In The Islamist Phoenix, world-renowned terrorism expert Loretta Napoleoni takes us beyond the headlines, demonstrating that while Western media portrays the Islamic State as little more than a gang of thugs on a winning streak, the organization is proposing a new model for nation building. Waging a traditional war of conquest to carve out the 21st-century version of the original Caliphate, IS uses modern technology to recruit and fundraise while engaging the local population in the day-to-day running of the new state. Rising from the ashes of failing jihadist enterprises, the Islamic State has shown a deep understanding of Middle Eastern politics, fully exploiting proxy war and shell-state tactics. This is not another terrorist network but a formidable enemy in tune with the new modernity of the current world disorder. As Napoleoni writes, “Ignoring these facts is more than misleading and superficial, it is dangerous. ‘Know your enemy’ remains the most important adage in the fight against terrorism.”From the eBook edition.

    Divides among citizens aren't just about power but are products of fundamental disagreements over the very nature and purpose of the modern nation state—and the vexing problem of religion’s role in public life. Hamid argues for a new understanding of how Islam and Islamism shape politics by examining different models of reckoning with the problem of religion and state, including the terrifying—and alarmingly successful—example of ISIS.With unprecedented access to Islamist activists and leaders across the region, Hamid offers a panoramic and ambitious interpretation of the region's descent into violence. Islamic Exceptionalism is a vital contribution to our understanding of Islam's past and present, and its outsized role in modern politics. We don't have to like it, but we have to understand it—because Islam, as a religion and as an idea, will continue to be a force that shapes not just the region, but the West as well in the decades to come.

    In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities.Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata.Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries.As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes. From the Hardcover edition.

    Focusing on two brothers from Mosul and their families, a charismatic Iraqi major who marched north from Baghdad to seize the city with his troops, rowdy Kurdish militiamen, and a hard-bitten American sergeant, Verini describes a war for the soul of a country, a war over and for history.Seeing the battle in a larger, centuries-long sweep, he connects the bloody-minded philosophy of the Islamic State with the ancient Assyrians who founded Mosul. He also confronts the ways that the American invasion of Iraq not only deformed that country, but also changed America like no conflict since Vietnam.

    But after her mother, unsettled by growing political unrest, leaves for medical treatment in India, the civil war intensifies, changing young Enjeela’s life forever. Amid the rumble of invading Soviet tanks, Enjeela and her family are thrust into chaos and fear when it becomes clear that her mother will not be coming home.Thus begins an epic, reckless, and terrifying five-year journey of escape for Enjeela, her siblings, and their father to reconnect with her mother. In navigating the dangers ahead of them, and in looking back at the wilderness of her homeland, Enjeela discovers the spiritual and physical strength to find hope in the most desperate of circumstances.A heart-stopping memoir of a girl shaken by the brutalities of war and empowered by the will to survive, The Broken Circle brilliantly illustrates that family is not defined by the borders of a country but by the bonds of the heart.

    Mike Giglio takes readers to the heart of this shifting, uncertain conflict, capturing the essence of a modern war.At its peak, ISIS controlled a self-styled "caliphate" the size of Great Britain, with a population cast into servitude that numbered in the millions. Its territory spread across Iraq and Syria as its influence stretched throughout the wider world.Giglio tells the story of the rise of the caliphate and the ramshackle coalition--aided by secretive Western troops and American airstrikes--that was assembled to break it down village by village, district by district. The story moves from the smugglers, traffickers, and jihadis working on the ISIS side to the victims of its zealous persecution and the local soldiers who died by the thousands to defeat it. Amid the battlefield drama, culminating in a climactic showdown in Mosul, is a dazzlingly human portrait of the destructive power of extremism, and of the tenacity and astonishing courage required to defeat it.

    Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to the ongoing intifada, is a direct consequence of those six days of fighting. Michael B. Oren’s magnificent Six Days of War, an internationally acclaimed bestseller, is the first comprehensive account of this epoch-making event. Writing with a novelist’s command of narrative and a historian’s grasp of fact and motive, Oren reconstructs both the lightning-fast action on the battlefields and the political shocks that electrified the world. Extraordinary personalities—Moshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser, Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin—rose and toppled from power as a result of this war; borders were redrawn; daring strategies brilliantly succeeded or disastrously failed in a matter of hours. And the balance of power changed—in the Middle East and in the world. A towering work of history and an enthralling human narrative, Six Days of War is the most important book on the Middle East conflict to appear in a generation.

    But what about the traveler who is at a crossroads in life, longing for something else, neither diversion nor distraction, beyond escape and mere entertainment? What about those eager for a journey that is personally meaningful? For millennia this cry has been answered by pilgrimage, the transformative journey to a sacred center. The ancients referred to this path as the Way of the Pilgrim, an acknowledgement of travel for the sake of devotion, commitment, even penance to a holy site, a destination that blazes with meaning -- in short, a journey of risk and renewal. The Art of Pilgrimage is a guide for travelers ready to embark on a sacred journey and for armchair travelers curious to know what it means to travel with soulful purpose. Geared toward the modern-day pilgrim looking for inspiration and a few spiritual tools for the road, it combines stories, myths, parables, and quotes from famous travelers of the past with practical suggestions and contemporary accounts from people traveling the sacred way today. Not a guidebook to holy sites, this book is designed to help travelers focus on the purpose and intention at every satge of their journey no matter where they are going. The Art of Pilgrimage includes stories of traditional pilgrimages such as those to Canterbury or Jerusalem, but also ones to Shakespeare's home, Graceland, or the Field of Dreams in Iowa. Phil Cousineau recounts anecdotes from his own travels covering over 50 countries and offers readers the advice he gives when leading tours for the Joseph Campbell Foundation.

