World Government

In The Cold War, Odd Arne Westad offers a new perspective on a century when a superpower rivalry and an ideological war transformed every corner of our globe. We traditionally think of the Cold War as a post-World War II diplomatic and military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. But in this major new work, Westad argues that the conflict must be understood as a global ideological confrontation with roots in the industrial revolution and with continuing implications for the world today.

By the time Henry Kissinger was made secretary of state in 1973, he had become, according to a Gallup poll, the most admired person in America and one of the most unlikely celebrities ever to capture the world’s imagination. Yet Kissinger was also reviled by large segments of the American public, ranging from liberal intellectuals to conservative activists. Kissinger explores the relationship between this complex man's personality and the foreign policy he pursued.

There is no story in 20th-century history more important to understand than Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. With The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, one of the world’s most distinguished historians, has written the definitive account for our time.

From Lt. General H.R. McMaster, US Army, ret., the former national security advisor and author of the best-selling classic Dereliction of Duty, comes a bold and provocative re-examination of the most critical foreign policy and national security challenges that face the United States, and an urgent call to compete to preserve America’s standing and security.

It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo’s new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling “the Congo crisis.”

This detailed and persuasive study by the author of The Patton Papers was described by Patton's daughter Ruth as "an extraordinary book". It is widely considered the best biography ever written of the General, an American hero as compelling as he was complex.

In the decade before the onset of the Civil War, groups of Americans engaged in a series of longshot - and illegal - forays into Mexico, Cuba, and other Central American countries in hopes of taking them over. These efforts became known as filibustering, and their goal was to seize territory to create new independent fiefdoms, which would ultimately be annexed by the still-growing United States. Most failed miserably. William Walker was the outlier. Soft-spoken with no military background, in 1856 he managed to install himself as president of Nicaragua.

Lenin once said, “There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.” This is one of those times when history has sped up. CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria helps listeners to understand the nature of a post-pandemic world: the political, social, technological, and economic impacts that may take years to unfold. In the form of 10 straightforward “lessons”, covering topics from globalization and threat-preparedness to inequality and technological advancement, Zakaria creates a structure for listeners to begin thinking beyond COVID-19.

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.

The Great Game in Cuba uses the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution to examine the CIA's inner workings during the '50s and '60s. Detailing the agency's lies and deceits, Mellen paints a vivid behind-the-scenes picture of the CIA in Cuba after the Castro revolution: what it wanted and the lengths it was willing to go to in order to paralyze the opposition to Fidel Castro.

Resuming the narrative of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, best-selling author Steve Coll tells for the first time the epic and enthralling story of America's intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11.

We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the "Old World" encountered the "New", when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492. As Caroline Dodds Pennock conclusively shows in this groundbreaking book, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others—enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders—the reverse was true: they discovered Europe. For them, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and quality of life, and its baffling beliefs.

When human rights lawyer Philippe Sands received an invitation to deliver a lecture in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, he began to uncover a series of extraordinary historical coincidences. It set him on a quest that would take him halfway around the world in an exploration of the origins of international law and the pursuit of his own secret family history, beginning and ending with the last day of the Nuremberg Trials.

In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the ‘End of History’—that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever. Now, however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats. These threats are not only external. Especially in the Anglosphere, the ‘decolonisation’ movement corrodes the West’s self-confidence by retelling the history of European and American colonial dominance.

All Against All is the story of the season our world changed from postwar to prewar again. It is about the power of bad ideas - exploring why, during a single winter, between November 1932 and April 1933, so much went so wrong. Historian Paul Jankowski reveals that it was collective mentalities and popular beliefs that drove this crucial period that sent nations on the path to war, as much as any rational calculus called "national interest".

COVID-19: The Greatest Cover-up in History - from Wuhan to the White House delivers the unfettered truth about what is undoubtedly the biggest political scandal of our time. It shows in unprecedented detail how governments in China, the UK, and the US not only failed to protect their citizens from the threat of the disease but actively conspired to put their own political and economic ideologies above the lives of ordinary people.

An investigative journalist's deep dive into the corrupt workings of the world's kleptocrats. Learn how the institutions of Europe and the US have become money-laundering operations, attacking the foundations of many of the world's most stable countries. Meet the kleptocrats. Meet their awful children. And find out how heroic activists around the world are fighting back.

In 2014's The Accidental Superpower, geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan made the case that geographic, demographic, and energy trends were unravelling the global system. Zeihan takes the story a step further in The Absent Superpower, mapping out the threats and opportunities as the world descends into disorder.

No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. The Nazis plotted to kill the city's Jews and to sabotage the nation's military installations: plans existed for hanging 20 prominent Hollywood figures such as Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, and Samuel Goldwyn; for driving through Boyle Heights and machine-gunning as many Jews as possible; and for blowing up defense installations and seizing munitions from National Guard armories along the Pacific Coast.

Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century traces all the continuities and ruptures that led from the founding revolution of October 1917, to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship, the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years, and the glasnost and perestroika policies of Gorbachev.