Other books that might interest you

• 

  Before the First Shots Are Fired...

  Tony Koltz, Tony Zinni

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  For the better part of the last half century, the United States has been the world's police, claiming to defend ideologies, allies, and our national security through brute force. But is military action always the most appropriate response? Drawing on his vast experience, retired four-star general Tony Zinni argues that we have a lot of work to do to make the process of going to war—or not—more clear-eyed and ultimately successful. He examines the relationship between the executive and the military; the challenges of working with the UN, coalition forces, and NATO; and the difficult choices that need to be made to create tomorrow's military. Among his provocative points: 
  Virtually every recent American military operation follows a disconnected series of actions that lead to outcomes we never foresaw or intended. 
  We need to assign accountability for the political decisions that can make or break a mission. 
  Words and ideas are as important to victory in today's conflicts as bullets. 
  From the Oval Office to the battlefield, Before the First Shots Are Fired is a hard-hitting analysis of the history of America's use of military action and a spirited call for change.

  Show book

• 

  Shot in the Tower - The Stories...

  Leonard Sellers

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The number 1 best book about spies in Britain. As listed by Dame Stelle Rimington Ex-Director-General of M.I.5.The first reaction to Leonard Sellers fascinating account of the spies who were executed in the Tower of London during the First World War is likely to be one of amazement at their ineptitude. Not one of them seems to have had any proper training or any idea of how to set about the job. This, of course raises the intriguing question: how many others were there who did know what they were up to and managed to escape detection? However, thanks to the more liberal attitude now prevalent regarding access to hitherto 'sensitive' material and to years of dogged research by Len Sellers, the remarkable, but somehow pathetic, stories of the eleven foreign agents who were caught and subsequently shot in the Tower for espionage can now be told. In these days when a mind-boggling array of equipment is available for the assimilation and transmission of supposedly secret information their antics strike one as little short of farcical, but for their efforts, inspired, it seems, more often by greed than patriotism, these men paid the ultimate price and paid it in the most historic site in Britain.Whether they deserved their fate, or indeed the niche in history which this book gives them, is for the reader to decide. What cannot be denied is that their collected histories make remarkable reading.

  Show book

• 

  Border and Rule - Global...

  Harsha Walia, Nick Estes, Robin...

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of the conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change that are generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, and racist nationalist rule. 
   
   
   
  Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial ideology. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how racial violence is escalating deadly nationalism in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere.

  Show book

• 

  Terrorism in Europe - In the...

  Patrick Cockburn

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  An award-winning foreign affairs correspondent examines twenty-first century terrorism in Europe and its relationship to terror campaigns of the past. 
   
  As conflicts rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, Europe has faced an unprecedented threat from homegrown extremists. In Terrorism in Europe, veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn examines the new wave of European terrorism, and how it relates to previous eras of terrorist violence in the region. 
   
  Cockburn looks at current attacks inspired by jihadis and ISIS, such as the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris and the 2016 bombings in Brussels. He also looks back at the terror campaigns of nationalist groups like the Irish Republican Army and Spain’s Basque Nationalist Separatist Party. Examining the patterns, motives and responses to terror threats across decades, Cockburn provides insight into what strategies work—and don’t work—in preventing future attacks.

  Show book

• 

  The Gift of Anger - Use Passion...

  Joe Solmonese

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Under Joe Solmonese's leadership, the Human Rights Campaign became the model other organizations look toward to create effective social and political change. Against daunting odds, HRC was instrumental in passing landmark national legislation such as the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act; repealing “Don't Ask, Don't Tell”; and passing marriage equality acts in eight states. How did Solmonese and HRC do it?What Solmonese reveals in this book is that for him, the key to success was learning to harness his anger. Essentially it's just a form of energy. Channeled, it can keep you moving forward on a long journey. But uncontrolled, it can blow everything up.With this as his guiding principle, Solmonese uses stories from his work with HRC and his previous position as CEO of the powerful women's organization EMILY's List to share a series of often-surprising lessons. For example, empathize with your enemies instead of shaming them, find allies wherever you can, and ask for the doable, not the impossible (even when the “impossible” is your ultimate goal). Most striking in this book are the stories of Solmonese's ability to draw some kind of win—however small—from seeming adversaries. But at every step of the way he emphasizes the importance of managing the yin-yang tension of anger. Particularly when one is dealing with irrational and offensive attitudes, the temptation is ever present to give in to righteous indignation. While it's fine to feel it, Solmonese's advice is to always be strategic with your outrage.

  Show book

• 

  Global Discontents -...

  Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  This program is read by the authorsIn a compelling new set of interviews, Noam Chomsky's Global Discontents identifies the “dry kindling” of discontent around the world that could soon catch fire.In wide-ranging interviews with David Barsamian, his longtime interlocutor, Noam Chomsky asks listeners to consider “the world we are leaving to our grandchildren”: one imperiled by the escalation of climate change and the growing potential for nuclear war. If the current system is incapable of dealing with these threats, he argues, it’s up to us to radically change it. These twelve interviews, conducted from 2013 to 2016, examine the latest developments around the globe: the devastation of Syria, the reach of state surveillance, growing anger over economic inequality, the place of religion in American political culture, and the bitterly contested 2016 U.S. presidential election. In accompanying personal reflections on his Philadelphia childhood and his eighty-seventh birthday, Chomsky also describes his own intellectual journey and the development of his uncompromising stance as America’s premier dissident intellectual.

  Show book