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Benghazi!: A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink
Par Ethan Chorin. 2022
In recognition of the 10th anniversary of the attack in Benghazi, a noted Libya expert and eyewitness to the attack…
provides a startling reconsideration of one of the defining controversies of our era. Ten years after an attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, cries of "Benghazi!" still echo across America. But instead of a landmark event to be taken seriously, it has become a punchline, an empty word, or a code for controversy and political theatre. In this thrilling retelling, Ethan Chorin reveals Benghazi as a watershed moment in American history, one that helped create the world America lives in today: polarized, fearful, and dangerously unstable. Here, Benghazi is not a story contained in 13 hours, but a decades-long history beginning with the rise of Muammar Gaddafi, stretching through 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Arab Spring, and reaching into the present day, as the impact of the attack and ensuing controversy remain visible in America and around the world. Chorin draws on his own bone-chilling experience during the Benghazi attack, his expertise as a former diplomat and scholar of Libyan history, and new interviews with Libyan insiders, eyewitnesses, and key players like Hillary Clinton and Ben Rhodes. With this ambitious, engaging narrative, Chorin makes clear why Benghazi still matters so much ten years later—and why we can&’t afford to continue overlooking and misunderstanding it.We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel
Par Eric Alterman. 2022
A bestselling historian uncovers the surprising roots of America&’s long alliance with Israel and its troubling consequences Fights about the…
fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. But despite these arguments&’ significance to American politics, American Jewish life, and to Israel itself, no one has ever systematically examined their history and explained why they matter. In We Are Not One, historian Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins. Following Israel&’s 1948–1949 War of Independence (called the &“nakba&” or &“catastrophe&” by Palestinians), few Americans, including few Jews, paid much attention to Israel or the challenges it faced. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, however, almost overnight support for Israel became the primary component of American Jews&’ collective identity. Over time, Jewish organizations joined forces with conservative Christians and neoconservative pundits and politicos to wage a tenacious fight to define Israel&’s image in the US media, popular culture, Congress, and college campuses. Deeply researched, We Are Not One reveals how our consensus on Israel and Palestine emerged and why, today, it is fracturing.The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East
Par Nicholas Morton. 2022
How the Mongol invasions of the Near East reshaped the balance of world power in the Middle Ages For…
centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region&’s complex history. As The Mongol Storm reveals, during the same era the Near East was utterly remade by another series of wars: the Mongol invasions. In a single generation, the Mongols conquered vast swaths of the Near East and upended the region&’s geopolitics. Amid the chaos of the Mongol onslaught, long-standing powers such as the Byzantines, the Seljuk Turks, and the crusaders struggled to survive, while new players such as the Ottomans arose to fight back. The Mongol conquests forever transformed the region, while forging closer ties among societies spread across Eurasia. This is the definitive history of the Mongol assault on the Near East and its enduring global consequences.A WALL STREET JOURNAL AND USA TODAY BESTSELLERAn actionable strategy guide for busy professionals who want to level up their…
management game In The Manager's Handbook, Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty member, serial entrepreneur, and investor in over 100 companies, David Dodson, delivers an insightful work that describes, in highly practical detail, five skills every great manager needs to know if they want to get things done. Managers desperately want a crisp, how-to book that will show them—in one single title—the way to master the most important skills necessary to run an organization. The Manager's Handbook organizes the five essential skills of effective implementation into one, simple-to-read, easy-to-use, book. The Manager's Handbook is an essential playbook for managers, executives, board members, and other business leaders interested in dramatically improving their ability to lead people and inspire loyalty. In the book, you’ll learn how to get better at running any kind of organization by breaking down each essential skill into bite-sized sub-skills you can easily and quickly learn. You'll also find: Digestible tips and tactics for hiring the best people, onboarding, performance feedback, and improving the performance of underachievers A model script for how to begin an exit interview Ways to let people go from your organization gracefully, quickly, and with compassion The Manager's Handbook is an essential playbook for managers, executives, board members, and other business leaders interested in dramatically improving their ability to lead people and inspire loyalty.In this nuts-and-bolts guide, over 750 professionals speak candidly about “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of two dozen…
