Recognizing the fundamental disparity between agrarian and urban societies, Mao advocated unorthodox strategies that converted deficits into advantages: using intelligence provided by the sympathetic peasant population; substituting deception, mobility, and surprise for superior firepower; using retreat as an offensive move; and educating the inhabitants on the ideological basis of the struggle. This radical new approach to warfare, waged in jungles and mountains by mobile guerrilla bands closely supported by local inhabitants, has been adopted by other revolutionary leaders from Ho Chi Minh to Che Guevara. Mao wrote On Guerrilla Warfare in 1937 while in retreat after ten years of battling the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek. Twelve years later, the Nationalist Chinese were rousted from the mainland, and Mao consolidated his control of a new nation, having put his theories of revolutionary guerrilla warfare to the test. Established governments have slowly come to recognize the need to understand and devise means to counter this new method of warfare. Samuel B. Griffith's classic translation makes Mao's treatise widely available and includes a comprehensive introduction that profiles Mao, analyzes the nature and conduct of guerrilla warfare, and considers its implications for American policy.

    Drawing on a broad range of disciplines, including history, literature, and philosophy—as well as the author's own experience of life on three continents—Cosmopolitanism is a moral manifesto for a planet we share with more than six billion strangers.

    He brilliantly conveys what it was like to be facing death, day after day, night after night, with never a bed to sleep in nor a hot meal to go home to. This is warfare in the raw ' brutal, yet humorous, immensely tragic, but sadly, all true.

    With a wealth of fascinating detail, Riley-Smith brings to life these stirring expeditions to the Holy Land and the politics and personalities behind them. This new edition includes revisions throughout as well as a new Preface and Afterword in which Jonathan Riley-Smith surveys recent developments in the field and examines responses to the Crusades in different periods, from the Romantics to the Islamic world today.  From reviews of the first edition:   “Everything is here: the crusades to the Holy Land, and against the Albigensians, the Moors, the pagans in Eastern Europe, the Turks, and the enemies of the popes. Riley-Smith writes a beautiful, lucid prose, . . . [and his book] is packed with facts and action.”—Choice“A concise, clearly written synthesis . . . by one of the leading historians of the crusading movement. ”—Robert S. Gottfried, Historian “A lively and flowing narrative [with] an enormous cast of characters that is not a mere catalog but a history. . . . A remarkable achievement.”—Thomas E. Morrissey, Church History“Superb.”—Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Speculum“A first-rate one-volume survey of the Crusading movement from 1074 . . . to 1798.”—Southwest Catholic

     The place: TOP GUN In the darkest days of the Vietnam War, the U.S. Navy's kill ratio had fallen to 2:1 -- a deadly decline in pilot combat effectiveness. To improve the odds, a corps of hardened fighter pilots founded the Fighter Weapons School, a.k.a. TOP GUN. Utilizing actual enemy fighter planes in brutally realistic dogfights, the Top Gun instructors dueled their students and each other to achieve a lethal new level of fighting expertise. The training paid off. Combining the latest weaponry and technology, mental endurance, and razor-sharp instincts, the Top Gunners drove the Navy's kill ratio up to an astounding 12:1, dominating the skies over Vietnam. This gripping account takes you inside the cockpit for an adventure more explosive than any fiction -- in a dramatic true story of the legendary military school that has created the most dangerous fighter pilots the world has ever seen.

    The Warrior's Honor is a report and a reflection on what he has seen in the places where ethnic war has become a way of life. Ignatieff charts the rise of the new moral interventionists--the relief workers, reporters, delegates, and diplomats who believe that other people's misery is of concern to us all. And he brings us face-to-face with the new ethnic warriors--the warlords, gunmen, and paramilitaries--who have escalated postmodern war to an unprecedented level of savagery. Hard-hitting and passionate, The Warrior's Honor is a profound and searching exploration of the perils and obligations of moral citizenship in a world scarred by war and genocide.

    For many, it defined a generation.The Very Brief History series is intended to give the reader a short, concise account of the most important events in world history. Each book provides the reader with the essential facts concerning a particular event or person; no distractions, just the essential facts, allowing the reader to master the subject in the shortest time possible. With The Very Brief History series, anyone can become a history expert!

    In this new edition of a groundbreaking work -- one of the first to bring critical theory into dialogue with more traditional approaches to international relations -- David Campbell provides a fundamental reappraisal of American foreign policy, with a new epilogue to address current world affairs and the burgeoning focus on culture and identity in the study of international relations.Extending recent debates in international relations, Campbell shows how perceptions of danger and difference work to establish the identity of the United States. He demonstrates how foreign policy, far from being an expression of a given society, constitutes state identity through the interpretation of danger posed by others.

