In The New Great Game, Lutz Kleveman gives us a fearless, insightful, and exacting portrait of a new battleground in the violent politics and passion of oil: Central Asia, known as the “black hole of the earth” for much of the last century. The Caspian Sea contains the world’s largest amount of untapped oil and gas resources. It is estimated that there might be as much as 100 billion barrels of crude oil in the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan alone.Using the concept of the “Great Game” that Rudyard Kipling immortalized in his novel Kim, Kleveman argues that now a New Great Game rages in the region, a modern variant of the nineteenth-century clash of imperial ambitions of Great Britain and Tsarist Russia. Only this time the stakes are raised. Desperate to wean itself from dependence on the powerful OPEC cartel, the United States is now pitted in this struggle against Russia, China, and Iran, all competing for dominance of the Caspian region, its resources and pipeline routes.Complicating the playing field are transnational energy corporations with their own agendas and the brash new, Wild West–style entrepreneurs who have taken control after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Traveling thousands of miles, from the Caucasus peaks across the central Asian plains down to the Afghan Hindu Kush, Kleveman met with the principal Great Game actors between Kabul and Moscow: oil barons, generals, diplomats, and warlords.Based on extensive research and travel in the Caucasus, the Caspian, and Central Asia, The New Great Game is a gripping narrative and a savvy and incisive analysis of the power struggle for the world’s remaining energy resources.

    This extraordinary book is the account of how he pulled it off. By turns thrilling and slapstick, sublime and outrageous, A Viking Voyage is an unforgettable adventure story that will take you to the heart of some of the most magnificent, unspoiled territory on earth, and even deeper, to the heart of a journey like no other. A celebration of the people and places Carter visits and a treasure-trove of fascinating Viking lore, here is an unforgettable story of friendship and teamwork–and the thrill of accomplishing a goal that once seemed impossible.

    It is also a story of the history, people and cultures of the Caucasus and of tiny ethnic groups struggling for both physical and cultural survival.

    Full of acute observation, uncontrollable humour and a rousing climax.’ - Country Life ‘To his credit Stancomb resists the stereotype of the closed-minded British expatriate.’ - Independent on Sunday - Pick of the paperbacks ‘A thoroughly good read ---An endearing tale of a roller coaster ride.’ - Croatia Online ‘This is not a tale of your usual English couple. This is such a fantastic read ... both humorous and thought provoking.’ - Travellingbookjunkie ‘The author presents this quirky little tale in an honest way, even when he is on the receiving end of a joke. You don’t need to make a break with your past to enjoy this book. It is a fascinating, humorous and totally believable read.’ - Robin’s Reviews ‘A good read. I enjoyed best the humorous bits.’ Tony Rossiter (author of It’s Only a Bloody Game) ‘A good read.’ - Tariq Ali Notes From a Very Small Island is the follow-up to the bestselling ‘Under a Croatian Sun’, which tells the story of a couple upping sticks and leaving their humdrum life in London for blue skies and café life on an island in Croatia. In this second book, the couple continue their attempts to fit in with the village community, but it’s not always easy, and more often than not their endeavours involve them in in hilarious disasters. They also now try to start some projects up, but they have to battle with maddening ex-communist authorities and highly suspicious locals. However, through this, they get to see the crippling legacies that communism and the recent war have left in the lives of their new neighbours. Although largely a light hearted tale, the book is also a heartfelt insight into a community trying to adjust to being members of the EU and the ways of the Western World.

    Exploration and Africa are two of his great passions - they drive him on and motivate his inquisitiveness and resolution not to fail, yet the challenges of the terrain, the climate, the animals, the people and his own psychological resolution will throw at him are immense.The dangers are very real, but so is the motivation for this ex-army officer. If he can overcome the mental and physical challenges, he will be walking into history...

    Most Iraqis were barred from entering the Emerald City for fear they would blow it up. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and internal documents, Chandrasekaran tells the story of the people and ideas that inhabited the Green Zone during the occupation, from the imperial viceroy L. Paul Bremer III to the fleet of twentysomethings hired to implement the idea that Americans could build a Jeffersonian democracy in an embattled Middle Eastern country. In the vacuum of postwar planning, Bremer ignores what Iraqis tell him they want or need and instead pursues irrelevant neoconservative solutions—a flat tax, a sell-off of Iraqi government assets, and an end to food rationing. His underlings spend their days drawing up pie-in-the-sky policies, among them a new traffic code and a law protecting microchip designs, instead of rebuilding looted buildings and restoring electricity production. His almost comic initiatives anger the locals and help fuel the insurgency. Chandrasekaran details Bernard Kerik’s ludicrous attempt to train the Iraqi police and brings to light lesser known but typical travesties: the case of the twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance put in charge of reestablishing Baghdad’s stock exchange; a contractor with no previous experience paid millions to guard a closed airport; a State Department employee forced to bribe Americans to enlist their help in preventing Iraqi weapons scientists from defecting to Iran; Americans willing to serve in Iraq screened by White House officials for their views on Roe v. Wade; people with prior expertise in the Middle East excluded in favor of lesser-qualified Republican Party loyalists. Finally, he describes Bremer’s ignominious departure in 2004, fleeing secretly in a helicopter two days ahead of schedule. This is a startling portrait of an Oz-like place where a vital aspect of our government’s folly in Iraq played out. It is a book certain to be talked about for years to come.

