A Journey: My Political Life Tony Blair  
More Details

Tony Blair is a politician who defines our times. His emergence as Labour Party leader in 1994 marked a seismic shift in British politics. Within a few short years, he had transformed his party and rallied the country behind him, becoming prime minister in 1997 with the biggest victory in Labour’s history, and bringing to an end eighteen years of Conservative government. He took Labour to a historic three terms in office as Britain’s dominant political figure of the last two decades.

A Journey is Tony Blair’s firsthand account of his years in office and beyond. Here he describes for the first time his role in shaping our recent history, from the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death to the war on terror. He reveals the leadership decisions that were necessary to reinvent his party, the relationships with colleagues including Gordon Brown, the grueling negotiations for peace in Northern Ireland, the implementation of the biggest reforms to public services in Britain since 1945, and his relationships with leaders on the world stage—Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush. He analyzes the belief in ethical intervention that led to his decisions to go to war in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and, most controversially of all, in Iraq.

A Journey is a book about the nature and uses of political power. In frank, unflinching, often wry detail, Tony Blair charts the ups and downs of his career to provide insight into the man as well as the politician and statesman. He explores the challenges of leadership, and the ramifications of standing up, clearly and forcefully, for what one believes in. He also looks ahead, to emerging power relationships and economies, addressing the vital issues and complexities of our global world.

Few British prime ministers have shaped the nation’s course as profoundly as Tony Blair, and his achievements and his legacy will be debated for years to come. Here, uniquely, we have his own journey, in his own words.

0307269833
Love and Friendship Allan Bloom  
More Details

The author of the national bestseller The Closing of the American Mind offers a provocative indictment of the devaluing of love and intimacy in today's culture. Allan Bloom explores the language of love from the Bible to Freud, shedding penetrating light on the true nature of our most basic human connections. "(A) rich mine of a book".—New York Daily News.

0671891200
Mr. Standfast John Buchan  
More Details

In this nail-biting adventure story, Hannay must outwit a foe far more intelligent than himself; muster the courage to propose to the lovely, clever Mary Lamington; and survive a brutal war. Although Mr. Standfast is a sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps, it offers far more characterisation and philosophy than the earlier book. For its pace and suspense, its changes of scenery and thrilling descriptions of the last great battles against the Germans, Mr Standfast offers everything that has made its author so enduringly popular. This publication from Boomer Books is specially designed and typeset for comfortable reading.

160096964X
The Four Adventures of Richard Hannay: The Thirty-Nine Steps/Greenmantle/Mr. Standfast/the Three Hostages John Buchan  
More Details

Here, from the father of spy fiction, is the grand sequence of his great master spy's adventures in four famous books: The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr. Standfast and The Three Hostages.

From the introduction by Robin W. Winks:
John Buchan is the father of the modern spy thriller. This is so even though the Hannay books are not, strictly speaking, about spies at all...They are about penetration of the enemy, about lonely escape and wild journeys, about the thin veneer that stands between civilization and barbarism even in the most elegant drawing-room in London.

The Thirty-Nine Steps shows...an attractive man, not too young...and not too old, since he must have the knowledge of maturity and substantial experience on which he will draw while being able to respond to the physical rigors of chase and pursuit. Let the hero, who appears at first to be relatively ordinary, and who thinks of himself as commonplace, be drawn against his best judgment into a mystery he only vaguely comprehends, so that he and the reader may share the growing tension together. Set him a task to perform...Place obstacles in his path the enemy, best left as ill-defined as possible, so that our hero cannot be certain who he might trust. See to it that he cannot turn to established authority to help, indeed that the police, the military, the establishment will be actively working against him.

Then set a clock ticking...

0879238712
A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency William P. Bundy  
More Details

An authoritative historical assessment of american foreign policy in a crucial postwar decade.

William Bundy's magisterial book focuses on the controversial record of Richard Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's often overpraised foreign policy of 1969 to 1973, an era that has rightly been described as the hinge on which the last half of the century turned. Bundy's principled, clear-eyed assessment in effect pulls together all the major issues and events of the thirty-year span from the 1940s to the end of the Vietnam War, and makes it clear just how dangerous the consequences of Nixon and Kissinger's deceptive modus operandi were.

0809016249
Reflections on the Revolution in France Edmund Burke  
More Details

Burke's seminal work was written during the early months of the French Revolution, and it predicted with uncanny accuracy many of its worst excesses, including the Reign of Terror. A scathing attack on the revolution's attitudes to existing institutions, property and religion, it makes a cogent case for upholding inherited rights and established customs, argues for piecemeal reform rather than revolutionary change - and deplores the influence Burke feared the revolution might have in Britain. "Reflections on the Revolution in France" is now widely regarded as a classic statement of conservative political thought, and is one of the eighteenth century's great works of political rhetoric.

