portrait of one of our era’s most notorious strongmen. Nixon, the first man to conduct a prolonged interrogation of Hussein after his capture, offers expert insight into the history and mind of America’s most enigmatic enemy. After years of parsing Hussein’s leadership from afar, Nixon faithfully recounts his debriefing sessions and subsequently strips away the mythology surrounding an equally brutal and complex man. His account is not an apology, but a sobering examination of how preconceived ideas led Washington policymakers—and the Bush White House—astray. Unflinching and unprecedented, Debriefing the President exposes a fundamental misreading of one of the modern world’s most central figures and presents a new narrative that boldly counters the received account.

    It's only five in the afternoon, but a sandtorm has plunged everything into a hellish twilight of murky, red dust. On rooftops, in alleyways lurk militiamen with machine guns, AK rifles and the odd rocket-propelled grenade. Artillery bombardment has shattered the town's sewers and rubble is piled up in lagoons of human excrement. It stinks. Welcome to Iraq... Within hours of 9/11, America's war on terrorism fell to those like the 23 Marines of the First Recon Battalion, the first generation dispatched into open-ed combat since Vietnam. They were a new breed of American warrior unrecognizable to their forebears-soldiers raised on hip hop, Internet porn, Marilyn Manson, video games and The Real World, a band of born-again Christians, dopers, Buddhists, and New Agers who gleaned their precepts from kung fu movies and Oprah Winfrey. Cocky, brave, headstrong, wary, and mostly unprepared for the physical, emotional, and moral horrors ahead, the "First Suicide Battalion" would spearhead the blitzkrieg on Iraq, and fight against the hardest resistance Saddam had to offer. Generation Kill is the funny, frightening, and profane firsthand account of these remarkable men, of the personal toll of victory, and of the randomness, brutality, and camaraderie of a new American war.

    I was not to carry any identification, and would have to leave my cell phone, audio recorder, watch, and purse at my hotel. . . ."For her whole life, Souad Mekhennet, a reporter for The Washington Post who was born and educated in Germany, has had to balance the two sides of her upbringing - Muslim and Western. She has also sought to provide a mediating voice between these cultures, which too often misunderstand each other.In this compelling and evocative memoir, we accompany Mekhennet as she journeys behind the lines of jihad, starting in the German neighborhoods where the 9/11 plotters were radicalized and the Iraqi neighborhoods where Sunnis and Shia turned against one another, and culminating on the Turkish/Syrian border region where ISIS is a daily presence. In her travels across the Middle East and North Africa, she documents her chilling run-ins with various intelligence services and shows why the Arab Spring never lived up to its promise. She then returns to Europe, first in London, where she uncovers the identity of the notorious ISIS executioner "Jihadi John," and then in France, Belgium, and her native Germany, where terror has come to the heart of Western civilization.Mekhennet's background has given her unique access to some of the world's most wanted men, who generally refuse to speak to Western journalists. She is not afraid to face personal danger to reach out to individuals in the inner circles of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, and their affiliates; when she is told to come alone to an interview, she never knows what awaits at her destination.Souad Mekhennet is an ideal guide to introduce us to the human beings behind the ominous headlines, as she shares her transformative journey with us. Hers is a story you will not soon forget.

    It was the culmination of a decade-long investigation, and ten people, including Anna Chapman, were swapped for four people held in Russia. At the time it was seen simply as a throwback to the Cold War. But that would prove to be a costly mistake. It was a sign that the Russian threat had never gone away and more importantly, it was shifting into a much more disruptive new phase. Today, the danger is clearer than ever following the poisoning in the UK of one of the spies who was swapped, Sergei Skripal, and the growing evidence of Russian interference in American life.Russians Among Us describes for the first time the story of deep cover spies in America and the FBI agents who tracked them. In intimate and riveting detail, it reveals new information about today’s spies—as well as those trying to catch them and those trying to kill them.

