Showing titles in 21st Century

In a narrative that moves like a thriller, Rhodes sheds light on the Reagan administration's unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s, as well as the arms-reduction campaign that followed, and Reagan's famous 1986 summit meeting with Gorbachev. Rhodes' detailed exploration of events of this time constitutes a prehistory of the neoconservatives. The story is new, compelling, and continually surprising - a revelatory re-creation of a hugely important era of our recent history.

On March 22, 2023, the Swedish Academy organized a conference on threats to democracy and freedom of expression featuring a slate of distinguished speakers including Arundhati Roy, Timothy Snyder, and Sofi Oksanen. Oksanen’s address—entitled “Putin's War on Women”—would go on to spark such interest that the acclaimed Finnish writer felt compelled to return to it as the basis for a larger, more in-depth look at Putin’s threat to women. The result is Same River, Twice, a devastating book-length essay that incisively builds on the themes and arguments first presented in her powerful speech.

From trade to technology to military might, competition between the United States and China dominates the foreign policy landscape. But this battle for global influence is also playing out in a strange and unexpected arena: the movies. The film industry, Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel explains, is the latest battleground in the tense and complex rivalry between these two world powers. In recent decades, as China has grown into a giant of the international economy, it has become a crucial source of revenue for the American film industry.

Growing up on the Falls Road in 1990s Belfast, Alix O'Neill has seen it all—burnt-out buses blocking the route to school, the police mistaking her father for a leading terrorist and a classmate playing hide-and-seek with her dad's prosthetic hand (blown off making a device for the IRA). Not that she or her friends are up to speed with the goings-on of the resistance. They’re too preoccupied with the obsessions of every teenage girl—booze, boys and Boyzone—to worry about the violence on their doorstep.

Based on unrivalled access to all the key politicians and their advisors - including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, George Osborne, Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of Vote Leave - Shipman has written a political history that reads like a thriller and offers a gripping day-by-day account of what really happened behind the scenes in Downing Street, both Leave campaigns, the Labour Party, Ukip and Britain Stronger in Europe.

Our insatiable demand for animals - for jewelry, pets, medicine, meat, trophies, and fur - is driving a worldwide poaching epidemic, threatening the continued existence of countless species. Rachel Nuwer, an award-winning science journalist with a background in ecology, takes listeners on a narrative journey to the front lines of the trade: to killing fields in Africa, traditional medicine black markets in China, and wild meat restaurants in Vietnam. Through exhaustive first-hand reporting that took her to 10 countries, Nuwer explores the forces currently driving the demand.

By the best-selling author of All Out War, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2017. The unmissable account of politics covering Theresa May's time as PM through to the end of the election campaign. Stuffed to the brim with revelation and explanation of political debates and arguments and a superb follow-up to All Out War.

In a refugee camp in southern Turkey, Elliot Ackerman sits across the table from Abu Hassar, who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq and has murky connections to the Islamic State. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after he establishes a rapport with Abu Hassar, he reveals that in fact he was a marine.

One of the least understood countries in the world, North Korea has long been known for its repressive regime. Yet it is far from being an impenetrable black box. Media flows covertly into the country, and fault lines are appearing in the government's sealed informational borders. Drawing on deeply personal interviews with North Korean defectors from all walks of life, ranging from propaganda artists to diplomats, Jieun Baek tells the story of North Korea's information underground.

You shouldn't have to be a privacy expert to understand what happens to your data. April Falcon Doss, a privacy expert and former NSA and Senate lawyer, has seen this imbalance in action. In Cyber Privacy, Doss demystifies the digital footprints we leave in our daily lives and reveals how our data is being used - sometimes against us - by the private sector, the government, and even our employers and schools.

Gripping and unforgettable, Chernobyl Roulette sounds the alarm about the dangers of nuclear sites in an unprecedented time, when plant workers are left to fight on their own while the world holds its breath. In a book that feels like a thriller, Serhii Plokhy tells a remarkable story about human nature, uncertainty and courage.

At 11.30 a.m. on Saturday 12 August 2000, two massive explosions roared through the shallow Arctic waters of the Barents Sea. The Kursk, pride of the Northern Fleet and the largest attack submarine in the world, was hurtling towards the ocean floor. In Kursk (originally published as A Time to Die), award-winning journalist Robert Moore vividly re-creates this disaster minute by minute.

A landmark book that completely transforms our understanding of the crisis of liberalism, from two preeminent intellectuals. Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only there but also back in the heartland of the West.

In this gripping investigation of the events that led to the plane's disappearance and why they could happen again, CNN aviation analyst David Soucie exposes the flaws in the aviation industry, shares what needs to be done so a plane doesn't go missing again, and uses a Bayesian analysis model to reveal what most likely happened onboard the plane that led to its downfall.

The massacre of the Yazidi people by ISIS was nothing less than genocide. In refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, the authors brought a skilled team to interview more than a hundred ISIS survivors and document what they experienced and saw. These former slaves observed their torturers and knew from the inside the secret facilities that ISIS has kept hidden from the world. What their testimony reveals is an organization whose ambition is power, regardless of their claim to be "soldiers of God."

In Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny, Con Coughlin, veteran commentator on war in the Middle East and author of Saddam: The Secret Life, examines how a mild-mannered ophthalmic surgeon has transformed himself into the tyrannical ruler of a once flourishing country.

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.

One by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil's friends disappeared. The Chinese government's brutal persecution of the Uyghur people had continued for years, but in 2017 it assumed a terrifying new scale. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century. Over a million people have vanished into China's internment camps for Muslim minorities. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is the story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil's homeland.

The Iran Wars is an absorbing account of a battle waged on many levels - military, financial, and covert. Jay Solomon’s book is the product of extensive in-depth reporting and interviews with all the key players in the conflict - from high-ranking Iranian officials to Secretary of State John Kerry and his negotiating team. With a reporter’s masterly investigative eye and the narrative dexterity of a great historian, Solomon shows how Iran’s nuclear development went unnoticed for years by the international community only to become its top security concern.

The financial crisis was no doubt a recession, and some would say a depression; everyone wants to sugarcoat it. Academics want to nitpick and perform magic tricks with the numbers and say it was only a recession. The reality is, no one has seen this before. It was clear, the game had changed. The old definition of what a recession was is no longer sufficient to express what happened. But yet, nothing has really changed. Proof of this can be seen in how the financial world has handled the crisis.