Politics Nation

Although it has been over five years since the 9/11 attacks, Americans still do not have a clear sense of how our government is waging the war on terror. In The Terrorist Watch, best-selling author Ronald Kessler takes listeners behind the scenes to reveal exactly how our leaders, charged with protecting the American people, are stopping terrorists.

Before World War II, transparent government was a proud tradition in the United States. In all but the most serious of circumstances, classification, covert operations, and spying were considered deeply un-American. But after the war, the power to decide what could be kept secret proved too tempting to give up. Since then, we have radically departed from that open tradition, allowing intelligence agencies, black sites, and classified laboratories to grow unchecked. Officials insist that only secrecy can keep us safe, but its true costs have gone unacknowledged for too long.

Supplemented with referential information and culled from more than a dozen interviews with Putin over a two-year period - spanning Stone's first trip to Moscow to meet with NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden to his most recent visit after the election of President Donald Trump - The Putin Interviews is based on what journalists, news organizations, and other world leaders have long coveted: extended, unprecedented access to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This historic mission of this remarkable but little-known organization, the US National Intelligence Council (NIC), now 40 years old, is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. Its signature inside products, National Intelligence Estimates, are now accompanied by the NIC's every-four-years Global Trends. Unclassified, Global Trends has become a noted NIC brand, its release awaited by officials, academics, and private sector managers around the world.

In four decades, bookended by the Pope’s visits to Ireland in September 1979 and August 2018, Ireland has become one of the wealthiest and most progressive nations in the world. Characteristically brilliant and timely, Renaissance Nation is a thrilling account of Ireland’s vertiginous rise and a timely exploration of its conflicted present, where stark decisions await the next generation of would-be revolutionaries.

On Parrish Island, a restricted island off the coast of Virginia, is a little-known and never-visited psychiatric facility. There, the government stores former intelligence employees whose psychiatric states make them a danger to their own government, people whose ramblings might endanger ongoing operations or prove dangerously inconvenient. One of these employees, agent Hal Ambler, is kept heavily medicated and closely watched. But there's one difference between Hal and the other patients, Hal isn't crazy.

Gloriana XII--The Original Wolf of Wall Street. In this hilarious sequel to The Mouse That Roared, Grand Fenwick is at it again, this time upsetting the world's economy. The tiny country's secret weapon this time is its Grand Pinot chewing gum. When sales boom during an anti-smoking campaign, Grand Fenwick's investment is suddenly worth millions. In an attempt to rid Grand Fenwick of its crippling budget surplus, Duchess Gloriana XII decides the stock market is the perfect place to lose it all. Instead, she makes millions more and ends up wreaking havoc on the world economy. Never has "the ...

In The Nation City, Rahm Emanuel, former two-term mayor of Chicago and White House Chief of Staff for President Barack Obama, offers a firsthand account of how cities, rather than the federal government, stand at the center of innovation and effective governance. Drawing on his own experiences in Chicago, and on his relationships with other mayors around America, Emanuel provides dozens of examples to show how cities are improving education, infrastructure, job conditions, and environmental policy at a local level.

Ascending to the leadership role of US Attorney for the Southern District, which includes Manhattan and several counties to the north, is a capstone to any legal career: it entails guiding a team of the best lawyers in America in selecting and winning cases that often have global import. Geoffrey Berman was honored to be tapped for the job by Donald Trump in 2018. The manner in which Trump had dispatched his predecessor Preet Bharara was troubling, but the institution was fabled for its independence. Surely he could manage.

The author of the "dazzling epic" (Lev Grossman, Time) Brilliant delivers an indelible view of the ways silence affects those who seek it and those who have it imposed upon them. Through her original, intertwined histories of the penitentiary and the monastery, Jane Brox illuminates the many ways silence is far more complex than any absolute; how it has influenced ideas of the self, soul, and society.

Ever since 9/11 America has fought an endless war on terror, seeking enemies everywhere and never promising peace. In Pay Any Price, James Risen reveals an extraordinary litany of the hidden costs of that war: from squandered and stolen dollars, to outrageous abuses of power, to wars on normalcy, decency, and truth. In the name of fighting terrorism, our government has done things every bit as shameful as its historic wartime abuses - and until this audiobook, it has worked very hard to cover them up.

The U.S. government spends enormous resources each year on the gathering and analysis of intelligence, yet the history of American foreign policy is littered with missteps and misunderstandings that have resulted from intelligence failures. In Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis examines the politics and psychology of two of the more spectacular intelligence failures in recent memory: the belief that the Shah in Iran was secure and stable in 1978, and the claim that Iraq had active WMD programs in 2002.

The Pentagon, unsentimental and politically conservative, might not seem likely to be worried about climate change - still linked, for many people, with polar bears and coral reefs. Yet, of all the major institutions in American society, none take climate change as seriously as the US military. Drawing on previously obscure reports and government documents, renowned security expert Michael Klare shows that the US military sees the climate threat as imperiling the country on several fronts at once.

An extraordinary American comes to life in this vivid, incisive portrait of the early days of the republic—and the birth of modern politics hen the roar of the Revolution had finally died down, a new generation of American politicians was summoned to the Potomac to assemble the nation's newly minted capital. Into that unsteady atmosphere which would soon enough erupt into another conflict with Britain in 1812, Dolley Madison arrived, alongside her husband James.

At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Harvard historian Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America. Since the end of the Cold War, Lepore writes, American historians have largely retreated from the idea of "the nation", in part because the rise of political nationalism has rendered it suspect and unpalatable. Bucking this trend, however, Lepore argues forcefully that the nation demands scrutiny. Without an honest reckoning with America's collective past, we will be at the mercy of unscrupulous demagogues....

In December 2003, after one of the largest, most aggressive manhunts in history, US military forces captured Iraqi president Saddam Hussein near his hometown of Tikrit. Beset by body-double rumors and false alarms during a nine-month search, the Bush administration needed positive identification of the prisoner before it could make the announcement that would rocket around the world. At the time John Nixon was a senior CIA leadership analyst who had spent years studying the Iraqi dictator.

In this inspiring manifesto, an internationally renowned ecologist makes a clear case for why protecting nature is our best health insurance, and why it makes economic sense.

The 25th Secretary of Defense takes listeners behind the scenes to reveal the inner workings of the Pentagon, its vital mission, and what it takes to lead it. The Pentagon is the headquarters of the single largest institution in America: the Department of Defense. The DOD employs millions of Americans. It owns and operates more real estate and spends more money than any other entity. It manages the world’s largest and most complex information network and performs more R&D than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined.

A comprehensive study of the missile system that formed a critical component of the United States' nuclear arsenal. The Titan II ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) program was developed by the United States military to bolster the size, strength, and speed of the nation's strategic weapons arsenal in the 1950s and 1960s.

Three New York Times reporters uncover the truth about biological weapons. In a frightening and unforgettable narrative of cutting-edge science and spycraft, Germs reconstructs the former Soviet and Iraqi germ warfare programs, and how they affected U.S. policy. "Chilling," says Booklist.