In a sweeping collection that ranges from Muslim military triumphs a thousand years ago through the turning of the tide between East and West to the brutal unconventional struggles of today and tomorrow, former Military Intelligence officer Peters extends his successful series of books on strategy and security affairs that have won him diehard fans for his insight, firsthand experience, and frankness.Endless War engages the toughest security issues of our time, including: - Does our Afghan war make sense? Can we win? Do we even have a strategy?- Has flawed military planning left our troops as virtual hostages in combat zones?- Can Israel survive? What would an Iranian nuclear arsenal mean for the world?- Is Islam a "religion of peace," or has the war between Islam and Western civilization continued virtually without interruption for almost fourteen centuries?- Why doesn't the greatest superpower in history win more often? Are we our own worst enemies?- Have we lost our sense of warfare's reality? Why don't we fight to win?- Do terrorist prisoners really deserve better treatment than American citizens?- What's the true price of striking serious history courses from our schools?- Who does deeper damage to the United States, our violent enemies or an arrogant ruling elite?In powerful prose combining clarity with passion, Ralph Peters continues to shape our country's military and strategic thought, while standing up for our troops and American values. No book on strategy or foreign affairs this year will be fiercer or more brutally honest. As ever more dark clouds gather over the world, this is a voice we need!

    Now Michael Casey tells the remarkable story of this image, detailing its evolution from a casual snapshot to an omnipresent graphic—plastered on everything from T-shirts to vodka to condoms—and into a copyrighted brand. As Casey follows it across the Americas and through cyberspace, he finds governments exploiting it and their dissenters attacking it, merchants selling it and tourists buying it. We see how this image is, ultimately, a mercurial icon that still ignites passion—and a reflection of how we view ourselves.

    Bringing writers to the nation from all corners of the globe, it aimed to break the cultural siege imposed by the Israeli military occupation, to strengthen artistic links with the rest of the world, and to reaffirm, in the words of Edward Said, "the power of culture over the culture of power."Celebrating the tenth anniversary of PalFest, Annexe is a collection of essays, poems, and sketches from some of the world's most distinguished artists, responding to their experiences at this unique festival. Both heartbreaking and hopeful, their gathered work is a testament to the power of literature to promote solidarity and hope in the most desperate of situations.Contributing authors include J. M. Coetzee, China Mieville, Alice Walker, Geoff Dyer, Claire Messud, Henning Mankell, Michael Ondaatje, Kamila Shamsie, Michael Palin, Deborah Moggach, Mohammed Hanif, Richard Ford, Gillian Slovo, Adam Foulds, Susan Abulhawa, Ahdaf Soueif, Jeremy Harding, Brigid Keenan, Rachel Holmes, Suad Amiry, Gary Younge, Jamal Mahjoub, Molly Crabapple, Najwan Darwish, Nathalie Handal, Omar Robert Hamilton, Pankaj Mishra, Raja Shehadeh, Selma Dabbagh, William Sutcliffe, Atef Abu Saif, Yasmin El-Rifae, Sabrina Mahfouz, Alaa Abd El Fattah, Mercedes Kemp, Ru Freeman."

    In other words, we're facing not a radicalization of Islam, but the Islamization of radicalism.Indeed, Roy argues, young European Muslims drawn to IS are attracted to the organization's violent means rather than utopian dreams of a caliphate. He places IS in the context of other radical millenialist groups such as China's Red Guards, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, and Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. In doing so, he shows that violence, not religious fundamentalism, is the central thread connecting young people who are drawn to radical groups.Jihad and Death is a concise dissection of the highly sophisticated narrative mobilized by IS: the myth of the caliphate recast into a modern story of heroism and nihilism.

    Sometimes, she does so in person—as during President Obama’s speech at the National Defense University, or during a reception for drone manufacturers and members of Congress, or in Cairo, where she was assaulted by police. Here, she’s researching the sinister nature of the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.In seven succinct chapters followed by a meditation on prospects for change, Benjamin—cited by the L.A. Times as “one of the high-profile members of the peace movement”—shines a light on one of the most perplexing elements of American foreign policy. What is the origin of this strange alliance between two countries that seemingly have very little in common? Why does it persist, and what are its consequences? Why, over a period of decades and across various presidential administrations, has the United States consistently supported a regime shown time and again to be one of the most powerful forces working against American interests? Saudi Arabia is perhaps the single most important source of funds for terrorists worldwide, promoting an extreme interpretation of Islam along with anti-Western sentiment, while brutally repressing non-violent dissidents at home.With extremism spreading across the globe, a reduced U.S. need for Saudi oil, and a thawing of U.S. relations with Iran, the time is right for a re-evaluation of our close ties with the Saudi regime.

