Disordered World: An Exploration of Our Volatile Post-9/11 World

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 “

The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran

Hooman Majd · 344 pages

A revealing look at Iran by an American journalist with an insider's access behind Persian wallsThe grandson of an eminent ayatollah and the son of an Iranian diplomat, now an American citizen, Hooman Majd is, in a way, both 100 percent Iranian and 100 percent American, combining an insider's knowledge of how Iran works with a remarkable ability to explain its history and its quirks to Western rea

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

Evan Osnos · 416 pages

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

Eugene Finkel · 336 pages

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Timothy Snyder · 128 pages

In previous books, Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, "Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism a

In The Land Of Israel

Amos Oz

My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

Ari Shavit · 445 pages

Not since Thomas L. Friedman’s groundbreaking From Beirut to Jerusalem has a book captured the essence and the beating heart of the Middle East as keenly and dynamically as My Promised Land. Facing unprecedented internal and external pressures, Israel today is at a moment of existential crisis. Ari Shavit draws on interviews, historical documents, private diaries, and letters, as well as his own f

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World

Francis Wheen · 332 pages

Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield

Jeremy Scahill · 680 pages

In this book the author of "Blackwater," takes us inside America's new covert wars. As he reveals, the foot soldiers in these battles operate daily across the globe and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture, or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies of America. Funded through "black budgets", Special Operations

The Rise of Islamic State

Patrick Cockburn · 172 pages

Out of the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring and Syria, a new threat emerges. While Al Qaeda is weakened, new jihadi movements, especially ISIS, are starting to emerge. In military operations in June 2014 they were far more successful than Al Qaeda ever were, taking territory that reaches across borders and includes the city of Mosul. The reports of their military coordination and

Arguably: Selected Essays

Christopher Hitchens · 776 pages

For nearly four decades, Christopher Hitchens has been telling us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront when we grapple with first principles -- the principles of reason and tolerance and skepticism that define and inform the foundations of our civilization -- principles that, to endure, must be defended anew by every generation. Here, in Arguably, he invites readers to take a seat at a democr

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags

Tim Marshall · 266 pages

From the renewed sense of nationalism in China to troubled identities in Europe and the USA, to the terrifying rise of Islamic State, the world is a confusing place right now and we need to understand the symbols, old and new, that people are rallying around. For thousands of years, flags have represented our hopes and dreams. We wave them. Burn them. March under their colors. And still, in the tw

This Unquiet Land

Barkha Dutt · 336 pages

India's fault lines run wide and deep. Some of them go back centuries, others are of comparatively recent origin. The myriad villains these fault lines have spawned include rapists, murderers, terrorists, prophets of religious hatred, corrupt politicians, upholders of abhorrent caste traditions, opponents of free speech and dissent, apologists for regressive cultural practices, and external advers

Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue

Sam Harris, Maajid Nawaz · 144 pages

In this short book, Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz invite you to join an urgently needed conversation: Is Islam a religion of peace or war? Is it amenable to reform? Why do so many Muslims seem drawn to extremism? What do words like Islamism, jihadism, and fundamentalism mean in today's world? Remarkable for the breadth and depth of its analysis, this dialogue between a famous atheist and a former ra

Age of Anger: A History of the Present

Pankaj Mishra · 416 pages

From Goodreads (edited by me though): **One of our most important public intellectuals reveals the hidden history of our current global crisis** Modernity, secularism, development, and progress have long been viewed by the powerful few as benign ideals for the many. Today, however, botched experiments in nation-building, democracy, industrialization, and urbanization visibly scar much of the wo

The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

Fareed Zakaria · 304 pages

Examines the influence of democracy on politics, business and economics, law, culture, and religion in different regions of the world; explores the dark side of the democratic process; and reflects on the future of world democracy.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone

Rajiv Chandrasekaran · 336 pages

An unprecedented account of life in Baghdad’s Green Zone, a walled-off enclave of towering plants, posh villas, and sparkling swimming pools that was the headquarters for the American occupation of Iraq.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

Thomas L. Friedman · 528 pages

Friedman discusses how the key to understanding the 21st century is understanding that the planet's three largest forces -- Moore's law (technology), the market (globalization) and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loos) -- are accelerating all at once. And these accelerations are transforming the five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community. Friedman p

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

Charles P. Pierce · 293 pages

The Culture Wars Are Over and the Idiots Have WonA veteran journalist's acidically funny, righteously angry lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States.In the midst of a career-long quest to separate the smart from the pap, Charles Pierce had a defining moment at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where he observed a dinosaur. Wearing a saddle.... But worse than this was when th

ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

Michael Weiss, Hassan Hassan · 341 pages

"How did a group of religious fanatics, clad in black pajamas and armed to the teeth, manage to carve out a violent, fundamentalist "Islamic state" in wide swaths of Syria and Iraq? How did the widely celebrated revolution against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad descend into a movement led by a psychopathically violent band of jihadists dedicated to the destruction of America? And just who are these

While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within

Bruce Bawer · 262 pages

An American living in Europe reports on the failure of European liberals to confront Islamic extremism in their own countries. Traveling and talking with people in trains, cafés, restaurants, and on street corners, Bawer came face-to-face with the mix of moralistic smugness and ignorance that feeds the rising tide of hatred toward the United States. He found, as well, a widespread refusal to grapp

Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies, and Aid

Samantha Nutt · 228 pages

Countdown

Amitav Ghosh · 108 pages

Transcript of author's talks with cross-section of people from India, Pakistan, Nepal on the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan in 1998.

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