The second chapter considers the way in which the West was seen at the time by residents of Central and Eastern Europe, while the third outlines the practice of Ketman, the act of paying lip service to authority while concealing personal opposition, describing seven forms applied in the people's democracies of mid-20th century Europe.The four chapters at the heart of the book then follow, each a portrayal of a gifted Polish man who capitulated, in some fashion, to the demands of the Communist state. They are identified only as Alpha, the Moralist; Beta, The Disappointed Lover; Gamma, the Slave of History; and Delta, the Troubadour. However, each of the four portraits were easily identifiable: Alpha is Jerzy Andrzejewski, Beta is Tadeusz Borowski, Gamma is Jerzy Putrament and Delta is Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński.The book moves toward its climax with an elaboration of "enslavement through consciousness" in the penultimate chapter and closes with a pained and personal assessment of the fate of the Baltic nations in particular.

    Now comes a brilliant portrait of the American Revolution, one that is compelling in its prose, fascinating in its details, and provocative in its freshinterpretations.In A Leap in the Dark, John Ferling offers a magisterial new history that surges from the first rumblings of colonial protest to the volcanic election of 1800. Ferling's swift-moving narrative teems with fascinating details. We see Benjamin Franklin trying to decide if his loyalty was to GreatBritain or to America, and we meet George Washington when he was a shrewd planter-businessman who discovered personal economic advantages to American independence. We encounter those who supported the war against Great Britain in 1776, but opposed independence because it was a leap in the dark.Following the war, we hear talk in the North of secession from the United States. The author offers a gripping account of the most dramatic events of our history, showing just how closely fought were the struggle for independence, the adoption of the Constitution, and the later battle betweenFederalists and Democratic-Republicans. Yet, without slowing the flow of events, he has also produced a landmark study of leadership and ideas. Here is all the erratic brilliance of Hamilton and Jefferson battling to shape the new nation, and here too is the passion and political shrewdness ofrevolutionaries, such as Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, and their Loyalist counterparts, Joseph Galloway and Thomas Hutchinson. Here as well are activists who are not so well known today, men like Abraham Yates, who battled for democratic change, and Theodore Sedgwick, who fought to preserve thepolitical and social system of the colonial past. Ferling shows that throughout this period the epic political battles often resembled today's politics and the politicians--the founders--played a political hardball attendant with enmities, selfish motivations, and bitterness. The political stakes, this book demonstrates, were extraordinary: first to secure independence, then to determine the meaning of the American Revolution.John Ferling has shown himself to be an insightful historian of our Revolution, and an unusually skillful writer. A Leap in the Dark is his masterpiece, work that provokes, enlightens, and entertains in full measure.

    R.H. Lockhart's account of the years he spent representing Britain's Foreign Office in Russia is still immensely entertaining and informative today. Lockhart was not an espionage agent; he was a diplomat. He was Britain's Vice-Consul in Moscow, then Acting Consul-General, then official "unofficial" representative to the new Bolshevik regime in Russia, between the years 1912 and 1918. Lockhart describes his attempts at rubber farming as a young man in Malaysia and the circumstances that led to his seeking a career in the Foreign Office. He was given the post of British Vice-Consul in Moscow shortly after joining the Service. In these memoirs, Lockhart gives us his insights into Russian culture and politics during the last years of Tzarist rule, the circumstances of Russia's participation in World War I, and Russia's descent into Bolshevism. Lockhart came to love the Russian people and consider Moscow his home while he witnessed the last Tzar unwittingly ensure his own downfall and the succeeding Provisional Government inevitably fail. He gives an honest account of the errors in British and Allied policies during these precarious years in Russia. We get a close-up view of the eternal rift between diplomatic knowledge and political imperative. "Memoirs of a British Agent" is a supremely literate and insightful first-hand account of the fascinating and turbulent time in Russia that gave birth to the Soviet Union through the eyes of a foreigner who knew many prominent members of both the Tzarist and Bolshevik regimes personally. Lockhart manages to convey great sympathy for Russians of various ideologies while at the same time speaking bluntly of their shortcomings. Rarely has a book that is so informative been so entertaining. "Memoirs of a British Agent" is a real page-turner.

