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The Good Soldiers
Book Description It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it "the surge." "Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences," he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.
Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Bagdad almost every grueling step of the way.
What was the true story of the surge? Was it really a success? Those are the questions he grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the story of these good soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale--not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.
Faces of the Surge
Beneath every policy decision made in the highest echelons of Washington about how a war should be fought are soldiers who live with those decisions every day. These are some of the faces of the U.S. strategy known as "the surge," as photographed by David Finkel, author of The Good Soldiers.
 Soldiers of the 2-16 Rangers wait for permission to enter a mosque. |  Two soldiers try to collect themselves after their Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb. |
 |  Sergeant Adam Schumann, regarded as one of the battalion's best soldiers on the day he was sent home with severe post -traumatic stress disorder. | |
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No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah
"This is the face of war as only those who have fought it can describe it."-Senator John McCain
Fallujah: Iraq's most dangerous city unexpectedly emerged as the major battleground of the Iraqi insurgency. For twenty months, one American battalion after another tried to quell the violence, culminating in a bloody, full-scale assault. Victory came at a terrible price: 151 Americans and thousands of Iraqis were left dead.
The epic battle for Fallujah revealed the startling connections between policy and combat that are a part of the new reality of war.
The Marines had planned to slip into Fallujah "as soft as fog." But after four American contractors were brutally murdered, President Bush ordered an attack on the city-against the advice of the Marines. The assault sparked a political firestorm, and the Marines were forced to withdraw amid controversy and confusion-only to be ordered a second time to take a city that had become an inferno of hate and the lair of the archterrorist al-Zarqawi.
Based on months spent with the battalions in Fallujah and hundreds of interviews at every level-senior policymakers, negotiators, generals, and soldiers and Marines on the front lines-No True Glory is a testament to the bravery of the American soldier and a cautionary tale about the complex-and often costly-interconnected roles of policy, politics, and battle in the twenty-first century.
From the Hardcover edition.
The Best and the Brightest
"A rich, entertaining, and profound reading experience." -- The New York Times
"[The] most comprehensive saga of how America became involved in Vietnam. It is also the Iliad of the American empire and the Odyssey of this nation's search for its idealistic soul. THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST is almost like watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller." -- The Boston Globe
"Deeply moving . . . We cannot help but feel the compelling power of this narrative . . . . Dramatic and tragic, a chain of events overwhelming in their force, a distant war embodying illusions and myths, terror and violence, confusions and courage, blindness, pride, and arrogance." -- Los Angeles Times
"Most impressive, superb -- perceptive, literary, multidimensional." -- The New York Times Book Review
"A story which every American should read." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
Though it lasted for only six tense days in June, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war never really ended. Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to the ongoing intifada, is a direct consequence of those six days of fighting. Michael B. Oren's magnificent Six Days of War, an internationally acclaimed bestseller, is the first comprehensive account of this epoch-making event.
Writing with a novelist's command of narrative and a historian's grasp of fact and motive, Oren reconstructs both the lightning-fast action on the battlefields and the political shocks that electrified the world. Extraordinary personalities-Moshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser, Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin-rose and toppled from power as a result of this war; borders were redrawn; daring strategies brilliantly succeeded or disastrously failed in a matter of hours. And the balance of power changed-in the Middle East and in the world. A towering work of history and an enthralling human narrative, Six Days of War is the most important book on the Middle East conflict to appear in a generation.
The Art of War (Barnes & Noble Classics)
Sun Tzu's incisive blueprint for battlefield strategy is as relevant to today's combatants in business, politics, and everyday life as it once was to the warlords of ancient China. The Art of War is one of the most useful books ever written on leading with wisdom, an essential tool for modern corporate warriors battling to gain the advantage in the boardroom and for anyone struggling to gain the upper hand in confrontations and competitions.
Here Lionel Giles's famed 1910 translation, laced with commentary from illustrious Chinese experts, is brought up to date with relevant quotations from Western writers and thinkers. This new edition offers Sun Tzu's timeless classic, both with and without annotation, making it more accessible to aspiring leaders and military strategists than ever before.
Dallas Galvin, a writer and journalist specializing in international affairs and the arts, has reported on military affairs in Latin America and Asia and produced documentaries for the NATO Alliance.
