Showing titles in World

More than twenty years after teaching English to China's first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler's twin daughters became the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand in their local primary school.

Kim Darroch was British ambassador to the US as the age of Trump dawned and Brexit unfolded. One of the UK’s most experienced and respected diplomats, Darroch was given the task of explaining Trump to the British and Brexit to the Americans. Choosing to resign after his confidential cables criticising the Trump administration were leaked to the press, Darroch’s unvarnished, behind-the-scenes account reveals for the first time the inside story of this tumultuous time and reflects more broadly on Britain’s relationship with the United States.

Stephanie Grisham rose from being a junior press wrangler on the Trump campaign in 2016 to assuming top positions in the administration as White House press secretary and communications director, while at the same time acting as First Lady Melania Trump’s communications director and eventually chief of staff. Few members of the Trump inner circle served longer or were as close to the first family as Stephanie Grisham, and few had her unique insight into the turbulent four years of the administration, especially the personalities behind the headlines.

World politics is entering a new phase, in which the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of international conflict will be cultural.

On November 22, 1963, Dr. Charles Crenshaw, an accomplished surgeon, tried to save John F. Kennedy's life - and then days later, the life of the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. His gripping, firsthand account contradicts the Warren Commission and years of public misperception, and illuminates a chapter in American history long cloaked in conspiracy. Writing with eye-opening immediacy, Dr. Crenshaw takes listeners into the emergency room to share the critical events at Parkland Hospital as he lived them.

Two Weeks in November is the thrilling, surreal, unbelievable and often very funny true story of four would-be enemies - a high ranking politician, an exiled human rights lawyer, a dangerous spy and a low-key white businessman turned political fixer - who team up to help unseat one of Africa's longest serving dictators, Robert Mugabe.

Evil Geniuses is the secret history of how, over the last half century, from even before Ronald Reagan through Donald Trump, America has sharply swerved away from its dream of progress for the many to a system of unfettered profit and self-interest for the few. As the social liberation of the 1960s finally ended in the chaos of Vietnam and Watergate, a cabal of rich industrialists, business chiefs, wide-eyed libertarians and right-wing economic radicals were waiting, determined to claw back everything they saw as rightfully theirs.

A Day Like Today charts John’s journey from the poverty of his post-war childhood in Cardiff, leaving school at 15, to the summits of broadcasting. Humphrys was the BBC’s youngest foreign correspondent, the first reporter at the catastrophe of Aberfan, an experience that marked him for ever; he was in the White House when Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign, in South Africa during the dying years of apartheid, and in war zones around the globe throughout his career. John was also the first journalist to present the Nine O’Clock News on television.

Packed with new reporting, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party tracks Trump’s improbable journey from disgraced and defeated former president to the dominant force, yet again, in the Republican Party. From his exile in Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump has become more extreme, vengeful, and divorced from reality than he was on January 6, 2021. His meddling damaged the GOP’s electoral prospects for third consecutive election in 2022. His legal troubles are mounting. Yet he re-emerged as the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Barbara A. Res worked directly with Donald Trump for 18 years on some of his biggest projects and had nearly unlimited access to him. Trump selected Res to be in charge of construction of Trump Tower, his greatest success as a developer. In this insider’s look at how the ambitious real estate developer became the most divisive president in recent US history, Res takes us into closed-door meetings, boardrooms, limo rides, and helicopter flights to really understand what makes him tick and show us why his claim to be a great dealmaker and savvy businessman is just a mirage.

A portrait of the current Israeli prime minister, one of Israel's more noticeable leaders in recent decades. Benjamin Netanyahu is currently serving his fourth term in office as prime minister of Israel, the longest serving prime minister in the country's history. Now Israeli journalist Ben Caspit puts Netanyahu's life under a magnifying glass, focusing on his last two terms in office.

Speeches of Note is a celebration of oratory old, new and unspoken. It is an obsessively curated, richly illustrated and sumptuously produced collection of speeches from throughout the ages. Some are surprising, inspiring, hilarious; others are moving, comforting, enlightening. Some of these speeches changed the course of history; others are all but unknown, even undelivered to this day, such as the chilling public announcement to be made by President Nixon should Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become stranded on the moon. All are extraordinary.

Sinn Féin is the most popular political party in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. A movement once synonymous with a paramilitary campaign is on the brink of taking real power through purely democratic means. But if Sinn Féin has mastered the art of electoral politics, it remains strangely opaque. Who really runs the party? How is it funded? And what can we expect of it as a party of government? Aoife Moore, Irish Journalist of the Year in 2021, explores these and other burning questions in The Long Game.

In the third volume of his Proof series, New York Times best-selling author Seth Abramson takes listeners on a deep dive into the Ukraine scandal, revealing it to be more sinister, complex, and transnational than previously thought. Abramson’s research on Trump administration corruption positions the Ukraine scandal as the foreseeable culmination of years of clandestine machinations involving scores of players, from Beijing to Budapest, Ankara to Caracas, Warsaw to Jerusalem, Kyiv to Riyadh, and Moscow to DC.

A powerful memoir from the late former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. With the same directness that defined his career in public service, Rumsfeld's memoir is filled with previously undisclosed details and insights about the Bush administration, 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also features Rumsfeld's unique and often surprising observations on eight decades of history. Both a fascinating narrative and an unprecedented glimpse into history, Known and Unknown captures the legacy of one of the most influential men in public service.

In Working he offers a captivating account of his life as a writer, describing the sometimes staggering lengths to which he has gone in order to produce his books and offering priceless insights into the art and craft of non-fiction writing. Anyone interested in investigative journalism and the pursuit of truth, in the writer’s process and the creation of literature, in the art of interviewing or simply the psychology of excellence will find a masterclass in all these subjects.

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE MILIBAND AND CORBYN YEARS, AND HOW THEY LED TO THE LABOUR LEFT'S DEMISE. For 42 years, Chris Williamson was a Labour Party member. In 2010, he was elected to Parliament to represent his home town. However, in 2019, he was unceremoniously suspended from the party after being subjected to a smear campaign, and he later resigned in protest at the betrayal. In this forensic memoir - free of his Labourist clutches - Williamson provides a unique ringside view.

Reclaiming Parkland details the failed attempt of Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman - cofounder of the production company Playtone - to make Vincent Bugliosi’s mammoth book about the Kennedy assassination, Reclaiming History, into a miniseries. It exposes the questionable origins of Reclaiming History in a dubious mock trial for cable television, in which Bugliosi played the role of an attorney prosecuting Lee Harvey Oswald for murder, and how this formed the basis for the epic tome.

It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo’s new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling “the Congo crisis.”

For the Palestinians who live in the narrow coastal strip of Gaza, the Israeli invasion of December 2008 was a nightmare of unimaginable proportions: In the 22-day-long action, 1,400 Gazans were killed, several hundred on the first day alone. And yet, while nothing should diminish Palestinian suffering through those frightful days, it is possible something redemptive is emerging from the tragedy of Gaza