    13 Hours presents, for the first time ever, the true account of the events of September 11, 2012, when terrorists attacked the US State Department Special Mission Compound and a nearby CIA station called the Annex in Benghazi, Libya. A team of six American security operators fought to repel the attackers and protect the Americans stationed there. Those men went beyond the call of duty, performing extraordinary acts of courage and heroism, to avert tragedy on a much larger scale. This is their personal account, never before told, of what happened during the thirteen hours of that now-infamous attack. 13 Hours sets the record straight on what happened during a night that has been shrouded in mystery and controversy. Written by New York Times bestselling author Mitchell Zuckoff, this riveting book takes readers into the action-packed story of heroes who laid their lives on the line for one another, for their countrymen, and for their country. 13 Hours is a stunning, eye-opening, and intense book--but most importantly, it is the truth. The story of what happened to these men--and what they accomplished--is unforgettable.

    

    Conventional wisdom has long claimed that economic change is the prime mover of political change, whether in the age of industry or the Internet. In our own time Paul Kennedy has claimed that economics provided the key to international power, while Francis Fukuyama and others have argued that capitalism doomed socialism and ensured the victory of democracy. Small wonder politicians are obsessed with the economy: the Clinton campaign motto-"It's the economy stupid" -sums up a central tenet of modern life. But is it the economy? Ferguson thinks it is high time we re-examined the link-the "nexus," to use Thomas Carlyle's term-between economics and politics, in the aftermath not only of the failure of socialism but also of the apparent triumph of American-style capitalism. His central argument is that the conflicting impulses of sex, violence, and power are together more powerful than money. In particular, political events and institutions have often dominated economic development. A bold synthesis of political history and modern economic theory, Cash Nexus will transform the landscape of modern history and draw challenging and unsettling conclusions about the prospects of both capitalism and democracy.

    In fact, I believe that my chosen profession is a noble calling. That’s why I wanted to be a part of it.”–Joe BidenAs a United States senator from Delaware since 1973, Joe Biden has been an intimate witness to the major events of the past four decades and a relentless actor in trying to shape recent American history. He has seen up close the tragic mistake of the Vietnam War, the Watergate and Iran-contra scandals, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a presidential impeachment, a presidential resignation, and a presidential election decided by the Supreme Court. He’s observed Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and two Bushes wrestling with the presidency; he’s traveled to war zones in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and seen firsthand the devastation of genocide. He played a vital role by standing up to Ronald Reagan’s effort to seat Judge Robert Bork on the Supreme Court, fighting for legislation that protects women against domestic violence, and galvanizing America’s response (and the world’s) to Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal march in the Balkans. In Promises to Keep, Biden reveals what these experiences taught him about himself, his colleagues, and the institutions of government.With his customary candor, Biden movingly recounts growing up in a staunchly Catholic multigenerational household in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware; overcoming a demoralizing stutter; marriage, fatherhood, and the tragic death of his wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi; remarriage and re-forming a family with his second wife, Jill; success and failure in the Senate and on the campaign trail; two life-threatening aneurysms; his relations with fellow lawmakers on both sides of the aisle; and his leadership of powerful Senate committees.Through these and other recollections, Biden shows us how the guiding principles he learned early in life–the obligation to work to make people’s lives better, to honor family and faith, to get up and do the right thing no matter how hard you’ve been knocked down, to be honest and straightforward, and, above all, to keep your promises–are the foundations on which he has based his life’s work as husband, father, and public servant. Promises to Keep is the story of a man who faced down personal challenges and tragedy to become one of our most effective leaders. It is also an intimate series of reflections from a public servant who refuses to be cynical about political leadership, and a testament to the promise of the United States.

    Written by USA TODAY’s Washington Bureau chief Susan Page, this biography is informed by more than one hundred interviews with Bush friends and family members, hours of conversation with Mrs. Bush herself in the final six months of her life, and access to her diaries that spanned decades. THE MATRIARCH examines not only her public persona but also less well-known aspects of her remarkable life. As a girl in Rye, New York, Barbara Bush weathered criticism of her weight from her mother, barbs that left lifelong scars. As a young wife, she coped with the death of her three-year-old daughter from leukemia, a loss that changed her forever. In middle age, she grappled with depression so serious that she contemplated suicide. And as first the wife and then the mother of American presidents, she made history as the only woman to see — and advise — both her husband and son in the Oval Office.As with many women of her era, Barbara Bush was routinely underestimated, her contributions often neither recognized nor acknowledged. But she became an astute and trusted political campaign strategist and a beloved First Lady. She invested herself deeply in expanding literacy programs in America, played a critical role in the end of the Cold War, and led the way in demonstrating love and compassion to those with HIV/AIDS. With her cooperation, this book offers Barbara Bush’s last words for history — on the evolution of her party, on the role of women, on Donald Trump, and on her family’s legacy.Barbara Bush’s accomplishments, struggles, and contributions are many. Now, Susan Page explores them all in THE MATRIARCH, a groundbreaking book certain to cement Barbara Bush as one of the most unique and influential women in American history.