    In twenty-four seasons pitcher Roger Clemens put together one of the greatest careers baseball has ever seen. Seven Cy Young Awards, two World Series championships, and 354 victories made him a lock for the Hall of Fame. But on December 13, 2007, the Mitchell Report laid waste to all that. Accusations that Clemens relied on steroids and human growth hormone provided and administered by his former trainer, Brian McNamee, have put Clemens in the crosshairs of a Justice Department investigation.Why did this happen? How did it happen? Who made the decisions that altered some lives and ruined others? How did a devastating culture of drugs, lies, sex, and cheating fester and grow throughout Major League Baseball's clubhouses? The answers are in these extraordinary pages.American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime is about much more than the downfall of a superstar. While the fascinating portrait of Clemens is certainly at the center of the action, the book takes us outside the white lines and inside the lives and dealings of sports executives, trainers, congressmen, lawyers, drug dealers, groupies, a porn star, and even a murderer—all of whom have ties to this saga. Four superb investigative journalists have spent years uncovering the truth, and at the heart of their investigation is a behind-the-scenes portrait of the maneuvering and strategies in the legal war between Clemens and his accuser, McNamee.This compelling story is the strongest examination yet of the rise of illegal drugs in America’s favorite sport, the gym-rat culture in Texas that has played such an important role in spreading those drugs, and the way Congress has dealt with the entire issue. Andy Pettitte, Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez, and Chuck Knoblauch are just a few of the other players whose moving and sometimes disturbing stories are illuminated here as well. The New York Daily News Sports Investigative Team has written the definitive book on corruption and the steroids era in Major League Baseball. In doing so, they have managed to dig beneath the disillusion and disappointment to give us a stirring look at heroes who all too often live unheroic shadow lives.

     Stanley Lane-Poole’s acclaimed biography Saladin and the Fall of Jerusalem is a complete study of the life of this noted leader: his youth, rise through twelfth-century Middle-Eastern politics, career as a military commander and the conquest of Egypt and Syria, and his intriguing clashes with Richard the Lionheart. Throughout his life, Saladin established himself as a military commander of genius, a man of honour and an intrepid statesman, cementing his place in the annals of Middle-Eastern history. The result of a lifetime of study by eminent historian Lane-Poole, Saladin and the Fall of Jerusalem benefits from the rich and colourful chronicles of Arab and Moslem historians, providing us with a unique insight into the life and deeds of this fascinating figure. “Stanley Lane-Poole has rendered valuable service in his different works by presenting various phases of Oriental history and life in such a way as to interest even those to whom such subjects are ordinarily a sealed book”.—The American Historical Review Stanley Edward Lane-Poole, 18 December 1854, was a British orientalist and archaeologist. Born in London, England, from 1874 to 1892 he worked in the British Museum, and after that in Egypt researching on Egyptian archaeology. From 1897 to 1904 he had a chair as Professor of Arabic studies at Dublin University. He died in 1931.

    At eighteen she witnessed the civil unrest of the 1979 Iranian revolution and continued to live in the Islamic Republic during its most volatile times, including the Iran-Iraq War. In a deeply intimate and personal story, Saper recounts her privileged childhood in pre-revolutionary Iran and how she gradually became aware of the paradoxes in her life and community—primarily the disparate religions and cultures.In 1979 under the Ayatollah regime, Iran became increasingly unfamiliar and hostile to Saper. Seemingly overnight she went from living a carefree life of wearing miniskirts and attending high school to listening to fanatic diatribes, a Jewish girl forced to veil her body as the rest of the country, and hiding in the basement as bombs fell all over the city. She fled to the United States in 1987 with her husband and children after witnessing her six-year-old daughter’s indoctrination into radical politics at school. At the heart of Saper’s story is a harrowing and instructive tale of how extremist ideologies seized a Westernized, affluent country and transformed it into a fundamentalist society.

    Lawrence, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle - 'A Line in the Sand' tells the story of the short but crucial era when Britain and France ruled the Middle East.

