Politics War

Never is an extraordinary novel, full of heroines and villains, false prophets and elite warriors, jaded politicians and opportunistic revolutionaries. It brims with cautionary wisdom for our times, and delivers a visceral, heart-pounding story that transports listeners to the brink of the unimaginable.

In the tradition of bestsellers by Robert Ludlum and Vince Flynn, Termination Orders introduces Dan Morgan, a retired black-ops agent who must return to duty to thwart a deadly international conspiracy.

Once a trained killer for the CIA, Dan Morgan has built a new life for himself. But when he receives a desperate plea from his former black-ops partner - reportedly killed in a foreign battle zone - he flies in to help. It should be a routine mission, extracting a human asset from the region, but it’s not - it’s an ambush.

From the Gilded Age until 1914, more than 100 American heiresses invaded Britannia and swapped dollars for titles - just like Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, the first of the Downton Abbey characters Julian Fellowes was inspired to create after reading To Marry An English Lord. Filled with vivid personalities, gossipy anecdotes, grand houses, and a wealth of period details-plus quotes and the finer points of Victorian and Edwardian etiquette - To Marry An English Lord is social history at its liveliest and most accessible.

On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next 12 months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally - and willing to fight to the end. In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows how Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless."

John Dempsey, former Navy SEAL and Tier One operator, is back. Only a few months into his new life as an operative for Ember, the United States’ most covert counterterrorism entity, he must stop an old nemesis who’s resurfaced after ten years of operating in the shadows. From the deserts of Iraq, through the jungles of Guatemala, to the streets of suburbia, Dempsey and his Ember team race against time to stop a series of horrific and devious attacks against the homeland.

To a trio of muggers, Red looks like just another suburban dad. But when they demand his wallet at knifepoint, something snaps. In the blink of an eye, two muggers are dead, the third severely injured, and Red doesn't remember a thing. Once an elite member of the Det, a secret forces outfit whose existence is beyond classified, Red thought his active service was over. But his memory is coming back - and a lethal killing machine is returning to duty.

This book analyzes the evolution of Russian military thought and how Russia's current thinking about war is reflected in recent crises. What Jonsson reveals is that Russia's conception of the very nature of war is now changing, as Russian elites see information warfare and political subversion as the most important ways to conduct contemporary war. Since information warfare and political subversion are below the traditional threshold of armed violence, this has blurred the boundaries between war and peace.

Korea was one of the last countries in Asia to be visited by Westerners, and its borders have remained largely unchanged since it was unified in the seventh century. Though it is one of the world's oldest and most ethnically homogeneous states, Korea was not born in a vacuum. Geographically isolated, the country was heavily influenced by powerful China and was often used as a bridge to the mainland by Japan. Calling themselves as "a shrimp among whales", Koreans borrowed elements of government, culture, and religion, all the while fiercely fighting to maintain independence.

In his best-selling autobiography, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and chief architect of Nazi Germany, repeatedly insisted he knew nothing of the genocidal crimes of Hitler's Third Reich. In this revealing new biography, author Martin Kitchen disputes Speer's lifelong assertions of ignorance and innocence, portraying a far darker figure who was deeply implicated in the appalling crimes committed by the regime he served so well. Kitchen reconstructs Speer's life with what we now know, including information from valuable new sources that have come to light only in recent years.

Twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other televangelists first spoke of the United States being a Christian nation that would build a global Christian empire, it was hard to take such hyperbolic rhetoric seriously. Today, such language no longer sounds like hyperbole but poses, instead, a very real threat to our freedoms and our way of life.

Israel, October 1973. As the Yom Kippur War flares into life, a state-of-the-art Soviet MiG fighter is racing at breakneck speed over the arid scrublands below . . . and promptly disappears. NASA Flight Controller and former top US test pilot Kaz Zemeckis watches the scene from the ground—and is quickly pulled into a dizzying, high-stakes game of spies, lies and a possible high-level defection that plays out across three continents.

