The ancient Greeks hard-wired a tragic sensibility into their culture. By looking disaster squarely in the face, by understanding just how badly things could spiral out of control, they sought to create a communal sense of responsibility and courage--to spur citizens and their leaders to take the difficult actions necessary to avert such a fate. Today, after more than seventy years of great-power peace and a quarter-century of unrivaled global leadership,...

"Jonathan Chait ... digs deep into Obama's record on major policy fronts-- economics, the environment, domestic reform, health care, race, foreign policy, and civil rights-- to demonstrate why history will judge our forty-fourth president as among the greatest in history"--

An International Affairs professor at Harvard University discusses the failures of the foreign policy elite since the Bush administration and makes suggestions for a fresh approach to improve global relations and stop violent extremism. "Dissects the faults and foibles of recent American foreign policy--explaining why it has been plagued by disasters like the 'forever wars' in Iraq and Afghanistan and outlining what can be done to fix it. In 1992,...

"From UFOs to Dr. Strangelove, LSD experiments to Richard Nixon, author Brian T. Brown investigates the paranoid, panicked history of the Cold War" -- From book jacket flap.

"Andrei Lankov has gone where few outsiders have ever been. A native of the former Soviet Union, he lived as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s. He has studied it for his entire career, using his fluency in Korean and personal contacts to build a rich, nuanced understanding. In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state. After providing an accessible history...

Presents a compelling assessment of Chinese-U.S. relations that challenges common misconceptions while explaining the importance of involving China in the promotion of global order while dissuading the country against regional aggression.

This is the story of a life of success beyond all expectations. A child of poverty dreams of a wonderful life of noble purpose and service to others and achieves it despite doubts, fears, and lack of money.

"The key to understanding the calamitous Afghan war is the complex, ultimately failed relationship between the powerful, duplicitous Karzai family and the U.S.--brilliantly portrayed here in its entirety for the first time by the former Washington Post Kabul bureau chief"--

Describes how nineteenth-century British efforts to open China to trade set in motion the fall of the Qing dynasty and started a war that allowed for the rise of nationalism and communism in the twentieth century.

"As a boy, Robert Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father tell evocative stories about traveling across America in his youth, travels in which he learned to understand the country literally from the ground up. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation of American geography often lost in the jet age. Along the way, he witnesses both prosperity and decline -- increasingly cosmopolitan cities...