popular professions. Dispensing with romantic fantasies, real-world professionals — from nurses and pharmacists to architects and attorneys — speak about the day-to-day realities of their careers in six categories: College vs. Reality The Biggest Surprise Hours and Advancement The Best and the Worst Changes in the Profession Would You Do It All Over Again? Chapters include overviews of each profession, followed by helpful information about education, testing, and registration and licensing requirements; the number of positions across the country; and the average starting or median annual salaries. This valuable resource is filled with the open, personal insights and observations most students and career-changers want — and need — to make informed decisions about what they will do with the rest of their lives.A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan: Empire and Decadence
Par Alistair Swale. 2023
Scholarship on Japan’s development from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century has, perhaps quite understandably, been dominated by…
attention given to Japan’s emergence as a world power through a succession of military conflicts, and the burgeoning of a modern literary canon. This book argues that the emergence of empire and high culture needs to be more thoroughly integrated with an awareness of popular culture in urban life, a culture that at times exhibited a less than whole-hearted enthusiasm for the trappings of 'civilization', - a culture that was, in a sense, ‘decadent’. It integrates coverage of popular culture across diverse media and platforms, accentuating the emergence of new modern forms that evolved from the inter-relation between textual, visual and performative traditions such as kōdan and gidayū. The commentary is seasoned with reference to contemporary narratives, aiming to capture more ‘on the street’ perceptions of momentous events such as war and natural disasters, as well as the more arcane or curious media sensations of the moment. These included exposés of scandalous conduct in high places, new fads in popular entertainments and riveting stories of human interest whether it be crime or tragedies of modern urban living.Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World
Par Bethany Allen. 2023
A Best in Political Books for 2023An acclaimed journalist on contemporary China lays bare the country's two-decade quest for global…
dominance and how the Chinese Communist Party coopted what Western leaders have long considered their most powerful tool in the fight for liberal democracy—capitalism—to expand its illiberal influence worldwide.Bethany Allen, the award-winning China reporter for Axios, shows that by tying profits to political acquiescence the Chinese Communist Party is forcing companies and governments around the world to accept its rules. The coronavirus pandemic marked the first time that the Party deployed its tool kit of economic coercion on an issue directly related to the health and well-being of quite literally every person in the world. But Western democracies aren’t helpless victims in Beijing’s game. The West created the conditions for the rise of authoritarian capitalism by divorcing political values from market structures.Written by one of the first American journalists to expose China's covert influence operations in the United States, Beijing Rules includes headline-making stories of Western institutions bowing to Beijing’s pressure—a glimpse of what America’s future may look like should liberal democracy come firmly under the thumb of authoritarian capitalism. Grounded in deep investigative reporting, it sounds the alarm about what we must do to prevent the loss of freedoms we now take for granted.Bandits in Print: "The Water Margin" and the Transformations of the Chinese Novel
Par Scott W. Gregory. 2023
Bandits in Print examines the world of print in early modern China, focusing on the classic novel The Water Margin…
(Shuihu zhuan). Depending on which edition a reader happened upon, The Water Margin could offer vastly different experiences, a characteristic of the early modern Chinese novel genre and the shifting print culture of the era.Scott W. Gregory argues that the traditional novel is best understood as a phenomenon of print. He traces the ways in which this particularly influential novel was adapted and altered in the early modern era as it crossed the boundaries of elite and popular, private and commercial, and civil and martial. Moving away from ultimately unanswerable questions about authorship and urtext, Gregory turns instead to the editor-publishers who shaped the novel by crafting their own print editions. By examining the novel in its various incarnations, Bandits in Print shows that print is not only a stabilizing force on literary texts; in particular circumstances and with particular genres, the print medium can be an agent of textual change.This book sheds light on the structure of “a unity with diversity” developed in the Qing imperial formation (1636–1912) by…
