"A highly readable and well-documented account of the use and abuse of religion for violent political ends . . . This is a book well worth reading" (Timothy J. Demy, ThD, PhD, coauthor of In the Name of God).Most Americans could not fathom how Islamic terrorists could bring down the World Trade Center or an army psychiatrist could turn on his own soldiers, taking their lives in the name of his religion. How could an ex-army veteran blow up a federal buildi...

With a new preface: A "stunning" analysis of the troubled Republican president by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg ( The New York Times Book Review).In this acclaimed biography that earned him a spot on Nixon's infamous "enemies list," Garry Wills takes a thoughtful, in-depth, and often "very amusing" look at the thirty-seventh US president, and draws some surprising conclusions about a man whose name has become synonymous...

" [The] book makes you care what happens to its main protagonist, the U.S. Postal Service itself. And, as such, it leaves you at the end in suspense." — USA TodayFounded by Benjamin Franklin, the United States Postal Service was the information network that bound far-flung Americans together, and yet, it is slowly vanishing. Critics say it is slow and archaic. Mail volume is down. The workforce is shrinking. Post offices a...

"Tells how America, since the end of World War II, has turned away from its ideals and goodness to become a match setting the world on fire" (Seymour Hersh, investigative journalist and national security correspondent).World War II marked the apogee of industrialized "total war." Great powers savaged one another. Hostilities engulfed the globe. Mobilization extended to virtually every sector of every nation. Air war, including the terror bombing of civilians, emerg...

"Slack engagingly reveals how the Federalist attack on the First Amendment almost brought down the Republic . . . An illuminating book of American history." — Kirkus Reviews , starred reviewIn 1798, with the United States in crisis, President John Adams and the Federalists in control of Congress passed an extreme piece of legislation that made criticism of the government and its leaders a crime punishable by heavy fines an...

The award-winning historian delivers a "brilliant and deeply informed" analysis of American power from the Spanish-American War to the Trump Administration ( New York Journal of Books).In this sweeping and incisive history of US foreign relations, historian Alfred McCoy explores America's rise as a world power from the 1890s through the Cold War, and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century. Since American dominance reached its ape...

Revised and updated: the definitive primary-source history of US involvement in General Pinochet's Chilean coup—"the evidence is overwhelming" ( The New Yorker).Published to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of General Augusto Pinochet's infamous September 11, 1973, military coup in Chile, this updated edition of The Pinochet File reveals the shocking, formerly secret record of the US government's complicity with atrocity in a foreign country. ...

From assassinations to student riots, this is "a splendidly evocative account of a historic year—a year of tumult, of trauma, and of tragedy" (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.).In the United States, the 1960s were a period of unprecedented change and upheaval—but the year 1968 in particular stands out as a dramatic turning point. Americans witnessed the Tet offensive in Vietnam; the shocking assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; and the chaos at the De...

"The best, the liveliest and most illuminating" account of Rockefeller, Morgan, and the other men who seized American economic power after the Civil War ( The New Republic).John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, E. H. Harriman, Jay Gould, Henry Clay Frick . . . their names carry a powerful historical ring, still echoing today in the countless institutions that are part of their legacy, from universities to museums to bank...

A journalist with deep knowledge of the region provides "an enthralling and largely firsthand account of the war in Afghanistan" ( Financial Times).Few reporters know as much about Afghanistan as Carlotta Gall. She was there in the 1990s after the Russians were driven out. She witnessed the early flourishing of radical Islam, imported from abroad, which caused so much local suffering. She was there right after 9/11, when US special forces helped the Northe...

"[A] wide-ranging and nuanced group portrait of the Founding Fathers" by a Pulitzer Prize winner ( The New Yorker).In the early 1770s, the men who invented America were living quiet, provincial lives in the rustic backwaters of the New World, devoted to family and the private pursuit of wealth and happiness. None set out to become "revolutionary." But when events in Boston escalated, they found themselves thrust into a crisis that moved quickly from protest...

A history of the Chinese experience in WWII, named a Book of the Year by both the Economist and the Financial Times: "Superb" ( The New York Times Book Review).In 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, Chinese troops clashed with Japanese occupiers in the first battle of World War II. Joining with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, China became the fourth great ally in a devastating struggle for its very surviv...