Showing titles in 21st Century

With an introduction by four-time Oscar nominated filmmaker Michael Mann. The story of Paul LeRoux, the twisted genius entrepreneur and cold-blooded killer who brought revolutionary innovation to international crime, and the exclusive inside story of how the DEA’s elite, secretive 960 Group...

This audiobook offers the first systematic analysis of Putin's two wars, placing the Second Chechen War and the War with Georgia of 2008 in their broader historical contexts. Drawing on extensive original Russian sources, Marcel H. Van Herpen analyzes in detail how Putin's wars were prepared and conducted and why they led to allegations of war crimes and genocide.

"This is a fascinating book. It will educate you. Schwartzel has done some extraordinary reporting." — The New York Times Book Review “In this highly entertaining but deeply disturbing book, Erich Schwartzel demonstrates the extent of our cultural thrall to China. His depiction of the craven...

At some point in the 1980s we gave up on the future. Before then, we imagined wonderful days to come, free from disease, work and want, in television series like Star Trek or events such as the 1939 Futurama World Fair. When we look ahead now, we tell dystopian stories of environmental collapse, zombie plagues and the end of civilisation. If it is true that we have to imagine the future before we build it, then this is deeply worrying.

Protests continue in Belarus in the aftermath of 2020's fraught presidential election. In this updated edition of his exploration of Belarus's complicated road to nationhood since it gained independence in 1991, Andrew Wilson has added two new chapters that reveal the extent of Aliaksandr Lukashenka's grip on power, the growth of the opposition movement and the violent crackdown that followed the vote. Wilson also examines the prospects for Europe as a whole of either Lukashenka's downfall or his survival with Russian support.

Reminiscent of the work of Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, an astonishing collection of intimate wartime testimonies and poetic fragments from a cross-section of Syrians whose lives have been transformed by revolution, war, and flight. Against the backdrop of the wave of demonstrations...

When John Bercow retired as Speaker of the House of Commons on 31 October 2019, he had become one of the most recognisable and iconoclastic figures in British politics, occupying a ringside seat during one of the most febrile periods in modern British history. In his no-holds-barred memoir, he...

The summer of 2018: England sweltered in the most sustained heatwave for 42 years, the government tore itself apart over deals and no deals, and hundreds of miles away, in a taciturn and strange state, the national football team did the unthinkable in the World Cup: they didn’t screw it up...

We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century. For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clear: democratic values had prevailed over dictatorship. But if the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism, as many intellectuals proclaimed, why have the era's darker impulses—ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism—revived?

On 1 September 2004, Chechen and Ingush militants took more than a thousand people captive at a school in the Caucasus region of southern Russia. Working as a correspondent, Tom Parfitt witnessed the bloody climax in which 314 hostages died, more than half of them children. The experience left Tom emotionally shredded, struggling to find a way to return to his life in Moscow and put to rest the ghosts of the Beslan siege. Having long been fascinated by the mountainous North Caucasus, Tom turned to his love of walking as a source of both recuperation and discovery.

The enormous sense of optimism unleashed by the Arab Spring in 2011 soon gave way to widespread suffering and despair. Of the many popular uprisings against autocratic regimes, Tunisia's now stands alone as a beacon of hope for sustainable human rights progress. Challenging the widely shared pessimism among regional experts, Micheline Ishay charts bold and realistic pathways for human rights in a region beset by political repression, economic distress, sectarian conflict, a refugee crisis, and violence against women.

Given how quickly its operations have achieved global impact, it may seem that the Islamic State materialized suddenly. In fact, al-Qaeda's operations chief, Sayf al-Adl, devised a seven-stage plan for jihadis to conquer the world by 2020 that included reestablishing the Caliphate in Syria between 2013 and 2016. Despite a massive schism between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, al-Adl's plan has proved remarkably prescient. In summer 2014, ISIS declared itself the Caliphate after capturing Mosul, Iraq - part of stage five in al-Adl's plan.

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."

“A crucial study in the political manipulation of intelligence, understanding how Curveball got us into Iraq will arm us for the next round of lies coming out of Washington.”—Robert Baer, author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism...

With exclusive reporting, eyewitness accounts and analysis from the Pulitzer Prize-winning staff of The New York Times, this edition of The January 6 Report offers the definitive record of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. This edition from The New York Times and Twelve Books contains: The January...

Conventional wisdom in the West blames the Ukraine crisis on Russian aggression. But this account is wrong: Washington and its European allies actually share most of the responsibility, having spent decades pushing east into Russia’s natural sphere of interest.

Age of Discovery explores a world on the brink of a new Renaissance and asks: how do we share more widely the benefits of unprecedented progress? How do we endure the inevitable tumult generated by accelerating change? How do we each thrive through this tangled, uncertain time? From gains in health, education, wealth and technology to crises of conflict, disease and mass migration, the similarities between today's world and that of the 15th century are both striking and prophetic: we have been here before.

Intelligence and Surprise Attack examines why surprise attacks often succeed even though, in most cases, warnings are available beforehand. Erik J. Dahl challenges the conventional wisdom about intelligence failure, which holds that attacks succeed because important warnings get lost amid noise or because intelligence officials lack the imagination and collaboration to connect the dots of available information.

Today's world is in flux. Competition between the great powers is back on the agenda and governments around the world are turning to secret statecraft and the hidden hand to navigate these uncertain waters. From poisonings to electoral interference, subversion to cyber sabotage, states increasingly operate in the shadows, while social media has created new avenues for disinformation on a mass scale. This is covert action: perhaps the most sensitive—and controversial—of all state activity.

This book defines and exposes modern anti-semitism. It shows how the scourge of Jew-hatred is as virulent as it ever was, and how modern anti-semites hide their hate behind the pretexts of "human rights" and "international law".