    Stories I Stole relates her time there in twenty vodka-fuelled episodes drawn from all over the country – tales of love, friendship and power cuts, of duelling (Georgian style), of horse races in the mountains, wars and refugees, broken hearts, fixed elections, drinking sessions and a room containing a thousand roses.Stories I Stole is a wonderful example of a writer tackling an unconventional subject with such wit, humanity and sheer literary verve that one is unable to imagine why one never learnt more about Georgia before. Stories I Stole is a magnificent first book: erudite, engaged, candid and blissfully poetic. PROLOGUE: The author visits a bizarre “Stalin theme park” culminating in the eery viewing of Stalin’s death maskSHASHLIK, TAMADA, SUPRAThe author visits Khaketi, where she is introduced to the tamada culture of “exaggerated hospitality; a point-of-honour hospitality.” During a marathon toasting session at dinner she realizes “It is a kind of aggression. When they did not know you well, they filled your glass and filled it again and carefully watched how you drank it… This was the Georgian way, friend or enemy with nothing in between. History was lost in tradition, drinking a way of remembering and forgetting at the same time.”SHUKIThe frustration of living with unpredictable power and water supplies during extremely cold winters; the heat and/or electricity is often turned off due to reasons ranging from sabotage, corruption, non-payment, theft, “black clan economics,” and incompetence. Nevertheless this leads to a particular happiness when the light does come on. The author discovers the heavenly comfort of public baths. “Times were difficult; people had very little money. A lot of men were unemployed and all the old good professional jobs, teachers, nurses, police, engineers, were state jobs and paid less than $50 a month… Half Tbilisi owed the other half money.”ETHNIC CLEANSINGThe author visits Abkhazia, where a refugee has asked her to find the apartment that war caused him to flee. She finds a woman living there who is a refugee herself—after her own house was burned down, she discovered the fully furnished house in Abkhazia shortly after it was vacated, and has been living there ever since, proudly tending the garden of the previous occupant.WHO ARE THE ABKHAZOn the beach with Shalva, whom she suspects is “Abkhaz KGB.” He feeds her the party line about the Abkhaz occupation and she feels like screaming truths at him. “You won the war. You threw out all the Georgians. You have your homeland to yourselves (apart from the Armenian villages and the pockets of Russians) and what is this place? It’s a black hole. There are barely any cars, barely any petrol, no factories, nothing works, no private businesses, a curfew, no salaries, barely any pensions, a shell of a university, a terrible hospital, etc. etc.” But Shalva doubts that the West is paradise: “Here we have everything we need. The land is fertile.”THE DUELThe story of Dato and Aleko—they get into a car wreck and Dato’s face is horribly scarred. Aleko steals Dato’s wife and Dato challenges him to a fight. When Aleko beats Dato up, Dato pulls a gun and shoots the man until he is almost paralyzed. Dato, meanwhile, lives the rest of his life with his mother, hooked on heroin. “Not really Pushkin is it?”LARGE ABANDONED OBJECTSThe author drives to Abkhazia with several journalists to see incumbent Ardzinba win the presidential election (the journalists rename it the “presidential farce,” since Ardzinba is the only one running. The author marvels over the abandoned relics of the USSR she sees along the roadside—rusting tractors, bits of pipline, lines of coal cars shunted and left along a rail line, etc. For her birthday, the author goes to Gorbachev’s dacha, a palatial house he built but never got to inhabit because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The house is a metaphor for the USSR: “impressive only for its sheer size but actually full of empty space and tat.”

    But what happened to the hostage-takers, the suicidal holy warriors, the martyrs, and the mullahs responsible for the now moribund revolution? Is modern Iran a society at peace with itself and the world, or truly a dangerous spoke in the "Axis of Evil"?Christopher de Bellaigue, a Western journalist married to an Iranian woman and a longtime resident of a prosperous suburb of Tehran, offers a stunning insider's view of a culture hitherto hidden from American eyes, and reveals the true hearts and minds of an extraordinary people.

    Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her.They didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn’t know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. Behind the facade of her picturesque life, Burton was a dedicated Communist, a Soviet colonel, and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb.This true-life spy story is about the woman code-named “Sonya.” Over the course of her career, she was hunted by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nazis, MI5, MI6, and the FBI—and she evaded them all. Her story reflects the great ideological clash of the twentieth century—between Communism, Fascism, and Western democracy—and casts new light on the spy battles and shifting allegiances of our own times.With unparalleled access to Sonya’s diaries and correspondence and never-before-seen information on her clandestine activities, Ben Macintyre has written a history of a legendary secret agent, a woman who influenced the course of the Cold War and helped plunge the world into a decades-long standoff between nuclear superpowers.

