World Government

In the greatest intelligence operation in the history of the world, Donald Trump was made president of the United States with the assistance of a foreign power. For the first time, The Plot to Destroy Democracy reveals the dramatic story of how blackmail, espionage, assassination, and psychological warfare were used by Vladimir Putin and his spy agencies to steal the 2016 US election. It will show how Russia and its fifth column allies tried to flip the cornerstones of democracy in order to reengineer the world political order that kept most of the world free since since 1945.

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and civil servant, made a nine-month journey through the eastern United States. The result was Democracy in America, a monumental study of the strengths and weaknesses of the nation’s evolving politics. His insightful work has become one of the most influential political texts ever written on America.

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.

"Fascists", "Brownshirts", "jackbooted stormtroopers" - such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?

In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries came to power in the war-torn Russian Empire in a way that defied all predictions. Scarcely a lifespan later, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed as accidentally as it arose. The decades between witnessed drama on an epic scale—the chaos and hope of revolution, famines and purges, hard-won victory in history's most destructive war, and worldwide geopolitical conflict, all entwined around the dream of building a better society. This book is a lively distillation of this complex history, told with vivid details, a grand sweep, and wry wit.

Everything is a computer. Ovens are computers that make things hot; refrigerators are computers that keep things cold. These computers - from home thermostats to chemical plants - are all online. All computers can be hacked. And Internet-connected computers are the most vulnerable. Forget data theft: Cutting-edge digital attackers can now crash your car, your pacemaker, and the nation’s power grid. In Click Here to Kill Everybody, renowned expert and best-selling author Bruce Schneier examines the hidden risks of this new reality.

How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings - and especially for women? Because, when you lift up women, you lift up humanity. For the last 20 years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift society up, you need to stop keeping women down.

A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of 21st century Russia: into the lives of Hells Angels convinced they are messiahs, professional killers with the souls of artists, bohemian theatre directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, supermodel sects, post-modern dictators and oligarch revolutionaries.

Afghanistan traces the historic struggles and the changing nature of political authority in this volatile region of the world, from the Mughal Empire in the 16th century to the Taliban resurgence today. Thomas Barfield introduces listeners to the bewildering diversity of tribal and ethnic groups in Afghanistan, explaining what unites them as Afghans despite the regional, cultural, and political differences that divide them.

Russia is a country with no natural borders, no single ethnic group, no true central identity. At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, it has been subject to invasion by outsiders, from Vikings to Mongols, from Napoleon’s French to Hitler’s Germans. In order to forge an identity, it has mythologized its past to unite its people and to signal strength to outsiders. In A Short History of Russia, Mark Galeotti explores the history of this fascinating, glorious, desperate, and exasperating country.

Acclaimed journalist, activist, and best-selling author Naomi Klein has spent two decades studying political shocks, climate change, and "brand bullies". From this unique perspective, she argues that Trump is not an aberration but a logical extension of the worst, most dangerous trends of the past half century - the very conditions that have unleashed a rising tide of white nationalism the world over. It is not enough, she tells us, to merely resist, to say no.

From modern literature to menopause, from utopian thought to rodeos - in this classic collection of essays, Ursula K. Le Guin roves with her customary audacity over the intersecting arenas of literature, feminism, and social responsibility, exploding any received notions she comes across and revealing visionary possibilities in their stead.

Economic growth isn't working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalist modernity, The Future Is Degrowth argues that the ideology of growth conceals the rising inequalities and ecological destructions associated with capitalism, and points to desirable alternatives to it.

Eighteen years after the genocide that made Rwanda international news, yet left it all but abandoned by the West, the country has achieved a miraculous turnaround. Rising out of the complete devastation of a failed state, Rwanda has emerged on the world stage yet again - this time with a unique model for governance and economic development under the leadership of its strong and decisive president, Paul Kagame. Here, Patricia Crisafulli and Andrea Redmond look at Kagame’s leadership.

Villains of All Nations explores the "Golden Age" of Atlantic piracy (1716-1726) and the infamous generation whose images underlie our modern, romanticized view of pirates.

Secrecy World offers a disturbing and sobering view of how the world really works and raises crucial questions about financial and legal institutions we may once have trusted. This audiobook discusses the fragile scaffolding upholding any tax haven, the flexible laws of banking, and the radiating impact of an international financial scandal.

In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis.

What do ordinary Russians think of Putin? Who are his supporters? And why might their support now be faltering? Alive with the voices and experiences of ordinary Russians and elites alike, Sam Greene and Graeme Robertson craft a compellingly original account of contemporary Russian politics.

At the heart of Africa is Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal and unstaunchable war in which millions have died. And yet, despite its epic proportions, it has received little sustained media attention. In this deeply reported book, Jason K. Stearns vividly tells the story of this misunderstood conflict through the experiences of those who engineered and perpetrated it.

Edwin Black, award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust, has mined scores of corporate and governmental archives to assemble thousands of previously uncovered and long-forgotten documents and studies into this dramatic story. Black traces a continuum of rapacious energy cartels and special interests dating back nearly 5,000 years, from wood to coal to oil, and then to the bicycle and electric battery cartels of the 1890s, which created thousands of electric vehicles that plied American streets a century ago.