Salvador

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · 155 pages

An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “

Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles

Richard Dowden · 576 pages

Dowden spins tales of cults and commerce in Senegal and traditional spirituality in Sierra Leone; analyzes the impact of oil and the Internet on Nigeria and aid on Sudan; and examines what has gone so badly wrong in Rwanda and the Congo.

Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran

Elaine Sciolino · 416 pages

"Like the mirror mosaics found in Iran's royal palaces and religious shrines, there is more to the whole of the country than the fragments revealed to outsiders. Persian Mirrors captures this elusive Iran. Sciolino paints in astonishing detail and rich color the surprising inner life of this country, where a great battle is raging, not for control over territory but for the soul of the nation."--B

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

Jonathan Blitzer · 544 pages

China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power

Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn · 510 pages

"When China wakes, it will shake the world," Napoleon Bonaparte once remarked. That moment is now at hand. And in this book Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the Pulitzer Prize winning Beijing correspondents of The New York Times, bring to life the people, the politics, and the paradoxes of China as never before. China Wakes combines groundbreaking reportage with the authors' personal account

The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday

Neil MacFarquhar · 393 pages

Since his boyhood in Qadhafi's Libya, Neil MacFarquhar has developed a counterintuitive sense that the Middle East, despite all the bloodshed in its recent history, is a place of warmth, humanity, and generous eccentricity. In this book, he introduces a cross-section of unsung, dynamic men and women pioneering political and social change. There is the Kuwaiti sex therapist in a leather suit with m

Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World

Robin Wright · 307 pages

Written by a veteran reporter, this is an up close portrait of the fierce struggle between moderates and extremists taking place within the Islamic world today. Why don't Muslims challenge the violent extremists among them? Well, they do. Here she cites the clerics, comedians, and rappers who challenge al Qaeda violence; the women who are launching liberation movements; and the former jihadists wh

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.

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

Howard W. French · 280 pages

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

Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine

Eugene Finkel · 336 pages

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

John Sweeney · 338 pages

"North Korea is like no other tyranny on earth. Its citizens are told their home is the greatest nation in the world, and big brother is always watching: it is Orwell's 1984 made reality. Award-winning BBC journalist John Sweeney is one of the few foreign journalists to have witnessed the devastating reality of life in the controversial and isolated nation of North Korea, having entered the countr

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

One Nation Under Blackmail, Vol. 1: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein

Whitney Alyse Webb · 544 pages

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

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 Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos

Richard Lloyd Parry · 336 pages

Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

Matt Taibbi · 288 pages

"Smells Like Dead Elephants brings together notorious journalistic agitator Matt Taibbi's most incisive and hilarious work from his column in Rolling Stone. Written during a period in our history with no shortage of outrage to compel Taibbi's pen, these pieces paint a shocking portrait of our government at work, or rarely working. But Taibbi doesn't just hit inside the Beltway, he gets into the ac

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

Jeremy Scahill · 464 pages

On September 16, 2007, machine gun fire erupted in Baghdad's Nisour Square leaving seventeen Iraqi civilians dead, among them women and children. The shooting spree, labeled "Baghdad's Bloody Sunday," was neither the work of Iraqi insurgents nor U.S. soldiers. The shooters were private forces working for the secretive mercenary company, Blackwater Worldwide. This is the explosive story of a compan

Poverty, by America

Matthew Desmond · 343 pages

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

Jason Stearns · 416 pages

The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe

Peter Godwin

Journalist Peter Godwin has covered wars. As a soldier, he's fought them. But nothing prepared him for the surreal mix of desperation and hope he encountered when he returned to Zimbabwe, his broken homeland. Godwin arrived as Robert Mugabe, the country's dictator for 30 years, has finally lost an election. Mugabe's tenure has left Zimbabwe with the world's highest rate of inflation and the shorte

The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State

Lawrence Wright · 480 pages

"Eleven powerful pieces first published in The New Yorker recall the path terror in the Middle East has taken from a more peaceful time in 1990s Israel to the recent beheadings of reporters by ISIS.With the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. This collection draws on several

Hello, Bastar - The Untold Story of India's Maoist Movement

Rahul Pandita · 202 pages