David Hebditch and Ken Connor examine, with a critical eye, successful as well as failed coup attempts throughout the twentieth century with the aim of showing their readers just what it takes to swiftly and soundly overthrow a government. Exploring coups from Nigeria, to Cuba, to Iraq, and with true stories of SAS combat written by Ken Connor, the book gives an insightful glimpse into this violent and rarely-seen world of shifting power.How to Stage a Military Coup is a unique textbook for the armchair revolutionary, as well as a practical guide for the idealist with a soft spot for the sound of artillery fire. From evaluation of the political climate and investigation of potential allies, to recruiting and training personnel, to strategies for ensuring timely transfer of power, the book leaves no aspect of the coup d'etat unexamined. The book also includes appendixes, notes, and a world map of coups d'etat.

    The perpetrators are not a handful of rogue companies, but many members of the Fortune 500. Kickback is a sweeping, global investigation into corporate bribery around the world and how backdoor financial transactions undermine democracy and the free market system by lining the pockets of some of the world's worst dictators and criminals. Ultimately, this system affects billions of people by creating conditions that lead to poverty, violence, environmental disaster, and political instability in countries like Nigeria, Bahrain, Costa Rica, and Iraq.Kickback traces the origins of corporate bribery from the reign of the British East India Company to the methods by which it is carried out today. Traveling across four continents and interviewing police and intelligence officials, convicted criminals, business executives, and corruption experts, David Montero takes an inside look at bribery's pernicious effects. He examines its ramifications at both the individual and national levels--from the murder of a young activist in Bangladesh to a Texas billionaire's dealings with Saddam Hussein, from pharmaceutical firms' payoffs in China to how the entrenched culture of bribery helped destroy the Greek economy. Montero also examines the countermeasures that have been introduced to combat these practices, such as the Justice Department's efforts to halt them and attempts to identify and provide restitution to victims.Given the new era of profound uncertainty we are entering--the strength of the European Union founders, the power of China rises, the global economy continues on a path of perilous flux, and allegations mount that President Donald Trump and his associates are possibly tainted by bribery themselves--the stakes for eradicating corporate bribery have never been higher.

    Suddenly, every aspiring PM wanted a fast-talking, sharp-thinking ad man on their team to help dazzle voters. But what were the consequences of their fixation with the snappy and simplistic? Sam Delaney embarks on a journey to expose the shocking truth behind the general election campaigns of the last four decades. Everything is here - from the man who snorted coke in Number 10 to the politician who fell in love with her own ad exec, from the fist-fights in Downing Street to the all-day champagne binges in Whitehall offices. Sam Delaney talks to the men at the heart of the battles - Alistair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, Tim Bell, Maurice Saatchi, Norman Tebbit, Neil Kinnock - and many more. Dark, revealing and frequently hilarious, Mad Men and Bad Men tells the story of how unelected, unaccountable men ended up informing policy - and how the British public paid the price.

    History is brimming with seismic global events—pandemics and plagues, wars and genocides. Each time, after a great catastrophe, our instincts to seek physical security compel us to move. The map of humanity isn’t settled—not now, not ever. The last century provides continuing evidence that we are in the most dangerous experiment humanity has ever experienced. As climates change, pandemics arrive, and economies rise and fall, which areas will people flee from and where will they resettle? Which countries will accept or reject them? How will the billions alive today, and the billions coming, create the next map of human geography? Now, global strategy advisor Parag Khanna expands on his TED Talks about mapping the future with this illuminating and authoritative vision of the next civilization. He explains how the past two major shifts—one agricultural and the other industrial—have led us to the cusp of the next one, which must be mobile and sustainable. Across the world, we must move people to where the resources are, and technologies to the people who need them. Igniting this accelerating mobility are five primary forces: demographic imbalances (young people flocking to new regions); economic dislocation (flight to where the jobs are); technological disruption; political upheaval; and climate change. Move is a fascinating and enlightening look at the “climate” of migration, revealing the deep trends that will shape the grand economic and security scenarios of the future. Most importantly, it offers us a chance to identify our location on humanity’s ever-changing map.

    ed.: Pirates of Somalia. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.

    A decade after 9/11, the war on terror has entered a new phase and, it would seem, a new territory. In early 2010, Al Qaeda operatives were reportedly "streaming" out of central Asia toward Somalia and the surrounding region. Somalia, now home to some of the world's most dangerous terrorists, was already the world's most failed state. Two decades of anarchy have spawned not just Islamic extremism but piracy, famine, and a seemingly endless clan-based civil war that has killed an estimated 500,000, turned millions into refugees, and caused hundreds of thousands more to flee and settle in Europe and North America. What is now happening in Somalia directly threatens the security of the world, possibly more than any other region on earth. James Fergusson's book is the first accessible account of how Somalia became the world's most dangerous place and what we can--and should--do about it.

