The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden

Obama's Wars

Bob Woodward

Bob Woodward interviewed dozens of high-ranking government officials to compile this record of the discussions and thought processes behind President Obama's decision to increase the American presence in Afghanistan by 30,000 military in early 2010 and begin phase-out of American involvement in mid-2011. The author used his access well in documenting secret discussions and public pronouncements

The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth

Mark Mazzetti · 400 pages

An account of the transformation of the CIA and America's special operations forces into man-hunting and killing machines in the world's dark spaces: the new American way of war.

The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014

Carlotta Gall · 368 pages

The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole who Infiltrated the CIA

Joby Warrick · 248 pages

This work is a narrative account of the mysterious Jordanian who penetrated both the inner circle of al-Qaeda and the highest reaches of the CIA, with a devastating impact on the war on terror. In December 2009, a group of the CIA's top terrorist hunters gathered at a secret base in Khost, Afghanistan, to greet a rising superspy: Humam Khalil al-Balawi, a Jordanian double agent who infiltrated the

The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda

Peter L. Bergen · 502 pages

Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib

Seymour M. Hersh · 432 pages

Since September 11, 2001, Seymour M. Hersh has riveted readers -- and outraged the Bush Administration -- with his stories in The New Yorker, including his breakthrough pieces on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Now, in Chain of Command, he brings together this reporting, along with new revelations, to answer the critical question of the last three years: how did America get from the clear morning w

The Forever War

Dexter Filkins · 376 pages

National Bestseller Winner of the National Book Critics Circle AwardA New York Times Book Review Best Book of the YearOne of the Best Books of the Year: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Boston Globe, and TimeAn instant classic of war reporting, The Forever War is the definitive account of America's conflict with Islamic fundamentalism and a searing exploration of its

Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives

Jim Sheeler · 292 pages

Based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning story, Jim Sheeler’s unprecedented look at the way our country honors its dead; Final Salute Is a stunning tribute to the brave troops who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and to the families who continue to mourn themThey are the troops that nobody wants to see, carrying a message that no military family ever wants to hear. It begins with a knock a

13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi

Mitchell Zuckoff · 352 pages

The harrowing, true account from the brave men on the ground who fought back during the Battle of Benghazi. This book presents, for the first time ever, the true account of the events of September 11, 2012, when terrorists attacked the US State Department Special Mission Compound and a nearby CIA station called the Annex in Benghazi, Libya. A team of six American security operators fought to repel

Killer Elite: The Inside Story of America's Most Secret Special Operations Team

Michael Smith · 352 pages

"Sunday Times journalist Michael Smith reveals the 25-year history of a top-secret US Army special operations unit. 'The Activity', as it became known to insiders, has hidden behind a myriad of rapidly changing code names like Centra Spike and Grey Fox, and been publicly 'disbanded' and then secretly resurrected so often that it has achieved near mythical status, even among the world's special ope

The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan

Michael Hastings

Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War

Peter Maass · 320 pages

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

Jason Stearns · 416 pages

No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes

Anand Gopal · 320 pages

"As U.S. troops prepare to withdraw, the shocking tale of how the American military had triumph in sight in Afghanistan--and then brought the Taliban back from the dead. In the popular imagination, Afghanistan is often regarded as the site of intractable conflict, the American war against the Taliban a perpetually hopeless quagmire. But as Anand Gopal demonstrates in this stunning chronicle, top T

The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

James Bamford · 395 pages

James Bamford has been the preeminent expert on the National Security Agency since his reporting revealed the agency's existence in the 1980s. Now Bamford describes the transformation of the NSA since 9/11, as the agency increasingly turns its high-tech ears on the American public.The Shadow Factory reconstructs how the NSA missed a chance to thwart the 9/11 hijackers and details how this mistake

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

Robert Fisk · 1,136 pages

During the thirty years that award-winning journalist Robert Fisk has been reporting on the Middle East, he has covered every major event in the region, from the Algerian Civil War to the Iranian Revolution, from the American hostage crisis in Beirut (as one of only two Western journalists in the city at the time) to the Iran-Iraq War, from the Russian invasion of Afghanistan to Israel’s invasions

Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan

Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Thank You for Your Service

David Finkel · 254 pages

"Finkel, a journalist, follows the soldiers who serve in the Iraq War as they struggle to reintegrate into American society"--

Soldier Girls: The Battles of Three Women at Home and at War

Helen Thorpe · 397 pages

Describes the experiences of three women soldiers deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq to reveal how their military service has affected their friendship, personal lives and families, detailing the realities of their work on bases and in war zones and how their choices and losses shaped their perspectives.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Erik Larson · 464 pages

It is a story that many of us think we know but don't, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Thomas E. Ricks · 487 pages

The definitive military chronicle of the Iraq war and a searing judgment on the strategic blindness with which America has conducted it, drawing on the accounts of senior military officers giving voice to their anger for the first time.Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondant Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco is masterful and explosive reckoning with the planning and execution o

Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War

Evan Wright · 356 pages

They were called a generation without heroes. Then they were called upon to be heroes. Within hours of 9/11, America's war on terrorism fell to those like the twenty-three Marines of the First recon Battalion, the first generation dispatched into open-ended combat since Vietnam. They were a new pop-culture breed of American warrior unrecognizable to their forebears - soldiers raised on hip ho

Biological War: A Scenario

Annie Jacobsen · 406 pages

Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent Into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death

Jim Frederick

This is the story of a small group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division's fabled 502nd Infantry Regiment--a unit known as "the Black Heart Brigade." Deployed in late 2005 to Iraq's so-called Triangle of Death, a veritable meat grinder just south of Baghdad, the Black Hearts found themselves in arguably the country's most dangerous location at its most dangerous time. Hit by near-daily mort