Showing titles in 21st Century

In my humble opinion, I find it difficult to understand how detractors of the investigation or any fair-minded person for that matter could say this investigation was not warranted, or even that it was a total waste of time. Unfortunately, partisan politics entered the picture. The Obama administration was facing re-election, and the Democratic Party wanted to prevent any bad news from hampering their chances to gain power in the House and Senate.

Simon Kuper has experienced Paris both as a human being and as a journalist. He has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, seen his wife through life-threatening cancer, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on their neighbourhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change.

Blending narrative history, travelogue, and personal reminiscences, Unsung Land, Aspiring Nation is an engaging memoir as well as an insightful meditation on the realities of nation-making and international development.

On the morning of April 15, 2004, the world woke up to the extraordinary news of the kidnap in a little known hamlet of Nigeria of some 276, primarily Christian schoolgirls, by the radical militant Nigerian insurgent group Boko Haram.

Poised to stand among the great war novels, the harrowing chronicle of a sniper during the Chechen War.“The saboteurs? Holy Christ, what happened? What did you do to deserve that?” a fellow soldier responds when he hears that Nicolai Lilin has been assigned to an unconventional, ultra-high-risk paramilitary unit of the Russian army. Also nicknamed the “para-bats” for the black parachutes that dropped them behind enemy lines at night, Lilin and his fellow “saboteurs” soon find themselves fighting Islamic insurgents armed with American weaponry in the breakaway province of Chechnya.

In All Things Must Fight to Live, Bryan Mealer takes listeners on a harrowing 2000 mile journey through Congo, where gun-toting militia still rape and kill with impunity. Amidst burnt-out battlefields where armies still wrestle for control, into the dark corners of the forests, and along the high savanna, where thousands have been slaughtered and quickly forgotten, Mealer searches for signs that Africa's most troubled state will soon rise from ruin.

Geography comes before history. Islands cannot have the same history as continental plains. The United Kingdom is a European country, but not the same kind of European country as Germany, Poland or Hungary. For most of the 150 centuries during which Britain has been inhabited it has been on the edge, culturally and literally, of mainland Europe.

The world watched in horror as Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans in August 2005, and the calamity seemed all the worse because many felt that technology had advanced far enough to prevent such tragedies, whether through advanced warning or engineering. Spawning off the Bahamian coast that month, Katrina quickly grew to be one of the deadliest natural disasters in American history, killing more than 1,800 people and flooding a heavy majority of one of America's most famous cities.

With the urgency and passion of Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), the seductive storytelling of JD Vance (Hillbilly Elegy) and the historical rigor of Carol Anderson (White Rage), Kamal Al-Solaylee explores the in-between space that brown people occupy in today's world: on the cusp of whiteness and the edge of blackness.

It was one of the strangest sights the Coast Guard pilots had ever seen: a tall-masted wooden ship, the kind that sailed centuries ago, capsizing in the wind and towering waves of Hurricane Sandy off the coast of North Carolina. It looked like something out of a movie - and, in a way, it was. The ship was the Bounty, a replica of a British merchant vessel of the same name whose crew famously mutinied in 1789. She had been built for a Marlon Brando film in the 1960s - and now she was sinking, her 16-person crew fleeing into the sea amid the splintered wood and torn canvas.

The crash of a U.S. reconnaissance plane into the Colombian jungle on February 13, 2003, set off a series of events that, five years later, would bring three South American countries on a collision course toward war, pit a giant government contractor against its employer - the U.S. government - and catapult a 40-year-old guerrilla army to the international stage as one of the most active and successful terrorist organizations in the world.

In the twenty-first century, a wave of political, cultural and technological change has capsized our old certainties and assumptions, creating both opportunity and danger. As people lose their faith in old institutions and elites, radical voices at the margins and the grassroots are disrupting the status quo. This is the time of the outsider – the protester, the populist, the hacker. Some of these outsiders have sown chaos, like Donald Trump, and others have provided inspirational leadership, like Volodymyr Zelensky. But all have grasped this precarious moment to make something new.

Winner of the 2011 Strega Prize, this blend of essay, social criticism, and memoir is a striking portrait of the effects of globalization on Italy’s declining economy. Starting from his family’s textile factory in Prato, Tuscany, Edoardo Nesi examines the recent shifts in Italy’s manufacturing industry. Only one generation ago, Prato was a thriving industrial center that prided itself on craftsmanship and quality. But during the last decade, cheaply made goods - produced overseas or in Italy by poorly paid immigrants - saturated the market, making it impossible for Italian companies to keep up.

Munoz provides new insight into Benazir Bhutto’s unprecedented rise and an unflinching, minute-by-minute narrative of the assassination itself. With impeccable research, Munoz also situates Bhutto in the decades-long history of U.S.-Pakistan relations and the emergence of global terrorism, pinpointing her death as the moment when those relations changed forever. The result is a gripping narrative of Pakistan’s turbulent political realities and the death of its leading politician.

As seen on TV! Internationally known espionage expert Chris Simmons has appeared on CNN, NBC, CBS, FOX, Univision, Telemundo, France TV, the CW, Lifetime, Discovery, NPR and numerous other outlets. He has also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek, El Pais (#1 paper in Spain), ESPN Magazine and countless other print media. CASTRO’S NEMESIS: True Stories of a Master Spy-Catcher interweaves the amazing tale of the ego-driven Celia, one of Havana’s highest-ranking American agents, and La Red Avispa, the ...

The Lord's Resistance Army appeared on the conflict landscape of Central Africa at the dawn of perhaps one of the bleakest period of post-independence African history: the 1980s and 1990s. This was the era of Afro-pessimism, during which the proliferation of war and crisis in Africa appeared simply overwhelming.

On June 25, 2013, the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidating a key provision of voting rights law. The decision - the culmination of an eight-year battle over the power of Congress to regulate state conduct of elections - marked the closing of a chapter in American politics. That chapter had opened a century earlier in the case of Guinn v. United States, which ushered in national efforts to knock down racial barriers to the ballot.

Journalist Pat Duggins, National Public Radio's resident "space expert", chronicles the planning stages of the Space Shuttle program in the early 1970s, the thrill of the first flight in 1981, construction of the International Space Station in the 1990s, and the decision in the early 2000s to shut the program down.

Just as Britain set the terms of the international system in the 19th century, and America in the 20th century, a new system will be set by today's creditors in China and the Middle East. In the process, rich will be pitted against poor, young against old, public sector workers against taxpayers, and one country against another. In Paper Promises, Economist columnist Philip Coggan helps us to understand the origins of this mess and how it will affect the new global economy.

Since the days of Adam Smith, economists have grappled with a series of familiar problems - but often their ideas are hard to digest, before we even try to apply them to today's issues. Linda Yueh is renowned for her combination of erudition, as an accomplished economist herself, and accessibility, as a leading writer and broadcaster in this field.