Current Events : Warfare & Terrorism

This "New York Times" bestseller--called "a ground-level account of the Persian Gulf War" by the "Los Angeles Times"--is now in paperback and features an all-new chapter on Operation Enduring Freedom. more...

Price: $7.99

Fiasco, Thomas E. Ricks’s #1 New York Times bestseller, transformed the political dialogue on the war in Iraq—The Gamble is the next news breaking installment. Thomas E. Ricks uses hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in Iraq and extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to document the inside story of the Iraq War since late 2005 as only he can, examining the events that took place as the military was forced to reckon with itself, the surge was launched, and a very different war began. Since early 2007 a new military order has directed American strategy. Some top U.S. officials now in Iraq actually opposed the 2003 invasion, and almost all are severely critical of how the war was fought from then through 2006. At the core of the story is General David Petraeus, a military intellectual who has gathered around him an unprecedented number of officers with both combat experience and Ph.D.s. Underscoring his new and unorthodox approach, three of his key advisers are quirky foreigners—an Australian infantryman-turned- anthropologist, an antimilitary British woman who is an expert in the Middle East, and a Mennonite-educated Palestinian pacifist. The Gamble offers news breaking information, revealing behind-the-scenes disagreements between top commanders. We learn that almost every single officer in the chain of command fought the surge. Many of Petraeus’s closest advisers went to Iraq extremely pessimistic, doubting that the surge would have any effect, and his own boss was so skeptical that he dispatched an admiral to Baghdad in the summer of 2007 to come up with a strategy to replace Petraeus’s. That same boss later flew to Iraq to try to talk Petraeus out of his planned congressional testimony. The Gamble examines the congressional hearings through the eyes of Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and their views of the questions posed by the 2008 presidential candidates. For Petraeus, prevailing in Iraq means extending the more...

Price: $27.95

WISER IN BATTLE is the first book about the war in Iraq by an on-site commander. Former Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez served as Commander of Coalition Ground Forces from June 2003 to June 2004. WISER IN BATTLE offers the full story of his tenure, providing a first-hand account of Saddam Hussein’s capture, the battle of Fallujah, and the never-ending quest to take out Shiite Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Sanchez also discusses how minor insurgent attacks grew into synchronized, well-coordinated operations, and then finally ignited into a major insurgency and full-scale Civil War. General Sanchez was also the senior military commander in Iraq when the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib occurred, and when they were exposed to the world. In WISER IN BATTLE, he chronicles the full inside story of the scandal, including what really happened, the circumstances that led to the abuses, who perpetrated them, and what the formal investigations revealed. Sanchez also shows how the Bush Administration led America into a strategic blunder of historic proportions. He details the cynical use of the Iraq war for political gain in Washington and shows how the pressure of a round-the-clock news cycle drove and distorted critical decisions. At the same time, WISER IN BATTLE is a personal story about the rise to power of the former highest ranking Hispanic in the U.S. Army. From his poverty-stricken youth on the Texas banks of the Rio Grande River and joining the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at 16 to pay his way through college to service in Vietnam, Kosovo, and, most recently, Iraq , Lieutenant General Sanchez tells an essential story that explains the meaning and role of the U.S. Military in the new century. WISER IN BATTLE provides an insider’s view into what we’ve done wrong and what we’ve done right, as well as ‘A New Doctrine’ for the future of the country. more...

Price: $11.99

Through powerful first-person accounts, scholarly analysis, and compelling narrative, this book details the causes and ramifications of the genocides perpetrated in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. more...

Price: $39.95

This new book by Julian Jackson, a leading historian of twentieth-century France, charts the breathtakingly rapid events that led to the defeat and surrender of one of the key Allied powers, setting in motion the traumatic years of the Occupation, the Vichy regime, and the rapid escalation of World War Two. - ;On 16 May 1940 an emergency meeting of the French High Command was called at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris. The German army had broken through the French lines on the River Meuse at Sedan and elsewhere, only five days after launching their attack. Churchill, who had been telephoned by Prime Minister Reynaud the previous evening to be told that the French were beaten, rushed to Paris to meet the French leaders. The mood in the meeting was one of panic and despair; there was talk of. evacuating Paris. Churchill asked Gamelin, the French Commander in Chief, 'Where is the strategic reserve?' 'There is none,' replied Gamelin. This exciting book by Julian Jackson, a leading historian of twentieth-century France, charts the breathtakingly rapid events that led to the defeat and surrender of one of the greatest bastions of the Western Allies, and thus to a dramatic new phase of the Second World War. The search for scapegoats for the most humiliating military disaster in French history began almost at once: were miscalculations by military leaders to blame, or was this an indictment of an entire nation?. Using eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Julian Jackson recreates, in gripping detail, the intense atmosphere and dramatic events of these six weeks in 1940, unravelling the historical evidence to produce a fresh answer to the perennial question of whether the fall of France was inevitable. - ;first class, authoritative account...an intelligent, lucid history. - The Times more...

Price: $18.95