When a mysterious new weapon tips the balance against American and allied forces throughout the Middle East, the only person the president can call for help is the man the administration has just fired - Navy SEAL turned covert Homeland Security operative, Scot Harvath. Caught live on Al Jazeera in an off-the-books operation, Harvath is forced to go to ground, as a senator with presidential aspirations turns her sights on the White House and forces President Jack Rutledge to publicly end the career of America's number-one counter-terrorism operative.

In 1960 Argentina, a covert team of Israeli agents hunted down the most elusive war criminal alive: Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust. The young spy who tackled Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street - and fought every compulsion to strangle the Obersturmführer then and there - was Peter Z. Malkin. For decades Malkin's identity as Eichmann's captor was kept secret. Here he reveals the entire breathtaking story - from the genesis of the top-secret surveillance operation to the dramatic public capture and smuggling of Eichmann to Israel to stand trial.

Harry Truman and Pablo Picasso were contemporaries and were both shaped by and shapers of the great events of the twentieth century—the man who painted Guernica and the man who authorized the use of atomic bombs against civilians. But in most ways, they couldn’t have been more different. Picasso was a communist, and probably the only thing Truman hated more than communists was modern art. Picasso was an indifferent father, a womanizer, and a millionaire. Truman was utterly devoted to his family. How did they come to be shaking hands in front of Picasso’s studio in the south of France?

A thrilling and revelatory narrative of one of the most epic and consequential periods in 20th century history - the Arab Revolt and the secret “great game” to control the Middle East. Lawrence in Arabia definitively overturns received wisdom on how the modern Middle East was formed. Sweeping in its action, keen in its portraiture, acid in its condemnation of the destruction wrought by European colonial plots, this is a book that brilliantly captures the way in which the folly of the past creates the anguish of the present.

Ex-Navy SEAL John Clark is the newly named head of Rainbow, an international task force dedicated to combating terrorism. In a trial by fire, he must stop a terrorist group of men and women so extreme that their success could literally mean the end of life on earth as we know it.

This is a story that starts off close and goes very big. The initial part of the story might sound familiar at first: it is about a platoon of mostly 19-year-old boys sent to Afghanistan, and an experience that ends abruptly in catastrophe. Their part of the story folds into the next: inexorably linked to those soldiers and never comprehensively reported before is the US Department of Defense’s quest to build the world’s most powerful biometrics database, with the ability to identify, monitor, catalog, and police people all over the world.

After a CIA covert mission goes badly awry, US Air Force intelligence officer Nicholas Flynn is exiled to guard a remote radar post along Alaska’s Arctic frontier. This dead-end assignment is designed to put his career permanently on ice, but Flynn’s not the type to fade quietly into obscurity.... As winter storms pound Alaska and northern Canada, Russian aircraft begin penetrating deep into friendly airspace. Are these rehearsals for a possible first strike, using Russia’s new long-range stealth cruise missiles?

After Task Force Ember’s successful intervention in Ukraine, John Dempsey disappears without a trace—with no notice or explanation given to his teammates. Spotty intelligence eventually places him in Russia where he is rumored to have been captured by the Russian FSB and is now presumed dead. Mourning his loss, Ember is forced to pick up the pieces, restructure, and continue their mission of keeping America safe. As the president’s “go-to” black ops asset, Ember is directed to find and finish off the Russian spymaster Arkady Zhukov and any last remnants of Zeta cell.

In this fascinating foray into the centuries-old relationship between science and military power, acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and writer-researcher Avis Lang examine how the methods and tools of astrophysics have been enlisted in the service of war. "The overlap is strong, and the knowledge flows in both directions," say the authors, because astrophysicists and military planners care about many of the same things: multi-spectral detection, ranging, tracking, imaging, high ground, nuclear fusion, and access to space. Tyson and Lang call it a "curiously complicit" alliance.