Every American president, when faced with a crisis, longs to take bold and decisive action. When American lives or vital interests are at stake, the public-and especially the news media and political opponents-expect aggressive leadership. But, contrary to the dramatizations of Hollywood, rarely does a president have that option.In Presidents in Crisis, a former director of the Situation Room takes the reader inside the White House during seventeen grave international emer...

A handful of star athletes, along with their promoters and journalists, created America's sports entertainment industry during the 1920s, the Golden Age of American sports. The period had an extraordinary impact, profoundly changing individual sports, establishing the secular religion of sports and sports heroes, and helping bond disparate social and regional sectors of the country. It's when sports became a cornerstone of modern American life.Heroes and Ballyhoo profiles t...

The White House Situation Room is arguably the most important facility in the most important building in the world. As the presidentÆs intelligence and alert center, it provides vital communication and crisis management capabilities to the chief executive and his advisers. It can also be ôan island of calm,ö as a top adviser for Vice President Al Gore once described it. So little is known about the Situation Room that, until the publication of Nerve Center, the American publicÆs knowledge of ...

Political speeches and public rhetoric paint the phenomena of terrorism with a black-and-white brush, presenting it as a clear-cut battle between evildoers and heroes. With The Achille Lauro Hijacking, Michael K. Bohn, who watched the incident unfold from the White House Situation Room, uses one of the most infamous terrorist incidents of the past twenty-five years to illuminate the folly of such oversimplified jingoisms. The 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship, the amazin...

You can't play Major League Baseball and bet on a game; just ask Pete Rose. Don't try running a betting ring in the NHL, either. Want the surest ticket out of NCAA sports? Betting's the way to do it. In stark contrast, however, the United States Golf Association officially sanctions betting among players during their games. And it's not just the pros who bet. Every man, out with his buddies, asks at the first tee, Shall we make this interesting? Yet there has never been a betting scandal in...

Travel back in time with Doctor Who, the Terminator, the X-Men, and all your favorite time travelers!Science fiction is the perfect window into the possibilities and perils of time travel. What would happen if you went back in time and killed your own grandparent? If you knew how to stop a presidential assassination, would time travel allow you to make your wish come true? Can we use time travel as a tool to escape the destiny of our future or mistakes of the past?...

With a focus of the Perseverance rover mission, here is the "Quintessential account of one of humanity’s most intriguing quests" (Pail Halpern, Medium), "A remarkable, timely, and up-to-date account of Mars exploration" (Leonard David, "Space Insider," Space.com).From The War of the Worlds to The Martian and to the amazing photographs sent back by the robotic rovers Curiosity and Opportunity, Mars has excited our imaginations as ...

For readers of Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking, the book readers have acclaimed as "A mega-comprehensive outlook at intelligence as convincing as it is surprising" and "A truly breathtaking forecast on the future of intelligence."With the ongoing advancement of AI and other technologies, our world is becoming increasingly intelligent. From chatbots to innovations in brain-computer interfaces to the possibility of superintelligences leading to the Singularity later ...

It's common knowledge that the Enigma cipher was broken at Bletchley Park, but less is known of the background: an exhilarating spy story of secret documents smuggled across borders, hair-raising escapes, Gestapo interrogations and betrayals.At the heart of it is the decisive role of Polish mathematicians and French spymasters who helped Britain's codebreakers change the course of the Second World War. X, Y & Z is the real story of how Enigma was broken.

Charles Eisenstein explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self. In this limited hardcover edition of Eisenstein's landmark book, he argues that our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we ...

A fascinating look at German planes that wound up in British territory during World War II, with photos.During the Second World War, a great many Luftwaffe aircraft arrived in the United Kingdom or its coastal waters, but, as with the famous flight of Rudolf Hess, not all of them through "conventional" combat circumstances. Some got lost; others were brought by defectors; some were lured through electronic countermeasures by the RAF; and others were brought down in...

From a master of regional and natural history comes a collection of essays that reveals how the Pacific Northwest shaped the people—and how the people shaped the landDrawing on a range of personal research, author Jack Nisbet engages some of the iconic images in Northwest history: from fossil riches to ice age floods; from the Willamette Meteorite to the 1872 Earthquake; from up-and-down mining cycles to steady rounds of tribal food gathering. Although the scale of...