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  Dreams and Shadows - The Future...

  Robin Wright

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  Robin Wright first landed in the Middle East on October 6, 1973, the day the fourth Middle East war erupted. She has covered every country and most major crises in the region since then, through to the rise of al Qaeda and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. For all the drama of the past, however, the region's most decisive traumas are unfolding today as the Middle East struggles to deal with trends that have already reshaped the rest of the world. And for all the darkness, there is also hope. Some of the emerging trends give cause for greater optimism about the future of the Middle East than at any time since the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948.Dreams and Shadows is an extraordinary tour de horizon of the new Middle East, with on-the-ground reportage of the ideas and movements driving change across the region-and the obstacles they confront. Through the powerful storytelling for which the author is famous, Dreams and Shadows ties together the players and events in Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey, the Gulf states, and the Palestinian territories into a coherent vision of what lies ahead.A marvelous field report from the center of the storm, the book is animated by the characters whose stories give the region's transformation its human immediacy and urgency. It is also rich with the history that brought us to this point. It is a masterpiece of the reporter's art and a work of profound and enduring insight.At the end, Wright offers perspective on the United States' most ambitious and costly foreign policy initiative since the rebuilding of Europe after World War II. The stakes are far greater than winning the war on terrorism, stabilizing Iraq, or achieving a lasting Arab-Israeli peace. Transforming the greater Middle East is the last great political challenge of the modern era. Yet the early burst of activity in a region long stagnant is already becoming one of the first grand surprises of the twenty-first century.

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  Letter from Birmingham Jail

  Jr. Martin Luther King

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  April 16th. The year is 1963. Birmingham, Alabama has had a spring of non-violent protests known as the Birmingham Campaign, seeking to draw attention to the segregation against blacks by the city government and downtown retailers. The organizers longed to create a non-violent tension so severe that the powers that be would be forced to address the rampant racism head on. Recently arrested was Martin Luther King, Jr.. It is there in that jail cell that he writes this letter; on the margins of a newspaper he pens this defense of non-violence against segregation. His accusers, though many, in this case were not the white racist leaders or retailers he protested against, but 8 black men who saw him as "other" and as too extreme. To them and to the world he defended the notion that "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere".

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  Deep Freeze - The United States...

  Dian Olson Belanger

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  “A comprehensive and lively book about the people and events that transformed Antarctica into an international laboratory for science.”—Raimund E. Goerler, Chief Archivist/Byrd Polar Research Center of The Ohio State University   In Deep Freeze, Dian Olson Belanger tells the story of the pioneers who built viable communities, made vital scientific discoveries, and established Antarctica as a continent dedicated to peace and the pursuit of science, decades after the first explorers planted flags in the ice.   In the tense 1950s, even as the world was locked in the Cold War, U.S. scientists, maintained by the Navy’s Operation Deep Freeze, came together in Antarctica with counterparts from eleven other countries to participate in the International Geophysical Year (IGY). On July 1, 1957, they began systematic, simultaneous scientific observations of the south-polar ice and atmosphere. Their collaborative success over eighteen months inspired the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which formalized their peaceful pursuit of scientific knowledge. Still building on the achievements of the individuals and distrustful nations thrown together by the IGY from mutually wary military, scientific, and political cultures, science prospers today and peace endures.   Belanger draws from interviews, diaries, memoirs, and official records to weave together the first thorough study of the dawn of Antarctica’s scientific age. Deep Freeze offers absorbing reading for those who have ventured onto Antarctic ice and those who dream of it, as well as historians, scientists, and policy makers.  “[A] highly informative and readable narrative account of perhaps the single most striking international scientific endeavor of the twentieth century.” —The Polar Record  “Deep Freeze, based on countless interviews and painstaking research, is a timely and gripping account.” —John C. Behrendt, author of Innocents on the Ice

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  The Spy Net - The Greatest...

  Henry Landau

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  The 'White Lady' spy net stretched across Europe, encompassing more than 1,000 agents and producing 70 per cent of Allied intelligence on the German forces in the First World War. Through sheer ingenuity, it maintained a staggeringly complex network of spies deep behind enemy lines, who provided vital information on troop movements to and from the Western Front. Its success rested on one man: Henry Landau. Talent-spotted while on a dinner date with one of the secret service's secretaries, Landau left with an exclusive invitation to the service headquarters to meet the legendary 'C' (Mansfield Cumming, the 'chief' of what is now MI6). Fully aware that the man on the other side of the door had a reputation for intimidating his young recruits - such as stabbing his leg without letting on that it was wooden - Landau never expected to be given the daunting task of running La Dame Blanche, nor did he realise how instrumental he would be in helping the Allies turn the tide of the war. Vivid, fast-paced and utterly compelling, The Spy Net is the extraordinary story of the war's most successful intelligence operation, as told by the man who pulled the strings.

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  The Secret Genesis of Area 51

  TD Barnes

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  The man “who has done more than anyone to lift the veil of secrecy . . . about what’s unfolded out there in the desert” reveals the origins of Area 51 (KLAS 8 News Now).   In 1955, the Central Intelligence Agency established a clandestine base of operations in the Nevada desert with a mission to protect the United States from a growing communist threat. Special projects at Area 51 were shrouded in mystery, and the first was one of the world’s most famous spy planes, the U-2. It fueled half-truths, rumors and legends for more than half a century. Now with many details of that endeavor declassified, the real story can finally be told. Author and Area 51 veteran TD Barnes sifts fact from fiction in one of America’s most protected origin stories.

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  Moral Politics - How Liberals...

  George Lakoff

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  An updated third edition of the modern classic that applies cognitive science to the world of politics—to explain how our unconscious views shape our votes. 
   
  When Moral Politics was first published, it redefined how Americans think and talk about politics through the lens of cognitive political psychology. Today, George Lakoff’s classic text has become all the more relevant, as liberals and conservatives have come to hold even more vigorously opposed views of the world, with the underlying assumptions of their respective worldviews at the level of basic morality. Even more so than when Lakoff wrote, liberals and conservatives simply have very different, deeply held beliefs about what is right and wrong. 
   
  Lakoff reveals radically different but remarkably consistent conceptions of morality on both the left and right. Moral worldviews, like most deep ways of understanding the world, are unconscious—part of our hard-wired brain circuitry. When confronted with facts that don’t fit our moral worldview, our brains work automatically and unconsciously to ignore or reject these facts, and it takes extraordinary openness and awareness of this phenomenon to pay critical attention to the countless facts we’re presented with each day. For this edition, Lakoff has added a new preface and afterword, extending his observations to various ideological conflicts since the book’s original publication, from the Affordable Care Act to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the 2008 financial crisis, and the effects of global warming. One might have hoped such massive changes and challenges would bring people together, but the reverse has actually happened; the divide between liberals and conservatives has become stronger and more virulent. 
   
  To have any hope of bringing mutual respect to the current social and political divide, we need to clearly understand the problem and make it part of our contemporary public discourse. Moral Politics offers a much-needed wake-up call to both the left and the right. 
   
  “An intelligent take on the way politics is conducted in America.” —Publishers Weekly 
   
  “That conservatives and liberals see the world differently comes as no news to most, but Lakoff’s look into just why that should be so makes for interesting reading.” —Kirkus Reviews

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