North Korea Undercover: Inside the World's Most Secret State

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State

Dana Priest, William M. Arkin · 320 pages

Describes the enormous, top-secret, invisible universe created by the government after 9/11 and describes why the system in place to keep us safe may actually be putting us in greater danger.

Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege

Will Potter · 256 pages

Examines the efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to target and prosecute environmentalists and animal rights activists, discussing people and events associated with radical activism, and describing political, legal, and public relations strategies that attach nonviolent acts of civil disobedience with "eco-terrorist" labels.

Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone

Scott Shane · 400 pages

A dramatic account of the cat-and-mouse game between the Obama administration and most-wanted terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki traces the President's shifting campaigns and the evolution of the robotic technology that ended Awlaki's life.

Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China

Philip P. Pan · 398 pages

A vivid chronicle of the world's most successful authoritarian state. Pan, who reported from China for seven years, eluded the police and succeeded in going where few Western journalists have dared. From the rusting factories in the industrial northeast to a tabloid newsroom in the booming south, from a small-town courtroom to the plush offices of the nation's wealthiest tycoons, he takes us insid

The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

Masha Gessen · 333 pages

This is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world. Handpicked by the "family" surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin seemed like a perfect choice for the oliga

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

Glenn Greenwald · 272 pages

Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide is the story of one of the greatest national security leaks in US history. In June 2013, reporter and political commentator Glenn Greenwald published a series of reports in the Guardian which rocked the world. The reports revealed shocking truths about the extent to which the National Security Agency had been gathering information about US citizens and intercepti

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 Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

Luke Harding · 346 pages

"IT BEGAN WITH A TANTALIZING, ANONYMOUS EMAIL: "I AM A SENIOR MEMBER OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY." What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man. Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old computer genius working for the National Security Agency when he shocked the world by exposing the near-universal mass surveillance programs of the United States

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

Barbara Demick · 314 pages

A remarkable view into North Korea, as seen through the lives of six ordinary citizens Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years--a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the unchallenged rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Taking us into a landscape most of us have nev

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

Blaine Harden · 256 pages

The heartwrenching New York Times bestseller about the only known person born inside a North Korean prison camp to have escaped North Korea’s political prison camps have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. No one born and raised in these camps is known to have escaped. No one, that is, except Shin Dong-hyuk. In Escape From C

Walking With The Comrades

Arundhati Roy · 182 pages

In early 2010, Roy traveled into the forests of Central India, homeland to millions of indigenous people, dreamland to some of the world's biggest mining corporations. The result is this... report from the heart of an unfolding revolution.

In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo

Michela Wrong · 353 pages

Known as "the Leopard," the president of Zaire for thirty-two years, Mobutu Sese Seko, showed all the cunning of his namesake -- seducing Western powers, buying up the opposition, and dominating his people with a devastating combination of brutality and charm. While the population was pauperized, he plundered the country's copper and diamond resources, downing pink champagne in his jungle palace l

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

Gil Durán · 352 pages

This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information

Andy Greenberg · 384 pages

Who Are The Cypherpunks? This is the unauthorized telling of the revolutionary cryptography story behind the motion picture The Fifth Estate in theatres this October, and We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, a documentary out now. WikiLeaks brought to light a new form of whistleblowing, using powerful cryptographic code to hide leakers’ identities while they spill the private data of

The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq

George Packer · 512 pages

"The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq recounts how the United States set about changing the history of the Middle East and became ensnared in a guerrilla war in Iraq. It brings to life the people and ideas that created the Bush administration's war policy and led America to the Assassins' Gate - the main point of entry into the American zone in Baghdad. The consequences of that policy are shown in

And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

Richard Engel · 241 pages

"Based on two decades of reporting, NBC's chief foreign correspondent's riveting story of the Middle East revolutions, the Arab Spring, war, and terrorism seen up-close--sometimes dangerously so. When he was just twenty-three, a recent graduate of Stanford University, Richard Engel set off to Cairo with $2,000 and dreams of being a reporter. Shortly thereafter he was working freelance for Arab new

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam

Eliza Griswold · 322 pages

Award-winning investigative journalist and poet, Eliza Griswold has spent the past seven years traveling between the equator and the tenth parallel: in Nigeria, the Sudan, and Somalia, and in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The stories she tells in "The Tenth Parallel" show us that religious conflicts are also conflicts about land, water, oil, and other natural resources, and that local

The Yellow Wind: With a New Afterword by the Author

David Grossman · 228 pages

An account of the author's three month journey on the West Bank of the Jordan River and his awareness of the moral dilemmas inherent in the Palestinian predicament.

Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition

Silky Shah · 280 pages

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

Jonathan Blitzer · 544 pages

A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

Howard W. French · 280 pages

Them: Adventures with Extremists

Jon Ronson · 336 pages

In the tradition of Bill Bryson, a fascinating and frequently hilarious look at extremists around the globe, and the conspiracy theory that unites them. Journalist Jon Ronson, the mild-mannered but ironic observer, learns some alarming things about the looking-glass world of them and us. Are the extremists onto something? Or has Ronson become one of Them?

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

Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad

Melanie Kirkpatrick · 362 pages

It is a crime to leave North Korea. Yet increasing numbers of North Koreans dare to flee. They go first to neighboring China, which rejects them as criminals, then on to Southeast Asia or Mongolia, and finally to South Korea, the United States, and other free countries. They travel along a secret route known as the new underground railroad. With a journalist's grasp of events and a novelist's ear