0140432043
The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H. H. Munro Sandie Byrne  
More Details

Saki is the acknowledged master of the short story. His writing is elegant, economical, and witty, its tone worldly, flippant irreverence delivered in astringent exchanges and epigrams more neat, pointed, and poised even than Wilde's. The deadpan narrative voice allows for the unsentimental recitation of horrors and the comically grotesque, and the generation of guilty laughter at some very un-pc statements.
Saki's short stories have been much reprinted as well as adapted for radio, stage, and television, but his novels, The Unbearable Bassington and When William Came, are almost unknown, his journalism and travel writing forgotten, and his plays rarely performed. Sandie Byrne argues that his reputation has been unfairly overshadowed by his predecessor Oscar Wilde, contemporary George Bernard Shaw, and successors P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh.

In a well-meaning introduction to the Penguin Complete Saki, No:el Coward reinforced the received image of Saki's work as celebrating an Edwardian or even Victorian milieu of privilege, luxury, and affectation; comedies of manners and light satire. Byrne shows that Saki's writing was no nostalgic evocation of a lost golden age, and that he was rarely concerned with the charm and delight Coward describes. His preoccupations were with England, the values of Empire, and the dangerous beauty of the feral ephebe. The threat to the first two of these triggered his alleged metamorphosis from cosmopolitan cynic and dandy-about-town to patriotic, even jingoistic, NCO, in a manner worthy of his blackest humor.

0199226059
Point of Departure James Cameron  
More Details

A classic 1967 memoir by one of the great journalists of the 20th century, Point of Departure collects James Cameron's eyewitness accounts of the atom bomb tests at Bikini atoll, the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the war in Korea, and vivid evocations of Mao Tse-Tung, Winston Churchill, and many others. Cameron, who was born in London in 1911, began his career in newspapers as a foreign correspondent; later, his television documentaries for the BBC and his column in The Guardian gave him a new audience in Britain and abroad. In the 1960s, Cameron was presented with the Granada Award for Foreign Correspondent of the Decade. He died in 1985.

1862078246
The Plague Albert Camus  
More Details

A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of unrelieved horror, Camus' novel about a bubonic plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature.

0679720219
Witness Whittaker Chambers  
More Details

Whittaker Chambers has written one of the really significant American autobiographies...penetrating and terrible insights into America in the early twentieth century. —Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

0895267896
40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin®, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania Matthew Chapman  
More Details

In this fascinating story of evolution, religion, politics, and personalities, Matthew Chapman captures the story behind the headlines in the debate over God and science in America.

Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education, decided in late 2005, pitted the teaching of intelligent design (sometimes known as "creationism in a lab coat") against the teaching of evolution. Matthew Chapman, the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, spent several months covering the trial from beginning to end. Through his in-depth encounters with the participants—creationists, preachers, teachers, scientists on both sides of the issue, lawyers, theologians, the judge, and the eleven parents who resisted the fundamentalist proponents of intelligent design—Chapman tells a sometimes terrifying, often hilarious, and above all moving story of ordinary people doing battle in America over the place of religion and science in modern life.

0061179450
American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays Noam Chomsky  
More Details

American Power and the New Manderins in the first significant work of social and political thought to come out of the Vietnamese catastrophe... I is the first draft of a declaration of intellectual independence, and though it deals with the past, its true significance must rest with the future." -Robert Sklar, The Natin

0394705556
The Culture of Terrorism Noam Chomsky  
More Details

With a detailed critique of Irangate, Culture of Terrorism demonstrates how America's ruling elite perpetrates a particularly vile form of cultural imperialism — accusing America's enemies of precisely those 'terrorist' attributes that might more accurately describe the actions of America itself.

0896083349
The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians Noam Chomsky  
More Details

Since its original publication in 1983, Fateful Triangle has become a classic in the fields of political science and Middle East affairs. This new edition features new chapters and a new introduction by Noam Chomsky and a foreword by Edward Said. Examining America's search for a 'reliable ally' in the Middle East, Chomsky untangles the intricacies of the US-Israeli-Palestinian relationship and lays bare the contortions, lies and misinformation that have been used over the years to obscure the real agenda. In the process he reveals the extent to which modern nation-states make claims for peace while actively pursuing very different objectives. In three new chapters Chomsky examines the Palestinian Uprising, the 'Limited War' in Lebanon and the Israeli-PLO Accords after the Oslo signings. This is a timely and much-needed corrective to the mythmaking that has obscured the real history of peace negotiations in the Middle East.

0745315305