    Jonathan Glover ambitiously attempts a moral psychology, tracing the patterns of human psychology that breed violence. Shrewd case studies examine the intellectual follies and moral horrors of the First World War's trench warfare, Hitler's Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the ideologically driven social experimentation by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and the ethnic and tribal hatreds that tore apart the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

    As the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for The New York Times and the author of the critically acclaimed books Privilege and Grand New Party, Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and influential voices of his generation. Now he offers a masterful and hard-hitting account of how American Christianity has gone off the rails — and why it threatens to take American society with it.In a story that moves from the 1950s to the age of Obama, Douthat brilliantly charts traditional Christianity’s decline from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan faith — which acted as a “vital center” and the moral force behind the Civil Rights movement — through the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s down to the polarizing debates of the present day. He argues that Christianity’s place in American life has increasingly been taken over, not by atheism, but by heresy: Debased versions of Christian faith that breed hubris, greed, and self-absorption. Ranging from Glenn Beck to Eat Pray Love, Joel Osteen to The Da Vinci Code, Oprah Winfrey to Sarah Palin, Douthat explores how the prosperity gospel’s mantra of “pray and grow rich”; a cult of self-esteem that reduces God to a life coach; and the warring political religions of left and right have crippled the country’s ability to confront our most pressing challenges, and accelerated American decline.His urgent call for a revival of traditional Christianity is sure to generate controversy, and it will be vital reading for all those concerned about the imperiled American future.

    Challenging the reductionist division of people by race, religion, and class, Sen presents an inspiring vision of a world that can be made to move toward peace as firmly as it has spiraled in recent years toward brutality and war.

    In this brilliant study (his best-known and most controversial), he opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and its view that change takes place through "the struggle of opposites." Instead, he relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan determination to work out anxiety over salvation or damnation by performing good deeds — an effort that ultimately discouraged belief in predestination and encouraged capitalism. Weber's classic study has long been required reading in college and advanced high school social studies classrooms.

    In this riveting novel drawn from actual events and based on real-life heroes whose identities remain classified—including soldiers, sailors, intelligence operatives, technocrats, analysts, and policymakers—John Weisman fills in the blanks of what may have happened during the hunt and capture of Usama Bin Laden.Moving from the political battlefields of Washington, D.C., and the secure, seventh-floor suite of the CIA director in Langley, Virginia, to the dusty streets of Peshawar, Lahore, and Abbottabad, Pakistan, to the rough Afghan interior, to the Middle East and western Europe, this fictional narrative brings to life the drama behind SEAL Team 6’s breathtaking raid in which Bin Laden—a.k.a. Crankshaft, a.k.a. al Mas (the Diamond), the ghost, the wraith, the grail for counterterrorists for more than a decade—met his fate.In the Oval Office, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department, Washington’s power brokers, the president, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Secretary of Defense conduct secret meetings, battle for political supremacy, and make life-and-death choices. Meanwhile, at an anonymous naval installation just south of Virginia Beach, Virginia, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group trains in secret for the mission of a lifetime. And at Vallhalla Base, the CIA’s safe house in Abbottabad, dedicated intelligence officers gather intel critical to locating and capturing the elusive Bin Laden.KBL: Kill Bin Laden probes the hearts and minds of America’s secret warriors, revealing what the job means to them and the toll it takes. Here are the Navy SEALs who can never admit what unit they work for; the CIA paramilitary operators who risk their lives among the enemy, putting themselves in harm’s way knowing their existence will be denied if they are killed or captured; and the elite cadre of gritty leaders who bravely put country and security above politics.Filled with pulse-pounding excitement and the tactics, intelligence tradecraft, and operational sources and methods used in real-world CIA and special-operations missions, KBL: Kill Bin Laden is a thrill-a-minute dramatization that sets the standard for adventure novels as it brilliantly imagines the action, intrigue, and suspense of this real-life event and offers a glimpse of the new face of warfare.

    Interviewing war survivors and martyrs' families, Rachna Bisht Rawat tells stories of extraordinary human courage, of not just men in uniform but also those who loved them the most. With its gritty stories of incomparable bravery, Kargil is a tribute to the 527 young braves who gave up their lives for us-and the many who were ready to do it too.

    In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.