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  The Great Society - 50 Years Later

  Post The Washington

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  A stirring profile of our 36th president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who presided over one of the most tumultuous eras in our country’s history.   Lyndon B. Johnson’s unprecedented and ambitious domestic vision in the 1960s changed the nation. It unraveled and restitched the very fabric of the American life. It knocked down racial barriers, provided health care for the elderly and food for the poor, sustained orchestras and museums in cities across the country, and put seat belts and padded dashboards in every automobile. But it also carved the deep philosophical divide that has come to define the nation’s harsh politics.   Half a century later, the policies of Lyndon B. Johnson continue to define politics and power in America. The Great Society: 50 Years Later is a series from the Washington Post that examines the legacy—and limits—of Johnson’s deeply humanistic, and profoundly revolutionary social agenda.  

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  Stepan Bandera: The Life and...

  Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe

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  "The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist" is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
  
  Elucidating the circumstances in which Bandera and his movement emerged and functioned, Rossolinski-Liebe explains how fascism and racism impacted on Ukrainian revolutionary and genocidal nationalism. The book shows why Bandera and his followers failed—despite their ideological similarity to the Croatian Ustaša and the Slovak Hlinka Party—to establish a collaborationist state under the auspices of Nazi Germany and examines the involvement of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and other atrocities during and after the Second World War. The author brings to light some of the darkest elements of modern Ukrainian history and demonstrates its complexity, paying special attention to the Soviet terror in Ukraine and the entanglement between Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, Russian, German, and Soviet history. The monograph also charts the creation and growth of the Bandera cult before the Second World War, its vivid revivals during the Cold War among the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Bandera's native eastern Galicia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

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  The Cloak and Dagger Cook - A...

  Kay Shaw Nelson

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  “Delightful . . . Kay Nelson’s memoir teaches us that food is a key to unlocking and understanding cultures other than our own.” —Charles Pinck, president, Office of Strategic Services Society   Upon graduating from college in 1948, Kay Shaw Nelson, a bright young woman with a yen for international travel, joined the newly founded Central Intelligence Agency. Within months, she received her security clearance, learned the difficulties associated with the life of a spy, fell in love, and set about traveling the world on assignment with her husband. At times under the cover of a cookbook writer, Nelson sailed from one exotic locale to another, each more incredible than the last. From Washington to Turkey and Cyprus, to Syria, Libya, France, Greece, and the Netherlands, among many other ports, the Nelsons traversed the globe as Kay discovered her passion for food, developed her journalistic abilities, and honed her exceptional palate.   With humor and panache, Nelson tells of her exploits gleaning intelligence while gathering recipes and sampling the local cuisine. Kebabs in Turkey, kimchi in Korea, spargel in Germany, eels in Spain, and Rumbledethumps in Scotland were among the delightful gastronomic surprises she encountered. Dozens of unusual recipes with memorable histories pepper this irresistible memoir of fascinating events, extraordinary corners of the globe, and clandestine culinary pursuits.  “This delightful gastro-biographic guidebook starts off by sending abroad a wide-eyed CIA novice who returns an epicurean globe-trotting and seasoned intelligence officer, author, and down-to-earth sophisticate. Like a complex, silky-smooth digestif, it finishes so quickly with such a pleasant buzz, you’ll want to signal the waiter for a second round.” —Elizabeth Bancroft, executive director, Association of Former Intelligence Officers

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  The Watchers - The Rise of...

  Shane Harris

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  Our surveillance state was born in the brain of Admiral John Poindexter in 1983. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, realized that the United States might have prevented the terrorist massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut if only intelligence agencies had been able to analyze in real time data they had on the attackers. Poindexter poured government know-how and funds into his dream-a system that would sift reams of data for signs of terrorist activity. Decades later, that elusive dream still captivates Washington. After the 2001 attacks, Poindexter returned to government with a controversial program, called Total Information Awareness, to detect the next attack. Today it is a secretly funded operation that can gather personal information on every American and millions of others worldwide. But Poindexter's dream has also become America's nightmare. Despite billions of dollars spent on this digital quest since the Reagan era, we still can't discern future threats in the vast data cloud that surrounds us all. But the government can now spy on its citizens with an ease that was impossible-and illegal-just a few years ago. Drawing on unprecedented access to the people who pioneered this high-tech spycraft, Shane Harris shows how it has shifted from the province of right-wing technocrats to a cornerstone of the Obama administration's war on terror. Harris puts us behind the scenes and in front of the screens where twenty-first-century spycraft was born. We witness Poindexter quietly working from the private sector to get government to buy in to his programs in the early nineties. We see an army major agonize as he carries out an order to delete the vast database he's gathered on possible terror cells-and on thousands of innocent Americans-months before 9/11. We follow General Mike Hayden as he persuades the Bush administration to secretly monitor Americans based on a flawed interpretation of the law. After Congress publicly bans the Total Information Awareness program in 2003, we watch as it is covertly shifted to a "black op," which protects it from public scrutiny. When the next crisis comes, our government will inevitably crack down on civil liberties, but it will be no better able to identify new dangers. This is the outcome of a dream first hatched almost three decades ago, and The Watchers is an engrossing, unnerving wake-up call.

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  Warnings - Finding Cassandras to...

  Richard A. Clarke, R.P. Eddy

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  Warnings is the story of the future of national security, threatening technologies, the U.S. economy, and possibly the fate of civilization. 
  In Greek mythology Cassandra foresaw calamities, but was cursed by the gods to be ignored. Modern-day Cassandras clearly predicted the disasters of Katrina, Fukushima, the Great Recession, the rise of ISIS, and many more. Like the mythological Cassandra, they were ignored. There are others right now warning of impending disasters, but how do we know which warnings are likely to be right? 
  Through riveting explorations in a variety of fields, the authors—both accomplished CEOs and White House National Security Council veterans—discover a method to separate the accurate Cassandras from the crazy doomsayers. They then investigate the experts who today are warning of future disasters: the threats from artificial intelligence, bio-hacking, mutating viruses, and more, and whose calls are not being heeded. Clarke's and Eddy's penetrating insights are essential for any person, any business, or any government that doesn't want to be a blind victim of tomorrow's catastrophe.

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  Agenda Setting Policies and...

  Peter John, Shaun Bevan, Will...

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  What will gain the system’s attention? “Explores the dynamics of a broad range of policy issues in different countries . . . an important scholarly contribution.” —Political Studies Review   Before making significant policy decisions, political actors and parties must first craft an agenda designed to place certain issues at the center of political attention. The agenda-setting approach in political science holds that the amount of attention devoted by the various actors within a political system to issues like immigration, health care, and the economy can inform our understanding of its basic patterns and processes. While there has been considerable attention to how political systems process issues in the United States, Christoffer Green-Pedersen and Stefaan Walgrave demonstrate the broader applicability of this approach by extending it to other countries and their political systems. This book brings together essays on eleven countries and two broad themes. Contributors to the first section analyze the extent to which party and electoral changes and shifts in the partisan composition of government have led—or not led—to policy changes in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, and France. The second section turns the focus on changing institutional structures in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and Canada, including the German reunification and the collapse of the Italian party system. Together, the essays make clear the efficacy of the agenda-setting approach for understanding not only how policies evolve, but also how political systems function.

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