a case study of the Qing-Tibetan encounters in the eighteenth century. By analyzing historical and ethnographical materials, the book investigates the translation of Chinese histories and stone inscriptions into Tibetan, the transformation of the landscapes at Mount Wutai and Lhasa, and the transplantation of Chinese deities and medical practices to Tibet. It demonstrates the processes in which the cosmopolitan interlocutors reified imperial integrity while expressing their diverse longings and belongings. It concludes that the Qing’s rule over its cultural others was neither simply Sinicizing nor colonizing, but a translational process in which multivocalic actors shared narratives, landscapes, and practices, while the emperor and tantric masters performed cosmic power over humans and metahumans. This book cuts across the fields of anthropology, history, Chinese Studies, and Tibetan Studies. It reflects on the concepts of sovereignty and ethnicity, and it also extends the methodological horizon of historical anthropology.&“A useful aid to understanding today&’s headlines as well as Israel&’s recent past.&” –Kirkus Review My Brother&’s Keeper tells the…
behind-the-scenes story of how the American President and the Israeli Prime Minister clashed about peace, war, and the future of the region.Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu viewed the world—and especially the Middle East—differently. The US president wanted to end what he saw as America&’s perpetual war against the Muslim and Arab worlds, use diplomacy to bring about a Palestinian state coexisting peacefully with Israel, and apply his signature foreign policy vision to reward the Islamic Republic of Iran in exchange for the scaling back of their nuclear pursuits. The Israeli premier wanted his country to thrive without the senseless bloodshed of terror and violence, and he was determined to protect the Jewish state from threats of annihilation by a member of the axis of evil that would one day be armed with nuclear weapons. Netanyahu wanted peace for peace, as well as the acceptance of Israel as a full-fledged part of the Middle East. In 2014, during a pivotal summer of terrorist violence, a war in Gaza, and the advancement of a nuclear deal with Iran, the two men clashed, threatening the US-Israeli strategic alliance and the future of the region. The Middle East would never be the same.Space and Everyday Lives of Children in Hong Kong: The Interwar Period (Global Histories of Education)
Par Stella Meng Wang. 2023
Deploying a spatial approach towards children’s everyday life in interwar Hong Kong, this book considers the context-specific development of five…
transnational movements: the garden city movement; imperial hygiene movement; nationalist sentiments; the Young Women's Christian Association; and the Girl Guide. Locating these transnational cultural movements in four layers of context, from the most immediate to the most global, including the context of Hong Kong, Republican China, the British empire, and global influences, this book shows Hong Kong as a distinctive colonial domain where the imperatives around race, gender and class produced new products of empire where the child, the garden, the school and sport turned out to be the main dynamics in play in the interwar period.Seeds of Turmoil: The Biblical Roots of the Inevitable Crisis in the Middle East
Par Bryant Wright. 2011
Dive into the biblical history that provides a clear, in-depth explanation of the origin, history, and significance of the Middle…
East conflict. Starting with Abraham, learn how he became the father of 3 religions, how his sons&’ rivalry planted the roots for turmoil, and how the nations of Israel and Palestine continue this stalemate in current affairs. The current conflict in the Middle East began long before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. It originated when Abraham sinned, distorting God's promise that he and his heirs would make a great nation and inherit the land now called The Holy Land. A historical and political account,?Seeds of Turmoil?clearly explains the biblical story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar and the ensuing sibling rivalry between Jacob and Esau, whose choices formed the world's three most influential religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.This fascinating insight into the beginnings of the conflict also explains what about the land is so important today. In addition, Wright sheds light on the conflicting Jewish, Christian, and Islamic perspectives and answers the question, Does God play favorites?A faith-based view on Middle Eastern relations, Seeds of Turmoil?provide the historical context for a modern understanding of how and why these current events take place.The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future