    Pre-eminent Middle East scholar Richard W. Bulliet disagrees, and in this fresh, provocative book he looks beneath the rhetoric of hatred and misunderstanding to challenge prevailing--and misleading--views of Islamic history and a "clash of civilizations." These sibling societies begin at the same time, go through the same developmental stages, and confront the same internal challenges. Yet as Christianity grows rich and powerful and less central to everyday life, Islam finds success around the globe but falls behind in wealth and power.Modernization in the nineteenth century brings in secular forces that marginalize religion in political and public life. In the Christian world, this simply furthers a process that had already begun. In the Middle East this gives rise to the tyrannical governments that continue to dominate. Bulliet argues that beginning in the 1950s American policymakers misread the Muslim world and, instead of focusing on the growing discontent against the unpopular governments, saw only a forum for liberal, democratic reforms within those governments. By fostering slogans like "clash of civilizations" and "what went wrong," Americans to this day continue to misread the Muslim world and to miss the opportunity to focus on common ground for building lasting peace. This book offers a fresh perspective on U.S.-Muslim relations and provides the intellectual groundwork upon which to help build a peaceful and democratic future in the Muslim world.

    Some are famous (Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell); others infamous (Harry St. John Philby, father of Kim); some forgotten (Sir Mark Sykes, Israel's godfather, and A. T. Wilson, the territorial creator of Iraq); some controversial (the CIA's Miles Copeland and the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz). All helped enthrone rulers in a region whose very name is an Anglo-American invention. As a bonus, we meet the British Empire's power couple, Lord and Lady Lugard (Flora Shaw): she named Nigeria, he ruled it; she used the power of the Times of London to attempt a regime change in the gold-rich Transvaal. The narrative is character-driven, and the aim is to restore to life the colorful figures who for good or ill gave us the Middle East in which Americans are enmeshed today.

    On his arrival in Jordan in 1958, he unraveled a coup aimed at the young King Hussein, who would become America's most reliable Middle East ally. Over time, their bond of trust and friendship deepened.His narrative contains secrets that will revise our understanding of the Middle East. In 1967, O'Connell tipped off Hussein that Israel would invade Egypt the next morning. Later, as Hussein's Washington counselor, O'Connell learned of Henry Kissinger's surprising role in the Yom Kippur War.The book's leitmotif is betrayal. Hussein, the Middle East's only bona fide peacemaker, wanted simply the return of the West Bank, seized in the Six-Day War. Despite American promises, the clear directive of UN Resolution 242, and the years of secret negotiations with Israel, that never happened. Hussein's dying wish was that O'Connell tell the unknown story in this book.

    Today, even the name itself has become a battleground for conflicting Israeli and Palestinian visions of the country's past. Israelis treat the very notion of 'Palestine' as a modern invention, while rooting their own nation's history in the ancient Kingdom of Israel. But, as Nur Masalha shows, the concept of Palestine (derived from the biblical 'Philistine') is one which can be traced to the beginning of recorded history, grounded in a distinctive Palestinian culture that long predates the Old Testament narrative of Israelite conquest. Beginning with the earliest references to the area in ancient texts, Masalha explores how the concept of Palestine and its associated identity has evolved over thousands of years, from the Bronze Age to the present day. Drawing on a rich body of sources and the latest archaeological evidence, Masalha shows how Palestine's past has been distorted and mythologised by Biblical lore and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the process, this magisterial work uncovers the true depth and complexity of Palestine's millennia-old heritage, and represents the authoritative account of the country's history.

    Egypt’s 2011 revolt was no exception. The military’s abandonment of Mubarak—a turning point for the revolt—confounded many observers, who assumed that the leader and the generals stood or fell together. The officers, it was thought, ruled from behind the scenes and simply swapped the figures in the spotlight to preserve the status quo.In a challenge to this conventional view, Hazem Kandil presents the revolution as the latest episode in an ongoing power struggle between the three components of Egypt’s authoritarian regime: the military, the security services, and the political apparatus. A detailed study of the interactions within this invidious triangle over six decades of war, conspiracy, and sociopolitical transformation, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen is the first systematic analysis of how Egypt metamorphosed from a military into a police state—and what that means for the future of its revolution.

    In this definitive masterwork, distinguished Oxford historian Albert Hourani offers the most lucid, enlightening history ever written on the subject. From the rise of Islam to the Palestinian issue, from the Prophet Mohammed to Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi. A History of the Arab Peoples chronicles the rich spiritual, political and cultural institutions of this civilization through thirteen centuries of war, peace, literature and religion. Lauded by authorities, encyclopedic and panoramic in its scope, here is a remarkable window on today's conflicts and on the future of a glorious and troubled land.