    television networks who financed and filmed them, and the Kennedy administration's unprecedented attempt to suppress both films. In the summer of 1962, one year after East German Communists built the Berlin Wall, a group of daring young West Germans came up with a plan. They would risk prison, Stasi torture, even death to liberate friends, lovers, and strangers in East Berlin by digging tunnels under the Wall. Among the tunnelers and escape helpers were a legendary cyclist, an American student from Stanford, and an engineer who would later help build the tunnel under the English Channel.               Then two U.S. television networks, NBC and CBS, heard about the secret projects, and raced to be first to air a spectacular "inside tunnel" special on the human will for freedom. The networks funded two separate tunnels in return for exclusive rights to film the escapes. In response, President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, wary of anything that might raise tensions and force a military confrontation with the Soviets, maneuvered to quash both documentaries.            Unfolding week by week, sometimes hour by hour, Greg Mitchell's riveting narrative deftly cuts back and forth from one extraordinary character to another.  There's the tunneler who had already served four years in the East German gulag; the Stasi informer who betrays the "CBS tunnel"; the young East Berliner who escapes with her baby, then marries one of the tunnelers; and broadcast legend Daniel Schorr, who battled unsuccessfully to save his film from White House interference and remained bitter about it to the end of his life. Looming over all is John F. Kennedy, who was ambivalent about--even hostile toward-- the escape operations.  Kennedy confessed to Dean Rusk:  "We don't care about East Berlin."       Based on extensive access to the Stasi archives, long-secret U.S. documents, and new interviews with tunnelers and refugees, The Tunnels provides both rich history and high suspense.  Award-winning journalist Mitchell captures the hopes and fears of everyday Berliners; the chilling reach of the Stasi secret police; U.S. networks prepared to "pay for play" yet willing to cave to official pressure; and a White House and State Department eager to suppress historic coverage. The result is "breaking history," a propulsive read whose themes reverberate even today.Optioned by FilmNation for a movie with Paul Greengrass attached to direct.

    Karen Dawisha's brilliant Putin's Kleptocracy provides an answer, describing how Putin got to power, the cabal he brought with him, the billions they have looted, and his plan to restore the Greater Russia.Russian scholar Dawisha describes and exposes the origins of Putin's kleptocratic regime. She presents extensive new evidence about the Putin circle's use of public positions for personal gain even before Putin became president in 2000. She documents the establishment of Bank Rossiya, now sanctioned by the US; the rise of the Ozero cooperative, founded by Putin and others who are now subject to visa bans and asset freezes; the links between Putin, Petromed, and Putin's Palace near Sochi; and the role of security officials from Putin's KGB days in Leningrad and Dresden, many of whom have maintained their contacts with Russian organized crime.Putin's Kleptocracy is the result of years of research into the KGB and the various Russian crime syndicates. Dawisha's sources include Stasi archives; Russian insiders; investigative journalists in the US, Britain, Germany, Finland, France, and Italy; and Western officials who served in Moscow. Russian journalists wrote part of this story when the Russian media was still free. Many of them died for this story, and their work has largely been scrubbed from the Internet, and even from Russian libraries, Dawisha says. But some of that work remains.

