Military Government

Zarifa Ghafari was three years old when the Taliban banned girls from schools, and she began her education in secret. She was seven when American airstrikes began. She was twenty-six when she became mayor—the only female mayor in the country—of Maidan Wardak, Kabul. An extremist mob barred her from her office; her male staff walked out in protest; assassins tried to kill her six times. Finally, they killed their father. Ghafari stood her ground. She ended corruption in the province, promoted peace and tried to lift up women, despite constant fear for herself and her family.

As the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went on the run. A few were soon caught, including the notorious SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Others, however, evaded capture through a sophisticated Nazi organization designed to hide them. Among them were Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who performed hideous medical experiments at Auschwitz; Martin Bormann, Hitler’s brutal personal secretary; Klaus Barbie, the cruel "Butcher of Lyon"; and perhaps the most awful Nazi of all: Adolf Eichmann.

Nerve agents are the world's deadliest means of chemical warfare. Nazi Germany developed the first military-grade nerve agents and massive industry for their manufacture. At the end of the Second World War, the Allies were stunned to discover this advanced and extensive program. The Soviets and Western powers embarked on a new arms race, amassing huge chemical arsenals. From their Nazi invention to the 2018 Novichok attack in Britain, Dan Kaszeta uncovers nerve agents' gradual spread across the world, despite international arms control efforts.

The basis for the film The Post, The Pentagon Papers are a series of articles, documents, and studies examining the Johnson Administration's lies to the public about the extent of US involvement in the Vietnam War, bringing to light shocking conclusions about America's true role in the conflict. With a brand-new foreword by James L. Greenfield, this edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning story is sure to provoke discussion about free press and government deception.

Favereau takes us inside one of the most powerful sources of cross-border integration in world history. The Horde was the central node in the Eurasian commercial boom of the 13th and 14th centuries and was a conduit for exchanges across thousands of miles. Its unique political regime - a complex power-sharing arrangement among the khan and the nobility - rewarded skillful administrators and diplomats and fostered an economic order that was mobile, organized, and innovative.

In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president - Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood - and subsequently led a brutal repression of the Islamist group. These bloody events echoed an older political rift: the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Fawaz Gerges, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East, tells how the clash between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region.

Richard Bessel, history professor at the University of York, specializes in the social and political history of Nazi Germany. In four compelling essays, he forcefully argues that racism made war inevitable. The Third Reich, led by "[A] band of political gangsters", came to power with a deep ideological commitment to war and racism. As the driving force behind the economics, social policy, and propaganda of Germany, racial hatred was the catalyst that plunged Europe into war.

Within days of the D-Day landings, the 'Das Reich' 2nd SS Panzer Division marched north through France to reinforce the front-line defenders of Hitler's Fortress Europe. Veterans of the bloodiest fighting of the Russian Front, 15,000 men with their tanks and artillery, they were hounded for every mile of their march by saboteurs of the Resistance and agents of the Allied Special Forces. Along their route they took reprisals so savage they will live forever in the chronicles of the most appalling atrocities of war.

According to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the "most shocking single event" of World War II was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather the fall of France in spring 1940. Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of the American response - a policy marked by panic and moral ineptitude, which placed the United States in league with fascism and nearly ruined the alliance with Britain.

Between 1939 and 1945, more than 70 Allied men and women were convicted - mostly in secret trials - of working to help Nazi Germany win the war. In the same period, hundreds of British Fascists were also interned without trial on specific and detailed evidence that they were spying for, or working on behalf of, Germany. Collectively, these men and women were part of a little-known Fifth Column: traitors who committed crimes including espionage, sabotage, communicating with enemy intelligence agents, and attempting to cause disaffection among Allied troops.

Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar: Each was a master of war. Each had to look beyond the battlefield to decide whom to fight and why; to know what victory was and when to end the war; to determine how to bring stability to the lands he conquered. Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar had to be not only generals but statesmen. And yet each was a battlefield commander, a strategist, a leader of men - in short, a warrior.

What is the future of war? How can we survive? If Americans are drawn into major armed conflict, can we win? McFate calls upon the legends of military study Carl von Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, and others, as well as his own experience, and carefully constructs the new rules for the future of military engagement, the ways we can fight and win in an age of entropy: one where corporations, mercenaries, and rogue states have more power and ‘nation states’ have less.

1972. The Munich Olympics. Palestinian members of the Black September group murder 11 Israeli athletes. Nine hundred million people watch the crisis unfold on television, witnessing a tragedy that inaugurates the modern age of terror.

Thousands of American soldiers are returning from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan with severe wounds from chemical war. They are not the victims of ruthless enemy warfare, but of their own military commanders. These soldiers, afflicted with rare cancers and respiratory diseases, were sickened from the smoke and ash swirling out of the "burn pits" where military contractors incinerated mountains of trash, including old stockpiles of mustard and sarin gas, medical waste, and other toxic material.

Eyes in the Sky is the authoritative account of how the Pentagon secretly developed a godlike surveillance system for monitoring America's enemies overseas, and how it is now being used to watch us in our own backyards. Whereas a regular aerial camera can only capture a small patch of ground at any given time, this system - and its most powerful iteration, Gorgon Stare - allow operators to track thousands of moving targets at once, both forwards and backwards in time, across whole city-sized areas.

In early 2014, sparked by an assault by their government on peaceful students, Ukrainians rose up against a deeply corrupt, Moscow-backed regime. Initially demonstrating under the banner of EU integration, the Maidan protesters proclaimed their right to a dignified existence; they learned to organize, to act collectively, to become a civil society. Most prominently, they established a new Ukrainian identity: territorial, inclusive, and present-focused with powerful mobilizing symbols.

In No Mission Is Impossible, Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal return with the intensely absorbing, fast-paced story of 30 of the boldest missions of the Israeli special forces. Bar-Zohar and Mishal depict in electrifying detail major battles, raids in enemy territory, and death-defying commando missions while also sharing the personal stories of both soldiers and top commanders, revealing their hopes and fears. The stories are often of victories, but sometimes they're of immense failures.

At the outbreak of World War II, MI6 spymaster Thomas Kendrick arrived at the Tower of London to set up a top secret operation: German prisoners' cells were to be bugged and listeners installed behind the walls to record and transcribe their private conversations. This mission proved so effective that it would go on to be set up at three further sites - and provide the Allies with crucial insight into new technology being developed by the Nazis. In this astonishing history, Helen Fry uncovers the inner workings of the bugging operation.

This fast-paced, behind-the-scenes narrative tells the inside story of how the Bush administration used bad intelligence to sell and then justify the Iraq war. Veteran reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn take the reader behind the scenes at the White House, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and Congress, where controversial decisions and turf battles were fought in the highest circles of the Bush administration.

Circle of Treason is the first account written by CIA agents who were key members of the CIA team that conducted the intense "Ames Mole Hunt." Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille were two of the five principals of the CIA team tasked with hunting one of their own and were directly responsible for identifying Ames as the mole, leading to his arrest and conviction.