World History Political Science

What happens when you take on the establishment? In Adults in the Room, renowned economist and former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis gives the full, blistering account of his momentous clash with the mightiest economic and political forces on earth.

Revolutions come in waves and cycles. We are again riding the crest of a revolutionary epic, much like 1848 or 1917, from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity in Greece to the Occupy movement. In Wages of Rebellion, Chris Hedges - who has chronicled the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline in his books Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class - investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion, and resistance.

The American military is a tightly sealed community, and few outsiders have reason to know that a great many senior officers view the Iraq war with incredulity and dismay. But many officers have shared their anger with renowned military reporter Thomas E. Ricks, and in Fiasco, Ricks combines these astonishing on-the-record military accounts with his own extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to create a spellbinding account of an epic disaster.

On the eve of International Women's Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists, and online warriors prompting an unprecedented awakening among China's educated, urban women.

As North Korea's State Poet Laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food provisions (even as the country suffered through its great famine), a travel pass, access to strictly censored information, and audiences with Kim Jong-il himself, his life in Pyongyang seemed safe and secure. But this privileged existence was about to be shattered. When a strictly forbidden magazine he lent to a friend goes missing, Jang Jin-sung must flee for his life.

Villains of All Nations explores the "Golden Age" of Atlantic piracy (1716-1726) and the infamous generation whose images underlie our modern, romanticized view of pirates.

The Venona Files are several intercepted communiques between the Soviet Union and American Communists following WWII. Some historians and journalists are starting to regard the Cold-War-era American Communist Party as nothing more than a quaint club of polite if misguided ideologues. In The Venona Secrets, Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel intend to create a new impression of treacherous Americans "who willfully gave their primary allegiance to a foreign power, the USSR."

In an extensive examination of this impassioned debate, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman find that the president was neither savior nor bystander. In FDR and the Jews, they draw upon many new primary sources to offer an intriguing portrait of a consummate politician - compassionate but also pragmatic - struggling with opposing priorities under perilous conditions.

Hitler's American Friends, by Bradley W. Hart, is an audiobook examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners, and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less-popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.

The media often suggest that Russia poses the greatest threat to America's national security, but the real danger lies farther east. While those in power have been distracted and disorderly, China has waged a six-front war on America's economy, military, diplomacy, technology, education, and infrastructure - and they're winning. It's almost too late to undo the shocking, though nearly invisible, victories of the Chinese. In Stealth War, retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding reveals China's motives and secret attacks on the West.

History remembers the Soviets and the Nazis as bitter enemies and ideological rivals - the two opposing totalitarian regimes of World War II whose conflict would be the defining and deciding clash of the war. Yet for nearly a third of the conflict's entire timespan, Hitler and Stalin stood side by side as partners.

As history, the uprisings of 1848 have long been overshadowed by the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolutions of the early twentieth century. And yet in 1848 nearly all of Europe was aflame with conflict. Parallel political tumults spread like brush fire across the entire continent, leading to significant changes that continue to shape our world today. These battles for the future were fought with one eye kept squarely on the past. Revolutionary Spring is a new understanding of 1848 that offers chilling parallels to our present moment.

What does it mean to label someone a fascist? Today, it is equated with denouncing him or her as a Nazi. But as intellectual historian Paul E. Gottfried writes in this provocative yet even-handed study, the term's meaning has evolved over the years. Gottfried examines the semantic twists and turns the term has endured since the 1930s and traces the word's polemical function within the context of present ideological struggles.

In the summer of 1941, Hitler ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Britain was struggling to combat his powerful propaganda machine, crowing victory and smearing his enemies as liars and manipulators over his frequent radio speeches, blasted out on loudspeakers and into homes. British claims that Hitler was dangerous had little impact against this wave of disinformation. Except for the broadcasts of someone called Der Chef, a German who questioned Nazi doctrine, and most importantly, a character created by the British propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer, a unique weapon in the war.

The United States was once the hope of the world, a beacon of freedom, and the defender of liberal democracy. Nations and peoples on all continents looked to America to stand up for the values that created the Western world, and to oppose autocracy and repression. But as Bernard-Henri Levy lays bare in this powerful and disturbing analysis of the world today, America is retreating from its traditional leadership role, and in its place have come five ambitious powers, former empires eager to assert their primacy and influence.

For anyone interested in foreign affairs, this book will catalyze debate, and not only for Mr. Huntington's concluding scenario for World War III. He sees how this could happen if the U.S. mishandles an increasingly xenophobic and truculent China. Chinese assertiveness, Huntington argues, rises out of its felt grievances against a relatively weakening West. After China, the gravest challenge to the West is resurgent Islamic identity.

When turmoil strikes world monetary and financial markets, leaders invariably call for "a new Bretton Woods" to prevent catastrophic economic disorder and defuse political conflict. The name of the remote New Hampshire town where representatives of 44 nations gathered in July 1944, in the midst of the century's second great war, has become shorthand for enlightened globalization.

In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis.

Drawing on new archival research, Robert Service's gripping new investigation of the final years of the Cold War - the first to give equal attention to the internal deliberations from both sides of the Iron Curtain - opens a window onto the dramatic years that would irrevocably alter the world's geopolitical landscape and the men at their fore.

This great question of Pearl Harbor - what did we know and when did we know it? - has been argued for years. But no investigator has ever been able to prove that foreknowledge of the attack existed at the highest levels. Until now.

If you like Day of Deceit, try Trapped at Pearl Harbor and vintage audio of FDR's Day of Infamy Speech.