    . . perhaps the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet."—New York Times Book Review "Unwavering political contrarian Noam Chomsky smart-bombs the US military's global Interventions. Shock and awe!"—Vanity Fair Because We Say So presents more than thirty concise, forceful commentaries on US politics and global power. Written between 2011 and 2015, Noam Chomsky's arguments forge a persuasive counter-narrative to official accounts of US politics and policies during global crisis. Find here classic Chomsky on the increasing urgency of climate change, the ongoing impact of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing, nuclear politics, cyberwar, terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, and the Middle East, security and state power, as well as deeper reflections on the Obama doctrine, political philosophy, the Magna Carta, and the importance of a commons to democracy. Because We Say So is the third in a series of books by Chomsky published by City Lights Publishers that includes Making the Future (2012) and Interventions (2007), a book banned by US military censors. Taken together, the three books present a complete collection of the articles Chomsky writes regularly for the New York Times Syndicate, and are largely ignored by newspapers in the United States. Because We Say So offers fierce, accessible, timely, gloves-off political writing by America's foremost public intellectual and political dissident. Noam Chomsky is one of the world's most well-known critics of US policy. He has published numerous groundbreaking and best-selling books on global politics, history, and linguistics.

    Army's Special Project--Stargate. He was the only Remote Viewer who worked one-on-one with the out-of-body pioneer Robert Monroe, and who has achieved intelligence collection results that have never been surpassed and rarely equaled. Among his achievements: He described the interior of a top secret Soviet manufacturing plant and accurately predicted a new class of ship under construction--the previously unknown Typhoon Class submarine. He sketched the location and described the thoughts and reactions of an American kidnap victim held by the Red Brigade in Northern Italy--U.S. Army General Dozier. He accurately predicted when Skylab would leave orbit and where it would impact on the Earth's surface--eleven months prior to the actual event. After conventional reconnaissance failed, he and others were able to locate a downed Soviet bomber that had been carrying nuclear materials. He achieved these results using scientifically designed and tested double-blind protocols. And in the years since his retirement he has continued to demonstrate these abilities on camera for national television in three countries. Yet he is still confronted with what he calls the "giggle factor"--the automatic response of many, including some who know better--to ridicule anything connected with "psychic stuff." Surprisingly, it was always that way, even during his Army years.Was it his largely unsuspected psychic ability that helped keep him alive in Vietnam, and aided in his invaluable contributions to the cold war effort, that made McMoneagle afirst-class remote viewer? Were his abilities a natural gift, or taught? How much did he owe to his near-death experience in the 1970s? And why would he give up a safe and distinguished career as an advisor to the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command to become Remote Viewer 001? This is his story.

    In ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, American journalist Michael Weiss and Syrian analyst Hassan Hassan explain how these violent extremists evolved from a nearly defeated Iraqi insurgent group into a jihadi army of international volunteers who behead Western hostages in slickly produced videos and have conquered territory equal to the size of Great Britain. Beginning with the early days of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS’s first incarnation as “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Weiss and Hassan explain who the key players are—from their elusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to the former Saddam Baathists in their ranks—where they come from, how the movement has attracted both local and global support, and where their financing comes from. Political and military maneuvering by the United States, Iraq, Iran, and Syria have all fueled ISIS’s astonishing and explosive expansion. Drawing on original interviews with former US military officials and current ISIS fighters, the authors also reveal the internecine struggles within the movement itself, as well as ISIS’s bloody hatred of Shiite Muslims, which is generating another sectarian war in the region. Just like the one the US thought it had stopped in 2011 in Iraq. Past is prologue and America’s legacy in the Middle East is sowing a new generation of terror.

    This publication unravels the appalling mass of lies, hypocrisy and betrayals that have surrounded accounts of the assassination of Lumumba.

    A six-foot-one red-haired Dane, Storm spent his teens in and out of trouble. A book about the Prophet Mohammed prompted his conversion to Islam, and Storm sought purpose in a community of believers. He attended a militant madrasah in Yemen, named his son Osama, and became close friends with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born terrorist cleric. But after a decade of Jihadi life, he not only repudiated extremism but, in a quest for atonement, became a double agent for the CIA and British and Danish intelligence.Agent Storm takes readers inside the jihadist world like never before, showing the daily life of zealous men set on mass murder, from dodging drones with al-Qaeda leaders in the Arabian desert to training in extremist gyms in Britain and performing supply drops in Kenya. The book also provides a tantalizing look at his dangerous life undercover, as Storm traveled the world for missions targeting its most dangerous terrorists , and into the world’s most powerful spy agencies: their tradecraft, rivalries, and late-night carousing, as well as their ruthless use of a beautiful blonde in an ambitious honey trap. Agent Storm is a captivating, utterly unique, real-life espionage tale.