    He not only reveals the celebrated Spain of bullfights and warror kings, painters and processions, cathedrals and olive orchards; he also shares the intimate, often hidden Spain he has come to know, where toiling peasants and their honest food, the salt of the shores and the oranges of the inland fields, the congeniality of living souls and the dark weight of history conspire to create a wild, contradictory, passionately beautiful land, the mystery called Iberia."Massive, beautiful...Unquestionably some of the best writing on Spain...The best that Mr. Michener has ever done on any subject...Stunning...Memorable."THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

    NBC News calls it, "A historical document of major significance." The focus is on Sir William Stephenson, Britain's urbane spy chief who inspired James Bond.

    As a soldier, he's fought them. But nothing prepared him for the surreal mix of desperation and hope he encountered when he returned to Zimbabwe, his broken homeland. Godwin arrived as Robert Mugabe, the country's dictator for 30 years, has finally lost an election. Mugabe's tenure has left Zimbabwe with the world's highest rate of inflation and the shortest life span. Instead of conceding power, Mugabe launched a brutal campaign of terror against his own citizens. With foreign correspondents banned, and he himself there illegally, Godwin was one of the few observers to bear witness to this period the locals call The Fear. He saw torture bases and the burning villages but was most awed as an observer of not only simple acts of kindness but also churchmen and diplomats putting their own lives on the line to try to stop the carnage.THE FEAR is a book about the astonishing courage and resilience of a people, armed with nothing but a desire to be free, who challenged a violent dictatorship. It is also the deeply personal and ultimately uplifting story of a man trying to make sense of the country he can't recognize as home.

    These two factors combine to make The Gathering Storm a unique work. The first volume of Churchill's memoirs, this selection is broken into two parts. The first, From War to War, consists of Churchill's critical observations on the settlement of World War I and its place in the causes of the Second World War. The second volume contains letters and memoranda from the British government--of which Churchill was part--as the country plunged unprepared into war. This stands as the best of history: written as it was made, by the man who made it.

    He more or less invented modern politi­cal consulting and helped Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush win their races for the White House. Then he reinvented himself as a master of cable television, first as the head of CNBC and, since 1996, as the creator and leader of Fox News, the most influential news network in the country. To liberals, Ailes is an evil genius who helped polarize the country by breaking the mainstream media’s long monopoly on what constitutes news. To conservatives, he’s a champion of free speech and fair reporting whose values and view of Amer­ica reflect their own. But no one doubts that Ailes has transformed journalism. Barack Obama once called him “the most powerful man in America”— and given that Fox News has changed the way millions understand the world, it may be true. Yet for all that fame and infamy, very few people know the real person behind the headlines. Journalist Zev Chafets received unprecedented access to Ailes and his family, friends, and Fox News colleagues. The result is a candid, compelling portrait of a fascinating man. We see Ailes in action at Fox News and hear him reflect on personal mat­ters he has never before discussed publicly. And we discover the heart of his sometimes surprising political beliefs: his profane piety and his unwav­ering belief in the values of his small-town Ohio boyhood. Ailes loves to fight, but he is a happy warrior who has somehow managed to charm and befriend many of the people he has defeated in political campaigns and television wars. Barbara Walters, Rachel Maddow, Jesse Jackson, the Kennedy clan— all are unexpected Ailes fans. Chafets also gives us an unprecedented look at the inner workings of Fox News and explores Ailes’s relationships with Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, Neil Cavuto, Chris Wallace, and the other stars he has nurtured. Ultimately, Ailes is neither villain nor hero but a man full of contradictions and surprises. As Chafets writes, “What will he do next? What stokes his competitive fires and occasional rages? How to reconcile his acts of exceptional loyalty and pri­vate generosity (even to rivals) with his impulse to present himself to the world as a ruthless leg breaker? What makes Roger run—and where, if anywhere, is the finish line? As Ailes himself might say: I report, you decide.”

    Joining the trio is a childhood friend and former Marine whose past service in Iraq adds an unexpected and sometimes unwelcome viewpoint, both to the people they come across and perhaps even themselves.As the crew works their way through Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, Glidden observes the reporters as they ask civilians, refugees, and officials, “Who are you?” Everyone has a story to tell: the Iranian blogger, the United Nations refugee administrator, a taxi driver, the Iraqi refugee deported from the US, the Iraqis seeking refuge in Syria, and even the American Marine.Glidden (How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less) records all that she encounters with a sympathetic and searching eye. Painted in her trademark soft, muted watercolors and written with a self-effacing humor, Rolling Blackouts cements Glidden’s place as one of today’s most original nonfiction voices.