We are, once again, a world at war. Geopolitical elites are deploying the implacable forces of ethnocentric hatred and religious nationalism; ordinary people are paying a fearful price. Not for the first time: this has been the characteristic pattern of war for more than a century. Every selection in this anthology (except for the timeless Aeneid) casts light on modern war, observed or directly experienced. Most are grounded in particular places—Stalingrad, Halberstadt, Budapest, ...

**NEW YORK TIMES #1 BESTSELLER **THE BOOK TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND WHY DEMOCRACY IS FAILING IN 2025‘The most coherent manifesto on confronting Trump’ New StatesmanIn the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, an...

As the 100th anniversary of World War I approaches, historian Margaret MacMillan compares current global tensions-rising nationalism, globalization’s economic pressures, sectarian strife, and the United States’ fading role as the world’s pre-eminent superpower-to the period preceding the Great War. In illuminating the years before 1914, MacMillan shows the many parallels between then and now, telling an urgent story for our time. THE BROOKINGS ESSAY: In the spirit of its commitment to high...

**An urgent exploration of a world in constant crisis, where every regional disaster threatens to become a global conflict, with lessons from history that can stop the spiral—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Revenge of Geography“Compelling and helpful . . . Kaplan’s analysis has enormous implications for U.S. strategy abroad. . . . His conclusion is the only right one.”—John Bolton, The Wall Street Journal**One of Fina...

The shocking images of neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, North Carolina in the summer of 2017 linger in the mind, but so do those of the passionate protestors who risked their lives to do the right thing. In this stirring graphic non-fiction book by the acclaimed author of The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book, Gord Hill looks at the history of fascism over the last 100 years, and the concurrent antifa movements that work fastidiously to topple it.Fascism is a relati...

A rich and passionate biography of a language and the dream of world harmony it sought to realize.In 1887, Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, a Polish Jew, had the idea of putting an end to tribalism by creating a universal language, one that would be equally accessible to everyone in the world. The result was Esperanto, a utopian scheme full of the brilliance, craziness, and grandiosity that characterize all such messianic visions.In this first full history of a const...

Three of the most provocative and thought-provoking works of the great Christopher Hitchens, now available in one volume.god Is Not GreatThis provocative international bestseller is the ultimate case against religion. In a series of acute readings of the major religious texts, Christopher Hitchens demonstrates the ways in which religion is man-made, dangerously sexually repressive and distorts the very origins of the cosmos. Above all, Hitchens argues that t...

An activist and an actor reflect on Edward Snowden and the surveillance state in this collection that "reads like a whistleblower's travel diary" ( Disorient).In late 2014, Arundhati Roy, John Cusack, and Daniel Ellsberg traveled to Moscow to meet with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The result was a series of essays and dialogues in which Roy and Cusack reflect on their conversations with Snowden. In these provocative and penetrating discussions, Roy an...

Finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Nonfiction: The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian returns with a groundbreaking comparative study of the dynamics and pathologies of war in modern times.Over recent decades, John W. Dower, one of America’s preeminent historians, has addressed the roots and consequences of war from multiple perspectives. In War Without Mercy (1986), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he described and analyzed the br...

Howard Zinn began work on his first book for his friends at Seven Stories Press in 1996, a big volume collecting all his shorter writings organized by subject. The themes he chose reflected his lifelong concerns: war, history, law, class, means and ends, and race. Throughout his life Zinn had returned again and again to these subjects, continually probing and questioning yet rarely reversing his convictions or the vision that informed them. The result was The Zinn Reader. Five years later,...

This sweeping history of the development of professional, institutionalized intelligence examines the implications of the fall of the state monopoly on espionage today and beyond.During the Cold War, only the alliances clustered around the two superpowers maintained viable intelligence endeavors, whereas a century ago, many states could aspire to be competitive at these dark arts. Today, larger states have lost their monopoly on intelligence skills and capabilities as technological...

*** This is a short and Untold Stories of the Women Heroes in the Extraordinary World War Two ***These women have been footnotes in history and at least one of them was a model for women in James Bond books and movies. The women however have remained in the shadows of the stories of the Second World War. These women fade into history even though their actions were crucial in changing the outcome of the war.This book is an effort to remember these forgotten ...