Other books that might interest you

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  Double Agent - My Secret Life...

  Kevin Fulton

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  '"I am a British soldier," I told my reflection. "I am a British soldier and I'm saving lives. I'm saving lives. I'm a British soldier and I'm saving lives..."'Kevin Fulton was one of the British Army's most successful intelligence agents. Having been recruited to infiltrate the Provisional IRA at the height of The Troubles, he rose its ranks to an unprecedented level. Living and working undercover, he had no option other than to take part in heinous criminal activities, including the production of bombs which he knew would later kill. So highly was he valued by IRA leaders that he was promoted to serve in its infamous internal police - ironically, his job was now to root out and kill informers.Until one day in 1994, when it all went wrong. . . Fleeing Northern Ireland, Kevin was abandoned by the security services he had served so courageously and left to live as a fugitive. The life of a double agent requires constant vigilance, for danger is always just a heartbeat away. For a double agent within the highest ranks of the IRA, that danger was doubled. In this remarkable account, Kevin Fulton - former intelligence agent, ex-member of the IRA - tells a truth that is as uncomfortable as it is gripping.

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  The Revolution Where You Live -...

  Sarah van Gelder, Danny Glover

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  YES! Magazine cofounder Sarah van Gelder sends dispatches from an eighteen-state journey across America, describing how people abandoned by big national institutions are developing creative community-based solutions to environmental and social problems. 
   
   
  YES! Magazine cofounder Sarah van Gelder was worried about the current state of American society. Environmental destruction, growing poverty, urban decay, rural decline-it's a long list. Can we turn this around, she wondered? Are there answers we haven't found yet? She confided her fears to a friend, who said to her, "If the universe could deploy the one small person that is you, what would it have you do?" Her answer surprised them both: "I'd go out traveling and see for myself." 
   
  So driving a twelve-year-old Toyota pickup truck with a tiny camper hand-painted by a Suquamish artist, van Gelder visited eighteen states and five Indian reservations, big cities and small towns. She wanted to meet people at the margins of society who were the least embedded in the big institutions that reward status quo thinking. 
   
  She came away believing that a profound change is sweeping the country. She went to all kinds of places and met all kinds of people who were dealing with very different problems, but what united them all was best summed up by a phrase she saw on a mural in Newark: "We the People LOVE This Place." Through the connection we each have to place-our physical and ecological place and also the human community-we are creating a new America.

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  Lyndon Johnson and the American...

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

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  With a new foreword: The New York Times–bestselling biography of President Lyndon Johnson from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Team of Rivals.   Featuring a 2018 foreword by the Pulitzer Prize–winning political historian that celebrates a reappraisal of Lyndon Johnson’s legacy five decades after his presidency, from the vantage point of our current, profoundly altered political culture and climate, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s extraordinary and insightful biography draws from meticulous research in addition to the author’s time spent working at the White House from 1967 to 1969. After Johnson’s term ended, Goodwin remained his confidante and assisted in the preparation of his memoir. In Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, she traces the 36th president’s life from childhood to his early days in politics, and from his leadership of the Senate to his presidency, analyzing his dramatic years in the White House, including both his historic domestic triumphs and his failures in Vietnam.   Drawing on personal anecdotes and candid conversation with Johnson, Goodwin paints a rich and complicated portrait of one of our nation’s most compelling politicians in “the most penetrating, fascinating political biography I have ever read” (The New York Times).  

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  Reagan at Reykjavik -...

  Ken Adelman

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  A dramatic account of the Cold War’s turning point, the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Iceland, by a key player in that weekend’s world-changing events. 
   
  In October 1986, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met for a forty-eight-hour summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. Planned as a short gathering to outline future talks, the meeting quickly turned to major international issues, including the Strategic Defensive Initiative (“Star Wars”) and the possibility of eliminating all nuclear weapons. Both men were at the height of their powers, and they had a rare opportunity to move toward peace. The meeting led to negotiations and concessions that neither side had predicted—and laid the groundwork for the most sweeping arms accord in history, adopted the following year, and the end of the Soviet Union a half decade later. 
   
  From his position as a participant in these historic events, Ken Adelman, Regan’s arms control director, is able to reveal the motivations, relationships, and conversations that led to the summit’s breakthroughs. His analysis as both a participant and historian provides an invaluable perspective on this uniquely significant episode. 
   
  Scrupulously researched and based on now-declassified documents, Reagan at Reykjavik tells the gripping tale of the weekend that changed the world. Adelman provides an honest, laser-etched portrait of President Reagan at one of his finest and most challenging moments—and, indisputably, one of the most significant triumphs of his presidency.

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  The American Consul - A History...

  Charles Stuart Kennedy

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  This definitive study of the U.S. Consular Service examines its history from the Revolutionary War until its integration with the Foreign Service in 1924. 
   
  As a British colony, Americans relied on the British consular system to take care of their sailors and merchants. But after the Revolution they scrambled to create an American service. While the American diplomatic establishment was confined to the world’s major capitals, U.S. consular posts proliferated to most of the major ports where the expanding American merchant marine called. 
   
  Mostly untrained political appointees, each consul was a lonely individual relying on his native wits to provide help to distressed Americans. Appointments were often given to accomplished authors, with notable members including Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fennimore Cooper, William Dean Howells, Bret Harte, and the cartoonist Thomas Nast.  
   
  Briefly traces the history of consuls from their creation in Ancient Egypt, this volume sheds light on the significant roles American consuls played throughout history, including in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War. This second edition continues the narrative to cover World War I, the Greek disaster in Turkey, and the early years of the Weimar Republic.

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  Barth Bonhoeffer and Modern...

  Josh Mauldin

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  Recent political events around the world have raised the specter of an impending collapse of democratic institutions. Contemporary concerns about the decline of liberal democracy are reminiscent to the tumult of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe. 
   
    
   
  Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived in Germany during the rise of National Socialism, and each reflected on what the rise of totalitarianism meant for the aspirations of modern politics. Engaging the realities of totalitarian terror, they avoided despairing rejections of modern society. Beginning with Barth in the wake of the First World War, following Bonhoeffer through the 1930s and 1940s in Nazi Germany, and concluding with Barth's post-war reflections in the 1950s, this study explores how these figures reflected on modern society during this turbulent time and how their work is relevant to the current crisis of modern democracy.

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