Par Victor Cha. 2012
From a seasoned advisor, &“a meaty, fast-paced portrait of North Korean society, economy, politics and foreign policy&” (Foreign Affairs). …
In The Impossible State, international-policy expert and former Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council Victor Cha pulls back the curtain on this controversial and isolated country, providing the best look yet at North Korea&’s history, the rise of the Kim family dynasty, and the obsessive personality cult that empowers them. He illuminates the repressive regime's complex economy and culture, its appalling record of human-rights abuses, and its belligerent relationship with the United States, and analyzes the regime&’s major security issues—from the seemingly endless war with its southern neighbor to its frightening nuclear ambitions—all in light of the destabilizing effects of Kim Jong-il's death and the pivotal and disquieting transition of power from tyrannical father to inexperienced son. How this enigmatic nation-state—one that regularly violates its own citizens&’ inalienable rights and has suffered famine, global economic sanctions, a collapsed economy, and near total isolation from the rest of the world—has continued to survive has long been a question that preoccupies the West. Cha reveals a land of contradictions, and delves into the ideology that leads an oppressed, starving populace to cling so fiercely to its failed leadership. With rare personal anecdotes from the author&’s time in Pyongyang and his tenure as an adviser in the White House, this authoritative, accessible, &“engrossing&” history (The Economist) offers much-needed understanding of the country&’s veiled past and uncertain future. &“An up-close, insightful portrait.&” —The Washington Post &“An eye-opening view of the closed, repressive dictatorship of North Korea. . . . A useful, pertinent work for understanding the human story behind the headlines.&” —Kirkus ReviewsWomen, Life, Freedom: Our Fight for Human Rights and Equality in Iran (Brown Democracy Medal)
Par Nasrin Sotoudeh. 2023
The Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal, presented by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State, recognizes outstanding individuals,…
groups, and organizations that produce innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world.Nasrin Sotoudeh is an Iranian lawyer and human rights activist who has been called "Iran's Nelson Mandela." Sotoudeh is a longtime opponent of the death penalty, advocate of improving imprisonment health conditions, and an activist dedicated to fighting for the rights of women, children, religious and ethnic minorities, journalists and artists, and those facing execution. As a result of her advocacy, Sotoudeh has been repeatedly imprisoned by the Iranian government for crimes against the state; she served one sentence from 2010 to 2013 and was sentenced again in 2018 to thirty-eight years and six months in prison and 148 lashes. Her work has been featured in the 2020 documentary Nasrin, by filmmakers Jeff Kaufman and Marcia S. Ross. For this important work, she is the recipient of the 2023 Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, marking the award's tenth year.Jerusalem in the Second World War (Routledge Studies in Second World War History)
Par Daphna Sharfman. 2024
This book is the first to present the unique story of the city of Jerusalem during the events of the…
Second World War and how it played a unique role in both the military and civilian aspects of the war. Whilst Jerusalem is usually known for topics such as religion, archaeology, or the politics of the Israeli–Arab conflict, this volume provides an in-depth analysis of this exceptional and temporary situation in Jerusalem, offering a perspective that is different from the usual political-strategic-military analysis. Although battles were raging in the nearby countries of Syria and Lebanon, and the war in Egypt and the Western Desert, the people who came to Jerusalem, as well as those who lived there, had different agendas and perspectives. Some were spies and intelligence officers, other were exiles or refugee immigrants from Europe who managed at the last moment to escape Nazi persecution. Journalists and writers described life in the city at this time. All were probably conscious of the fact that when the war came to an end, local rivalry and mounting conflict would take the centre stage again. This was a time of a special, magical drawn-out moment that may shed light on an alternative, more peaceful, kind of Jerusalem that unfortunately was not to be. This volume seeks to find an alternative approach and to contribute to the development of insightful research into life in an unordinary city in an unordinary situation. It will be of value to those interested in military history and the history of the Middle East.Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents
Par Minal Hajratwala. 2006
The PEN Award–winning chronicle of the Indian diaspora told through the stories of the author&’s own family. In this &“rich,…