    The economic narratives that underpinned these eras—the gold standard, the Bretton Woods regime, the "Washington Consensus"—brought great success and great failure. In this eloquent challenge to the reigning wisdom on globalization, Dani Rodrik offers a new narrative, one that embraces an ineluctable tension: we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national self-determination, and economic globalization. When the social arrangements of democracies inevitably clash with the international demands of globalization, national priorities should take precedence. Combining history with insight, humor with good-natured critique, Rodrik's case for a customizable globalization supported by a light frame of international rules shows the way to a balanced prosperity as we confront today's global challenges in trade, finance, and labor markets.

    Insurgents and warring governments, meanwhile, have made aid a permanent feature of military strategy: refugee camps serve as base camps for genocidaires, and aid supplies are diverted to feed the troops. Even as humanitarian groups continue to assert the holy principle of impartiality, they have increasingly become participants in aid's abuses.In a narrative that is impassioned, gripping, and even darkly absurd, journalist Linda Polman takes us to war zones around the globe--from the NGO-dense operations in "Afghaniscam" to the floating clinics of Texas Mercy Ships proselytizing off the shores of West Africa--to show the often compromised results of aid workers' best intentions. It is time, Polman argues, to impose ethical boundaries, to question whether doing something is always better than doing nothing, and to hold humanitarians responsible for the consequences of their deeds.

    But much of their work is based on assumptions that are untested generalizations at best, harmful misperceptions at worst.Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work defies certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning, that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low.This important book illuminates how the poor live, and offers all of us an opportunity to think of a world beyond poverty.Learn more at www.pooreconomics.com

    Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity?In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history.While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day.“Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.

    Through these we examine humanity's will to power in forms both infamous and poorly understood, and trace the evolution of the imperial impulse as it moves from the blunt military aggression of the ancient empires to the subtle but far-reaching cultural influence of today's superpowers.We encounter empires in all their contradictions - like the Mongol Empire, the largest land empire the world has ever seen, and yet also the most short-lived. Rise and Fall also reveals striking, often completely unrelated historical parallels: pyramids found not just in Egypt but also in Babylon, Mexico and China; unmistakable echoes of the infant discovered in a basket myth which occur in the Old Testament, the Akkadian origin myth, as well in Hinduism. Above all, we see how the ambition of imperial greatness everywhere - from the Roman emperors to Hitler - is rooted in dreams of utopia and immortality.Every empire contains the seeds of its own destruction: so what precisely is social progress? Who benefits from it, and who suffers? Rise and Fall reminds us that the progress of humankind takes many forms, and that - perhaps - the systems we take for granted today are far from being the only or inevitable course of future civilisation.

    It is the 1980s and they are fleeing the civil war in Sudan. This remarkable account tracks Bol’s boyhood through one camp after another, through good times and bad, until he begins a vast journey through Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe which finally ends in South Africa some ten years later. By the time Bol reaches Pretoria, he is in his early twenties, and for the first time finds himself without a purpose. Hoping to lift his spirits, he starts studying English at a school for refugees. He recounts his life experiences to a teacher, who suggests he writes it all down. The result is this book.

    Venturing alone into the dark heart of war, armed with just a video camera, a digital camera, a laptop, and a satellite modem, the award-winning journalist covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Sites talks with rebels and government troops, child soldiers and child brides, and features the people on every side, including those caught in the cross fire. His honest reporting helps destroy the myths of war by putting a human face on war's inhumanity. Personally, Sites will come to discover that the greatest danger he faces may not be from bombs and bullets, but from the unsettling power of the truth.

    City is the ultimate guidebook to our urban centers-the signature unit of human civilization. With erudite prose and carefully chosen illustrations, this unique work of metatourism explores what cities are and how they work. It covers history, customs and language, districts, transport, money, work, shops and markets, and tourist sites, creating a fantastically detailed portrait of the city through history and into the future.The urban explorer will revel in essays on downtowns, suburbs, shantytowns and favelas, graffiti, skylines, crime, the theater, street food, sport, eco-cities, and sacred sites, as well as mini essays on the Tower of Babel, flash mobs, ghettos, skateboarding, and SimCity, among many others. Drawing on a vast range of examples from across the world and throughout history, City is extensively illustrated with full-color photographs, maps, and other images. Acclaimed author and independent scholar P. D. Smith explores what it was like to live in the first cities, how they have evolved, and why in the future, cities will play an even greater role in human life.