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
In his first book since What Went Wrong? Bernard Lewis examines the historical roots of the resentments that dominate the Islamic world today and that are increasingly being expressed in acts of terrorism. He looks at the theological origins of political Islam and takes us through the rise of militant Islam in Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, examining the impact of radical Wahhabi proselytizing, and Saudi oil money, on the rest of the Islamic world. The Crisis of Islam ranges widely through thirteen centuries of history, but in particular it charts the key events of the twentieth century leading up to the violent confrontations of today: the creation of the state of Israel, the Cold War, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, the Gulf War, and the September 11th attacks on the United States.While hostility toward the West has a long and varied history in the lands of Islam, its current concentration on America is new. So too is the cult of the suicide bomber. Brilliantly disentangling the crosscurrents of Middle Eastern history from the rhetoric of its manipulators, Bernard Lewis helps us understand the reasons for the increasingly dogmatic rejection of modernity by many in the Muslim world in favor of a return to a sacred past. Based on his George Polk Award?winning article for The New Yorker, The Crisis of Islam is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what Usama bin Ladin represents and why his murderous message resonates so widely in the Islamic world.
See more photos, specs, and reviewsGuests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village
A delightful, well-written, and vastly informative ethnographic study, this is an account of Fernea's two-year stay in a tiny rural village in Iraq, where she assumed the dress and sheltered life of a harem woman.
See more photos, specs, and reviewsOverthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
"Regime change" did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush, but has been an integral part of U.S. foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the toppling of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, the United States has not hesitated to overthrow governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is but the latest example of the dangers inherent in these operations.
In Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer tells the stories of the audacious politicians, spies, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose foreign regimes. He details the three eras of America's regime-change centurythe imperial era, which brought Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Honduras under America's sway; the cold war era, which employed covert action against Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile; and the invasion era, which saw American troops toppling governments in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Kinzer explains why the U.S. government has pursued these operations and why so many of them have had disastrous long-term consequences, making Overthrow a cautionary tale that serves as an urgent warning as the United States seeks to define its role in the modern world.
"Overthrow is an infuriating recitation of our government's military bullying over the past 110 yearsa century of interventions around the world that resulted in the overthrow of 14 governmentsin Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Chile, Iran, Grenada, Afghanistan, and . . . Iraq."The Texas Observer
"In this fascinating history, Kinzer explores the reasons for such operations and what they accomplished. The pattern of regime-change operations has followed the arc of U.S. global engagement in the twentieth century . . . Across the cases, which are recounted in lively and colorful detail, Kinzer argues that the motives for regime change have ranged from the prosaic and the pecuniary to the principled and the strategic. But in each case, action was undertaken when foreign governments refused to protect U.S. interests as defined at the moment . . . A useful portrait of the presidents who have influenced the exercise of U.S. power and the interesting judgment that interventions have often succeeded in their immediate goals but failed to advance U.S. interests in the long term."G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs
"To be shocked and awed by history is not a common reading experience. One usually reserves such reactions for edgy fiction, juicy memoirs or newsy exposes. Yet Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq is as gripping as any of these . . . The book is more than just a retelling of American intervention abroad: rogue diplomats and covert agents, a malleable press, ignorance of local cultures, the influence of multinational corporations, the rhetoric of American righteousness. What's new here is how adeptly Kinzer draws the dotted line from each story to the next . . . Kinzer recounts this century of overthrow with the swift pen of a newsman. A former New York Times correspondent and the author of several works of nonfiction, he also provides a sharp critique of how the American press was often complicit in regime change."San Francisco Chronicle
"Stephen Kinzer has a grim message for those critics of the Iraqi war who believe George W. Bush to be America's most misguided, uninformed, and reckless president. Bush has had plenty of company in the past century...
Hunters: U.S. Snipers in the War on Terror
The war on terror-fought shot by shot, bullet by bullet, and kill by kill.
The ongoing War on Terror is unlike any conflict the United States Armed Forces have fought. There are no set battles. The enemy adheres to no warrior code or international law. Their only desire is to kill- or be killed. That's where the snipers of the U.S. Marine, Army, and Navy SEALs come in...
Here in their own words are the compelling and gripping true stories of the snipers whose sole purpose is to eliminate any and all enemy threats with a single bullet. From the deserts and rubble-strewn streets of Iraq to the endless labyrinth of the remote Afghanistan mountain country, this is life and death beyond the front lines of battle and behind the scope of a high-powered rifle.
Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate
This book presents an historical overview of women and gender in Islam. It is written from a feminist perspective, using the analytic tools of contemporary gender studies. The results of its investigations cast new light on the issues covered.
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