Politics War

In this new history of the conflict that defined the postwar era, Sergey Radchenko provides a deep dive into the psychology of the Kremlin's decision-making. He reveals how the Soviet struggle with the United States and China reflected its irreconcilable ambitions as a self-proclaimed superpower and the leader of global revolution. This tension drove Soviet policies from Stalin's postwar scramble for territory to Khrushchev's reckless overseas adventurism and nuclear brinksmanship, Brezhnev's jockeying for influence in the third world, and Gorbachev's failed attempts to reinvent Moscow.

Usama Bin Laden’s greatest fear was not capture or death, but the exposure of al-Qaeda’s secrets. At great risk to themselves and the entire mission, the US Special Operations Forces, who carried out the Abbottabad raid that killed Bin Laden, took an additional eighteen minutes to collect Bin Laden’s hard drives and thereby expose al-Qaeda’s secrets. In this ground-breaking book, Nelly Lahoud dives into Bin Laden’s files and meticulously distills the nearly six thousand pages of Arabic private communications.

Korea was one of the last countries in Asia to be visited by Westerners, and its borders have remained largely unchanged since it was unified in the seventh century. Though it is one of the world's oldest and most ethnically homogeneous states, Korea was not born in a vacuum. Geographically isolated, the country was heavily influenced by powerful China and was often used as a bridge to the mainland by Japan. Calling themselves as "a shrimp among whales", Koreans borrowed elements of government, culture, and religion, all the while fiercely fighting to maintain independence.

Somewhere under the freezing Atlantic, a Soviet sub commander has just made a fateful decision. The Red October is heading west. The Americans want her. The Russians want her back. The chase for the highly advanced nuclear submarine is on - and there’s only one man who can find her... Brilliant CIA analyst Jack Ryan has little interest in fieldwork, but when covert photographs of Red October land on his desk, Ryan soon finds himself in the middle of a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek played by two world powers - a game that could end in all-out war.

This book analyzes the evolution of Russian military thought and how Russia's current thinking about war is reflected in recent crises. What Jonsson reveals is that Russia's conception of the very nature of war is now changing, as Russian elites see information warfare and political subversion as the most important ways to conduct contemporary war. Since information warfare and political subversion are below the traditional threshold of armed violence, this has blurred the boundaries between war and peace.

In this Pulitzer Prize - winning biography, Barbara Tuchman explores American relations with China through the experiences of one of our men on the ground. In the cantankerous but level-headed "Vinegar Joe", Tuchman found a subject who allowed her to perform, in the words of the National Review, "one of the historian's most envied magic acts: conjoining a fine biography of a man with a fascinating epic story."

In 1960 Argentina, a covert team of Israeli agents hunted down the most elusive war criminal alive: Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust. The young spy who tackled Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street - and fought every compulsion to strangle the Obersturmführer then and there - was Peter Z. Malkin. For decades Malkin's identity as Eichmann's captor was kept secret. Here he reveals the entire breathtaking story - from the genesis of the top-secret surveillance operation to the dramatic public capture and smuggling of Eichmann to Israel to stand trial.

In this revelatory, dynamic biography, Benson Bobrick, profiles George H. Thomas, arguing that he was the greatest and most successful general of the Civil War. Because Thomas didn't live to write his memoirs, his reputation has been largely shaped by others, most notably Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, two generals with whom Thomas served and who diminished his successes in their favor in their own memoirs.

In captivating detail, Stevenson provides a fast-paced, hour-by-hour narration from the hijacking of Air France Flight 139 to the final 90-minute mission. In addition to discussing the incredible rescue itself, Stevenson also covers the political backdrop behind the hijacking, especially Ugandan President Idi Amin's support for the hijackers, which marked one of the first times a leader of a nation had backed terrorist activities.

Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s now famous Aubrey-Maturin novels, regarded by many as the greatest series of historical novels ever written. It establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship’s surgeon and an intelligence agent. It displays the qualities which have put O’Brian far ahead of any of his competitors.

Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.

May 10, 1940. The Netherlands was swarming with Third Reich troops. In seven days it's entirely occupied by Nazi Germany. Joining a small resistance cell in the Dutch city of Haarlem were three teenage girls: Hannie Schaft, and sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, who would soon band together to form a singular female underground squad.

Israel, October 1973. As the Yom Kippur War flares into life, a state-of-the-art Soviet MiG fighter is racing at breakneck speed over the arid scrublands below . . . and promptly disappears. NASA Flight Controller and former top US test pilot Kaz Zemeckis watches the scene from the ground—and is quickly pulled into a dizzying, high-stakes game of spies, lies and a possible high-level defection that plays out across three continents.

The massive armies of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies posed a huge threat to the nations of Western Europe. US military planners decided they needed a plan to slow the juggernaut they expected when and if a war began. The plan was Special Forces Berlin. Their mission, should hostilities commence, was to wreak havoc behind enemy lines and buy time for vastly outnumbered NATO forces to conduct a breakout from the city.

The theories and observations in this abridged version of Prussian soldier Carl von Clausewitz's magnum opus have been heeded by military strategists for nearly 200 years. Most have considered this to be the "Bible" of military strategy and tactics.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has punctured the longest stretch of peace between major powers since WWII, bringing the horrors of warfare—past, present, and future—to the forefront of listeners' minds. In The Shortest History of War, internationally acclaimed historian Gwynne Dyer adds urgently needed context. Dyer ably charts the evolution of violent conflict: tribal aggression, classical combat, limited war, total war, and cold war-followed by present-day terrorism, nuclear threats, and the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS).

This book will explore whether we can successfully align our politics with climate science and the conditions under which it may be possible to act boldly. Canada’s WWII experience, Klein contends, provides a reminder that we have mobilized in common cause and retooled our economy in a few short years.

John Foster Dulles was secretary of state while his brother, Allen Dulles, was director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In this book, Stephen Kinzer places their extraordinary lives against the backdrop ofAmerican culture and history. He uses the framework of biography to ask: Why does the United States behave as it does in the world?

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region's Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924 the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to two percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. This is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia's Christian population.

As England prepares to fight the Nazis, three very different women answer the call to mysterious country estate Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes. Vivacious debutante Osla is the girl who has everything - beauty, wealth, and the dashing Prince Philip of Greece sending her roses - but she burns to prove herself as more than a society girl, and puts her fluent German to use as a translator of decoded enemy secrets.