entertaining and illuminating story,&” Minal Hajratwala mixes history, memoir, and reportage to explore the collisions of choice and history that led her family to emigrate from India (San Francisco Chronicle). &“Meticulously researched and evocatively written&” (The Washington Post), Leaving India looks for answers to the eternal questions that faced not only Hajratwala&’s own Indian family but all immigrants, everywhere: Where did we come from? Why did we leave? What did we give up and gain in the process? Beginning with her great-grandfather Motiram&’s original flight from British-occupied India to Fiji, where he rose from tailor to department store mogul, Hajratwala follows her ancestors across the twentieth-century to explain how they came to be spread across five continents and nine countries. As she delves into the relationship between personal choice and the great historical forces—British colonialism, apartheid, Gandhi&’s salt march, and American immigration policy—that helped shape her family&’s experiences, Hajratwala brings to light for the very first time the story of the Indian diaspora. A luminous narrative from &“a fine daughter of the continent, bringing insight, intelligence and compassion to the lives and sojourns of her far-flung kin,&” Leaving India offers a deeply intimate look at what it means to call more than one part of the world home (Alice Walker).Shah of Shahs
Par Ryszard Kapuscinski. 1985
This journalist&’s portrait of life in Iran just after the Revolution is &“a book of great economy and power [with]…
a supreme sense of the absurd&” (New Republic). Iran, 1980: the revolutionaries have taken charge. In a deserted Teheran hotel, Ryszard Kapuściński tries to make journalistic and human sense out of the mass of notes, tapes, and photographs he had accumulated during his extended stay in Iran. Just what happened and how? What did Khomeini have to offer that the Shah, who promised to &“create a second America within a generation,&” did not? Where did the revolution come from, and where is it going? After all this blood has been spilled, what has it given its people or the world? &“We have given [the world] poetry, the miniature, and carpets,&” says a rug merchant in Teheran. &“We have given the world this miraculous, Unique uselessness.&” Kapuściński tells a rich story that combines factual reporting with his own impressions and reflections. Always engrossing and frequently revelatory, it is a unique portrait of the psychological state of a country in revolution.Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays
Par Amos Oz. 1995
&“Powerful&” essays from a founder of the Peace Now movement and advocate for a two-state solution (Library Journal). The haunting…
poetry of [Oz's] prose and the stunning logic of his testimony make a potent mixture." —Washington Post Book World Amos Oz was one of the first voices of conscience to advocate for a two-state solution. As a founding member of the Peace Now movement, Oz has spent over thirty-five years speaking out on this issue, and these powerful essays and speeches span an important and formative period for understanding today's tension and crises. Whether he is discoursing on the role of writers in society or recalling his grandmother's death in the context of the language's veracity; examining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a tragicomedy or questioning the Zionist dream, Oz remains trenchant and unflinching in this moving portrait of a divided land. "[Oz is] the modern prophet of Israel." —Sunday Telegraph (UK)Excavating the Power of Memory in Japan
Par Glenn D. Hook. 2016
Excavating the power of memory offers a succinct examination of how memory is constructed, embedded and disseminated in contemporary Japanese…
society. The unique range and perspective of this collection will provide an understanding not found elsewhere. It starts with a lucid introduction of how memory plays a political and wider social role in Japan. Four case studies follow. The first takes up the divergence in memory at the national and subnational levels by analysing the memory of the battle of Okinawa and US military accidents in Okinawa prefecture, illuminating how memory in the prefecture embeds Okinawans as victims of mainland Japan and of the United States. The second explores whether Japan’s membership of the International Criminal Court represents a shift in the Japanese government’s negative remembrance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, demonstrating how both courts are largely portrayed as being disconnected in political debates. The third offers an analysis of the surviving letters of the Kamikaze pilots in order to interrogate and compare their presumed identity in the dominant collective memory and their own self-identities. The fourth untangles how the ‘memory of winds’ in Japanese fishing communities remains an expression of social thought that presides over the ‘transmission of meaning’ about fishermen's geographical surroundings. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Japan Forum.