There are non-fiction books dealing with political/historical issues published on a regular basis. Keeping up with them is difficult at best. Since I am still working on a review of The Last Great Senate, I thought I would pick out a few new books that might be of interest to you.
The blockquotes are pulled directly from the Publishers' websites, and the titles of the books are linked to the Goodreads page which also has links for purchase. I have read multiple reviews of these books, and they are linked to the newspaper titles within the blockquotes in case you are interested in more than the blurbs.
I haven't read these yet, although I have started Amsterdam and would really love to read The Blood Telegram, but if anyone has, please share your impression in the comments. Or if you would rather, let me know and you would be more than welcome to write a diary about any one of these or any other political titles.
Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America
by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman
Published by Touchstone
September 3rd 2013
336 pages
How safe are we? What do we sacrifice to feel safe? And who pays the ultimate price?
Two Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists examine one of the most sensitive post–9/11 national security investigations—a breathtaking race to prevent an al-Qaeda bomber from launching Osama bin Laden’s final attack on American soil.
In Enemies Within, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman lay bare the complex and often contradictory state of counterterrorism and intelligence in America through the pursuit of Najibullah Zazi, a terrorist bomber who trained under one of bin Laden’s most trusted deputies. Zazi and his coconspirators represented America’s greatest fear: a terrorist cell operating inside America.
Apuzzo and Goldman lift the veil of secrecy to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of our counterterrorism measures. This real-life spy story—uncovered in previously unpublished secret NYPD documents and interviews with intelligence sources—shows that while many of these programs are more invasive than ever, they are often counterproductive at best.
After 9/11, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly initiated an audacious plan for the Big Apple: dispatch a vast network of plainclothes officers and paid informants—called “rakers” and “mosque crawlers”—into Muslim neighborhoods to infiltrate religious communities and eavesdrop on college campuses. Police amassed data on innocent people, often for their religious and political beliefs. But when it mattered most, these strategies failed to identify the most imminent threats.
Enemies Within tackles the tough questions about the measures that we take to protect ourselves from real and perceived threats. Apuzzo and Goldman take readers inside America’s sprawling counterterrorism machine while it operates at full throttle. They reveal what works, what doesn’t, and what Americans have unknowingly given up.
Touchstone
New York Times
Los Angeles Times
Wall Street Journal
Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City
by Russell Shorto
Publisher: Doubleday
October 22nd 2013
368 pages
An endlessly entertaining portrait of the city of Amsterdam and the ideas that make it unique, by the author of the acclaimed Island at the Center of the World
Tourists know Amsterdam as a picturesque city of low-slung brick houses lining tidy canals; student travelers know it for its legal brothels and hash bars; art lovers know it for Rembrandt's glorious portraits.
But the deeper history of Amsterdam, what makes it one of the most fascinating places on earth, is bound up in its unique geography-the constant battle of its citizens to keep the sea at bay and the democratic philosophy that this enduring struggle fostered. Amsterdam is the font of liberalism, in both its senses. Tolerance for free thinking and free love make it a place where, in the words of one of its mayors, "craziness is a value." But the city also fostered the deeper meaning of liberalism, one that profoundly influenced America: political and economic freedom. Amsterdam was home not only to religious dissidents and radical thinkers but to the world's first great global corporation.
In this effortlessly erudite account, Russell Shorto traces the idiosyncratic evolution of Amsterdam, showing how such disparate elements as herring anatomy, naked Anabaptists parading through the streets, and an intimate gathering in a sixteenth-century wine-tasting room had a profound effect on Dutch-and world-history. Weaving in his own experiences of his adopted home, Shorto provides an ever-surprising, intellectually engaging story of Amsterdam from the building of its first canals in the 1300s, through its brutal struggle for independence, its golden age as a vast empire, to its complex present in which its cherished ideals of liberalism are under siege.
Doubleday
The Guardian
Huffington Post (Associated Press)
The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide
Written by Gary J. Bass
Publisher: Random House
September 24, 2013
528 Pages
A riveting history—the first full account—of the involvement of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1971 atrocities in Bangladesh that led to war between India and Pakistan, shaped the fate of Asia, and left in their wake a host of major strategic consequences for the world today.
Giving an astonishing inside view of how the White House really works in a crisis, The Blood Telegram is an unprecedented chronicle of a pivotal but little-known chapter of the Cold War. Gary J. Bass shows how Nixon and Kissinger supported Pakistan’s military dictatorship as it brutally quashed the results of a historic free election. The Pakistani army launched a crackdown on what was then East Pakistan (today an independent Bangladesh), killing hundreds of thousands of people and sending ten million refugees fleeing to India—one of the worst humanitarian crises of the twentieth century.
Nixon and Kissinger, unswayed by detailed warnings of genocide from American diplomats witnessing the bloodshed, stood behind Pakistan’s military rulers. Driven not just by Cold War realpolitik but by a bitter personal dislike of India and its leader Indira Gandhi, Nixon and Kissinger actively helped the Pakistani government even as it careened toward a devastating war against India. They silenced American officials who dared to speak up, secretly encouraged China to mass troops on the Indian border, and illegally supplied weapons to the Pakistani military—an overlooked scandal that presages Watergate.
Drawing on previously unheard White House tapes, recently declassified documents, and extensive interviews with White House staffers and Indian military leaders, The Blood Telegram tells this thrilling, shadowy story in full. Bringing us into the drama of a crisis exploding into war, Bass follows reporters, consuls, and guerrilla warriors on the ground—from the desperate refugee camps to the most secretive conversations in the Oval Office.
Bass makes clear how the United States’ embrace of the military dictatorship in Islamabad would mold Asia’s destiny for decades, and confronts for the first time Nixon and Kissinger’s hidden role in a tragedy that was far bloodier than Bosnia. This is a revelatory, compulsively readable work of politics, personalities, military confrontation, and Cold War brinksmanship.
Random House
The Asian Review of Books
Washington Post
New York Times
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