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* "Written in the 6th century BC, Sun Tzu's The Art of War is a Chinese military treatise that is still revered today as the ultimate commentary on war and military strategy. Focussing on the principle that one can outsmart your foe mentally by thinking very carefully about strategy before resorting to physical battle, this philosophy continues to be applied to the corporate and business world."

In 1970 Ulrike Meinhof abandoned a career as a political journalist to join the Red Army Faction; captured as a terrorist along with other members of the group in 1972, she died an unexplained death in a high-security prison in 1976. A charismatic spokesperson for the RAF, she has often come near to being idealized as a freedom fighter, despite her use of extreme violence. In an effort to understand how terrorism takes root, Sarah Colvin seeks a dispassionate view of Meinhof and a period when We...

In Putin’s Labyrinth, acclaimed journalist Steve LeVine, who lived in and reported from the former Soviet Union for more than a decade, provides a gripping account of modern Russia. President Dmitri Medvedev and the country’s real power, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, are posing a resolute challenge to the West. In a penetrating narrative that recounts the lives and deaths of six Russians, LeVine portrays the growth of a “culture of death”—from targeted assassinations of the state’s enemies to t...

Military cemeteries are one of the most prominent cultural landscapes of Israel. Their story reflects largely the main social processes that Israeli society has been undergoing since the War of Independence (1948)until today. Until the end of the 1970s, the military tombstones and their surroundings were uniform and equal, according to rules set by the State. However, since the 1980s families of the fallen soldiers started to add on the tombstone personal expressions, as well as personal objects...

“One of the best true crime books of all time.” —Time As seen on Investigation Discovery’s The Grim Sleeper: Mind of a Monster The inside story of the notorious and elusive serial killer who stalked the vulnerable, the young, and the ignored in 1980s Los Angeles—and then returned decades later to kill again The Grim Sleeper was one of the most brutal serial killers in California history, preying on the women of South Central for decades. No one knows this story better than Christine Pelisek...

The History of the United States Civil Service: From the Postwar Years to the Twenty-First Century provides a broad, comprehensive overview of the US civil service in the postwar period and examines the reforms and changes throughout that time. The author situates the history of the civil service into a wider context, considering political, social and cultural changes that occurred and have been influential in the history of American government. The book analyzes the development of administrati...

The new MAD, Massive Attacks of Disruption-and not China or Russia-are the most immediate and greatest dangers to the nation. But no one has recognized and thus acted to contain and prevent these potentially existential threats that, if left unchecked, will bring ruin to America and much of the planet. Beyond traditional threats from states such as China and Russia and non-state actors employing violent extremism, can America's politics and political system withstand the assaults of the Fifth H...

Brought to you by Penguin.Can anyone truly understand Russia? Let one of the world's leading experts show you how, using the fascinating history of a nation to illuminate its future. Russia is a country with no natural borders, no single ethnos, no true central identity. At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, it is everyone's 'other'. And yet it is one of the most powerful nations on earth, a master game-player on the global stage with a rich history of war and peace, poets and revolutionaries....

From 9/11 to the launch of the iPod, from the creation of "Gmail: to the 2004 tsunami, from the Enron Bankruptcy to the killing of Osama bin Laden, 10 Years That Shook the World is the story of an extraordinary decade. For each year, Loretta Napoleoni presents events not as a chronology bus as dispatches from the world's collective memory. Topics like politics, economics, celebrities, and the environment intersect and converge to reveal the accelerating pace of globalization and the changes that...

Cormac McCarthy told an interviewer for the New York Times Magazine that “books are made out of books,” but he has been famously unwilling to discuss how his own writing draws on the works of other writers. Yet his novels and plays masterfully appropriate and allude to an extensive range of literary works, demonstrating that McCarthy is well aware of literary tradition, respectful of the canon, and deliberately situating himself in a knowing relationship to precursors. The Wittliff Collection a...

A fascinating study of the root motivations behind the political activities and philosophies of Putin's government in Russia "Part intellectual history, part portrait gallery . . . Black Wind, White Snow traces the background to Putin's ideas with verve and clarity."-Geoffrey Hosking, Financial Times "Required reading. This is a vivid, panoramic history of bad ideas, chasing the metastasis of the doctrine known as Eurasianism. . . . Reading Charles Clover will help you understand the world o...

Why has Libya fallen apart since 2011? The world has largely given up trying to understand how the revolution that toppled Muammar Gaddafi has left the country a failed state and a major security headache for Europe. Gaddafi's police state has been replaced by yet another dictatorship, amidst a complex conflict of myriad armed groups, Islamists, tribes, towns and secularists. What happened? One of few foreign journalists to have lived in post-revolution Tripoli, Ulf Laessing has unique insight i...

The study examines how in a city whose population was largely exchanged after the Second World War, processes of becoming homeland took place and how the identification of new and former residents with the city took place since 1945. Home is understood here as a "social concept" and the often contradicting processes of local appropriation are placed at the center of the analysis. Although the official efforts of so-called Czechization are also at work, this only applies to the extent to which th...

WARRIOR ELITE is a unique and compelling account of Australia's special forces and intelligence operations - ranging from the early special forces of World War II to the establishment and development of the SAS and Commando Regiments as the elite fighters of today, and from the Australian Security Intelligence Service to the Australian Signals Directorate and ASIO. It is an authoritative, gripping and thoroughly up-to-date account of both the history and current state of our special forces and i...

La publication des Bienveillantes de Jonathan Littell (2006) a projete sur l'avant-plan la figure inquietante du " salaud " (ou du " monstre ", ou du " bourreau ") prenant la parole. Cette figure n'est pas inedite. Au debut des annees cinquante, Robert Merle avait deja octroye le monopole narratif au monstre par excellence que fut Rudolf Hoess, le commandant d'Auschwitz. Meme un Jean-Paul Sartre, dans une nouvelle celebre parue en 1939, avait fait parler l'infame. D'autres ecrivains, a diverses...

Less than two decades after the Yugoslav Wars ended, the edifice of parliamentary government in the Western Balkans is crumbling. This collapse sets into sharp relief the unreformed authoritarian tendencies of the region's entrenched elites, many of whom have held power since the early 1990s, and the hollowness of the West's 'democratisation' agenda. There is a widely held assumption that institutional collapse will precipitate a new bout of ethnic conflict, but Mujanovic argues instead that th...