    Since Washington's secret funding of the Mujahideen following the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s, America has supported extremists with money and hardware, including enemies such as Bin Laden. The Pentagon's willingness to make alliances abroad have seen the war coming home with inevitable consequences: by funding, training, and arming jihadist elements in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya since the Cold War and waging wars of regime change and interventions that gave birth to the Islamic State. Meanwhile, Trump's dealings In the Middle East are likely only to exacerbate the situation further.Blumenthal excavates the real story behind America's dealing with the world and shows how the extremist forces that now threaten peace across the globe are the inevitable flowering of America's imperial designs of a national security state. And shows how this has ended with the rise of the Trump presidency.

    Don't miss out on this fun, informative and painstakingly researched historical romp by the highly praised and award-winning author of Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed At All. So when the missionaries show up on your doorstep, you'll have plenty to discuss with them... Later days, Saints! The Complete Heretic's Guide to Western Religion. Because Religion isn't just wrong. It's hilarious.

    Masterfully weaving together multiple strands of the events in New York; at the Pentagon; and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Fall and Rise is a mesmerizing, minute-by-minute account of that terrible day.In the days and months after 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff, then a reporter for the Boston Globe, wrote about the attacks, the victims, and their families. After additional years of meticulous reporting, Zuckoff has filled Fall and Rise with voices of the lost and the saved. The result is an utterly gripping book filled with intimate stories of people most affected by the events of that sunny Tuesday in September: an out-of-work actor stuck in an elevator in the North Tower of the World Trade Center; the heroes aboard Flight 93 deciding to take action; a veteran trapped in the inferno in the Pentagon; the fire chief among the first on the scene in sleepy Shanksville; a team of firefighters racing to save an injured woman and themselves; and the men, women, and children flying across the country who suddenly faced terrorists bent on murder.Fall and Rise will open new avenues of understanding for everyone who thinks they know the story of 9/11, bringing to life—and in some cases, bringing back to life—the extraordinary ordinary people who experienced the worst day in modern American history.

    involvement with Afghanistan, media control, and the long-term implications of America's military attacks abroad. Informed by his deep understanding of the gravity of these issues and the global stakes, 9-11 demonstrates Chomsky's impeccable knowledge of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia, and sheds light on the rapidly shifting balance of world power. Speaking out against escalating violence, Chomsky critically examines the United States' own foreign policy record and considers what international institutions might be employed against underground networks and national states accused of terrorism. 9-11's analysis still stands as a measure of how well the media is able to serve its role of informing the citizenry, so crucial to our democracy in times of war.

    Lewis Bible pairs thought-provoking meditations from C.S. Lewis’s spiritual writings with corresponding passages from the authoritative NRSV Bible. This one-of-a-kind Bible for devotional reading, reflection, and inspiration is perfect for readers of Lewis’s Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, or his other works of seminal Christian writing. Fans of Lewis’s widely-beloved allegorical fantasy series, the Chronicles of Narnia, will love this chance to engage with the author’s more deeply spiritual side after reading favorites like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

    A large and growing chunk of the American population was so turned off--or radicalized--by electoral chicanery, a spineless news media, and the increasingly blatant lies from our leaders ("they hate us for our freedom") that they abandoned the political mainstream altogether. They joined what he calls The Great Derangement.Taibbi tells the story of this new American madness by inserting himself into four defining American subcultures: • The Military, where he finds himself mired in the grotesque black comedy of the American occupation of Iraq;• The System, where he follows the money-slicked path of legislation in Congress;• The Resistance, where he doubles as chief public antagonist and undercover member of the passionately bonkers 9/11 Truth Movement; and• The Church, where he infiltrates a politically influential apocalyptic mega-ministry in Texas and enters the lives of its desperate congregants. Together these four interwoven adventures paint a portrait of a nation dangerously out of touch with reality and desperately searching for answers in all the wrong places. Funny, smart, and a little bit heartbreaking, The Great Derangement is an audaciously reported, sobering, and illuminating portrait of America at the end of the Bush era."The funniest angry writer and the angriest funny writer since Hunter S. Thompson roared into town." -- James Wolcott"…[A] scabrous, hilarious vivisection of our disintegrating nation. …Taibbi shines a light on the corruption, absurdities, and idiot pieties of modern American politics. Beneath his cynical fury, though, are flashes of surprising compassion for the adrift credulous souls who are taken in by it all." -- Michelle Goldberg

    Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.Carolyn’s every move was dictated by her husband’s whims. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He chose when they had sex; Carolyn could only refuse—at her peril. For in the FLDS, a wife’s compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had $20 to her name.Escape exposes a world tantamount to a prison camp, created by religious fanatics who, in the name of God, deprive their followers the right to make choices, force women to be totally subservient to men, and brainwash children in church-run schools. Against this background, Carolyn Jessop’s flight takes on an extraordinary, inspiring power. Not only did she manage a daring escape from a brutal environment, she became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS. And in 2006, her reports to the Utah attorney general on church abuses formed a crucial part of the case that led to the arrest of their notorious leader, Warren Jeffs.