Political History

A landmark collaboration between a thirty-year veteran of the CIA and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, The Main Enemy is the inside story of the CIA-KGB spy wars, told through the actions of the men who fought them. Based on hundreds of interviews with operatives from both sides, The Main Enemy puts us inside the heads of CIA officers as they dodge surveillance and walk into violent ambushes in Moscow. This is the story of the generation of spies who came of age in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis and rose to run the CIA and KGB in the last days of the Cold War.

Master of the Senate carries Lyndon Johnson's story through one of its most remarkable periods: his 12 years in the U.S. Senate. At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done. "There is something uniquely mesmerizing about the wily, combative Lyndon Johnson as portrayed by Caro," says Publishers Weekly.

Tens of thousands of men and women have left comfortable, privileged lives to join the Islamic State and kill for it. To them, its violence is beautiful and holy, and the caliphate a fulfillment of prophecy and the only place on earth where they can live and die as Muslims. The Way of the Strangers is an intimate journey into the minds of the Islamic State's true believers. From the streets of Cairo to the mosques of London, Wood interviews supporters, recruiters, and sympathizers of the group.

Here is the behind-the-scenes story of how the United States forged its wartime alliance with Britain, told from the perspective of three key American players in London: Edward R. Murrow, Averell Harriman, and John Gilbert Winant. Drawing from a variety of primary sources, Olson skillfully depicts the dramatic personal journeys of these men who, determined to save Britain from Hitler, helped convince a cautious Franklin Roosevelt and a reluctant American public to support the British at a critical time.

As lives offline and online merge, it's easy to forget how we got here. Rise of the Machines reclaims the story of cybernetics, a control theory of man and machine. Thomas Rid delivers a portrait of our technology-enraptured era. Springing from mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of myths about the future of machines. This vision radically transformed the postwar world, ushering in sweeping cultural change.

To be sure, neoliberalism has contributed to a number of alarming trends, not least of which has been a massive growth in income inequality. Yet as the eminent historian Gary Gerstle argues in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, these indictments fail to reckon with the full contours of what neoliberalism was and why its worldview had such persuasive hold on both the right and the left for three decades.

In a narrative that moves like a thriller, Rhodes sheds light on the Reagan administration's unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s, as well as the arms-reduction campaign that followed, and Reagan's famous 1986 summit meeting with Gorbachev. Rhodes' detailed exploration of events of this time constitutes a prehistory of the neoconservatives. The story is new, compelling, and continually surprising - a revelatory re-creation of a hugely important era of our recent history.

The media often suggest that Russia poses the greatest threat to America's national security, but the real danger lies farther east. While those in power have been distracted and disorderly, China has waged a six-front war on America's economy, military, diplomacy, technology, education, and infrastructure - and they're winning. It's almost too late to undo the shocking, though nearly invisible, victories of the Chinese. In Stealth War, retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding reveals China's motives and secret attacks on the West.

Taking us from the French Revolution to the Cold War, Andrew Roberts presents us with a bracingly honest and deeply insightful look at nine major figures in modern history: Napoleon Bonaparte, Horatio Nelson, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, George C. Marshall, Charles de Gaulle, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Margaret Thatcher. Each one of these leaders fundamentally shaped the outcome of the war in which their nation was embroiled.

Based on unrivalled access to all the key politicians and their advisors - including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, George Osborne, Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of Vote Leave - Shipman has written a political history that reads like a thriller and offers a gripping day-by-day account of what really happened behind the scenes in Downing Street, both Leave campaigns, the Labour Party, Ukip and Britain Stronger in Europe.

A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled - and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high - in wealth, freedom, and social stability - and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations.

David Harvey's Companion to Marx's Grundrisse builds upon his widely acclaimed companions to the first and second volumes of Capital in a way that will reach as wide an audience as possible. Marx's stated ambition for this text is to reveal "the exact development of the concept of capital as the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself is the foundation of bourgeois society."

In Witch Hunt, Gregg Jarrett uncovers the bureaucratic malfeasance and malicious politicization of our country’s justice system. The law was weaponized for partisan purposes. Even though it was Hillary Clinton’s campaign that collected and disseminated a trove of lies about Trump from a former British spy and Russian operatives, Democrats and the media spun this into a claim that Trump was working for the Russians.

From New York Times best-selling author and political mastermind Karl Rove comes a fresh look at President William McKinley, who found a message that healed his nation, pried his party away from its bosses, and extended its reach to forge a governing majority that lasted 30 years.

In this classic work—a blend of memoir, social criticism, and political analysis that remains relevant today—the first Black Congresswoman to serve in American history, New York’s dynamic representative Shirley Chisholm, traces her extensive political struggle and examines the problems that have long plagued the American system of government.

A fresh look at the endlessly fascinating Tudors - the dramatic and overlooked story of Henry VII and his founding of the Tudor Dynasty - filled with spies, plots, counter-plots, and an uneasy royal succession to Henry VIII. Near the turn of the sixteenth century, England had been ravaged for decades by conspiracy and civil war. Henry Tudor clambered to the top of the heap, a fugitive with a flimsy claim to England’s crown who managed to win the throne and stay on it for 24 years.

Imagine if Occupy and Extinction Rebellion actually won. In Another Now, world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis shows us what such a world would look like. Far from being a fantasy, he describes how it could have come about—and might yet. But would we really want it? Varoufakis’s boundary-breaking new book confounds expectations of what the good society would look like and reveals the uncomfortable truth about our desire for a better world.

Only once in the last 250,000 years have humans stumbled upon a way to lift ourselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history. If democracy, individualism, and the free market were humankind’s destiny, they should have appeared and taken hold a bit earlier in the evolutionary record. The emergence of freedom and prosperity was nothing short of a miracle.

Carmen Aguirre was six-year-old when she and her family fled to Canada following General Augusto Pinochet’s violent 1973 coup in Chile. She was only eleven-years-old when her mother and stepfather joined the resistance movement and returned to South America, taking Carmen and her sister went with them. As their mother and stepfather set up a safe house for resistance members in La Paz, Bolivia, the girls' own double lives began. At 18, Carmen became a militant herself, plunging further into a world of terror, paranoia and euphoria.

Struggling with a recession... European nations at risk of defaulting on their loans... A possible global financial crisis. It happened before, in the 1970s. The Oil Kings is the story of how oil came to dominate U.S. domestic and international affairs. Brilliantly reported and filled with astonishing details about some of the key figures of the time, this is the history of an era that we thought we knew, an era whose momentous reverberations still influence events at home and abroad today.