    The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is one of the most important books to have emerged since the end of the Cold War." --HENRY A. KISSINGERBased on the author's seminal article in Foreign Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is a provocative and prescient analysis of the state of world politics after the fall of communism. In this incisive work, the renowned political scientist explains how "civilizations" have replaced nations and ideologies as the driving force in global politics today and offers a brilliant analysis of the current climate and future possibilities of our world's volatile political culture."An intellectual tour de force: bold, imaginative, and provocative. A seminal work that will revolutionize our understanding of international affairs." --ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI"The book is studded with insights, flashes of rare brilliance, great learning, and in particular, an ability to see the familiar in a new and provocative way." --MICHAEL ELLIOTT, THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD"A benchmark for informed speculation on those always fascinating questions: Just where are we in history? What hidden hand is controlling our destiny?...A searching reflection on our global state." --RICHARD BERNSTEIN, THE NEW YORK TIMES"This is what is so stunning about The Clash of Civilizations: It is not just about the future, but may actually help to shape it." --WANG GUNGWU, THE NATIONAL INTEREST

    Dominant in national politics for forty years under the influence of the conservative but pragmatic leadership of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, the GOP, Scarborough argues, is in a self-inflicted eclipse. The only way forward? Recover the principled realism of the giants who led the party to greatness.  In the aftermath of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide, the Republican Party appeared to be on the verge of permanent irrelevance. LBJ’s Great Society was institutionalizing sweeping liberal reforms, and the United States had a thriving, prosperous economy. Yet in an instant everything changed, and the next four decades would witness an unprecedented era of Republican ascendancy. What happened?   In The Right Path, Joe Scarborough looks back in time to discern how Republicans once dominated American public life. From Eisenhower’s refusal to let “the perfect be the enemy of the good” to Reagan’s charismatic but resolutely practical genius, Scarborough shows how principled pragmatism, combined with a commitment to core conservative values, led to victory after victory.   Now, however, political incalcitrance is threatening to turn a once-mighty party into a permanent minority.     Opening with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965—the high-water moment for liberalism—and ending with the national disillusionment that set in after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, The Right Path effortlessly blends American political history with astute analysis and pithy, no-holds-barred commentary. Both a bracing call to arms and a commonsense history, The Right Path provides an illuminating look at conservatism and its discontents—and why the GOP must regain its former tone and tradition if it hopes to survive.  Praise for The Right Path “This concise history of modern Republican politics might just leave you optimistic about the chances that conservatives can govern again. . . . In the world of commentary, we tend to obsess over the quotidian ebbs and flows—assuming that every little bump in the road is a disaster. . . . But there’s something about reading the history that allows one to take a longer view and put things in context. And that’s precisely what this book does very well.”—The Daily Caller“The Right Path is the right book at the right time to spark a much-needed conversation about the future of the Republican Party.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin  “If you’re interested in the Republican future, you need to read The Right Path. I don’t agree with all of it, but Joe Scarborough has written a book that’s both thought-provoking and fun.”—William Kristol“Joe Scarborough’s lively, provocative, and instructive history of the modern Republican Party will stir up the GOP—which is exactly what he has in mind. As the Grand Old Party searches for a path to victory, Joe offers some important lessons to be learned.”—Tom Brokaw   “Joe Scarborough’s incisive, original, provocative, and well-argued book, deploying American political history both distant and recent, deserves to be widely read, carefully considered, and energetically debated.”—Michael BeschlossFrom the Hardcover edition.

    Tracing the roots of political Zionism back to the pogroms of Russia and the Dreyfus Affair, Morris describes the gradual influx of Jewish settlers into Palestine and the impact they had on the Arab population. Following the Holocaust, the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel, but it also shattered Palestinian Arab society and gave rise to a massive refugee problem. Morris offers distinctive accounts of each of the subsequent Israeli-Arab wars and details the sporadic peace efforts in between, culminating in the peace process initiated by the Rabin Government. In a new afterword to the Vintage edition, he examines Ehud Barak’s leadership, the death of President Assad of Syria, and Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, and the recent renewed conflict with the Palestinians. Studded with illuminating portraits of the major protagonists, Righteous Victims provides an authoritative record of the middle east and its continuing struggle toward peace.

    This powerful account of brutality against women in the Muslim world remains as shocking today as when it was first published, more than a quarter of a century ago. It was the horrific female genital mutilation that she suffered aged only six, which first awakened Nawal el Saadawi's sense of the violence and injustice which permeated her society. Her experiences working as a doctor in villages around Egypt, witnessing prostitution, honour killings and sexual abuse, inspired her to write in order to give voice to this suffering. She goes on explore the causes of the situation through a discussion of the historical role of Arab women in religion and literature.Saadawi argues that the veil, polygamy and legal inequality are incompatible with the just and peaceful Islam which she envisages.