For a crucial period, Henry Crumpton led the CIA's global covert operations against America's terrorist enemies, including al Qaeda. In the days after 9/11, the CIA tasked Crumpton to organize and lead the Afghanistan campaign. With Crumpton's strategic initiative and bold leadership, from the battlefield to the Oval Office, U.S. and Afghan allies...

In Private Empire, Steve Coll investigates the notoriously secretive ExxonMobil Corporation, revealing the true extent of its power. ExxonMobil’s annual revenues are larger than the economic activity in the great majority of countries, equivalent to the GDP of Norway. In many of the countries where it conducts business,ExxonMobil’s sway over politics and...

The laws of financial boom and bust, it turns out, have more than a little to do with male hormones. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Dr. John Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk in men, especially younger men—significantly, the fear of risk is not reduced in women...

For three decades, the United States and Iran have engaged in a secret war. It is a conflict that has never been acknowledged and a story that has never been told.

This surreptitious war began with the Iranian revolution and simmers today inside Iraq and in the Persian Gulf. Fights rage in the shadows, between the CIA and its...

When a two-day-old Hawaiian monk seal pup is attacked and abandoned by his mother on a beach in Kauai, environmental officials must decide if they should save the newborn animal or allow nature to take its course. But as a member of the most endangered marine mammal species in U.S. waters, Kauai Pup 2, or KP2, is too precious to lose, and he embarks on...

One of the greatest American composers of the twentieth century, John Cage created music that defies easy explanation. Many writers have grappled with Cage’s music—which used notes chosen by chance, randomly tuned radios, and even silence—trying to understand what his music means rather than where it came from. An unprecedented and revelatory book, Where...

A farseeing and controversial analysis of the military America needs and the military we can afford from the director of research at Brookings.

Congress' plan for deficit reduction includes more than a one trillion dollar cut to defense spending over the next decade This, Michael O'Hanlon argues, isn't just unwise-it is potentially catastrophic. In this...

In All There Is, founder Dave Isay shares stories of love and marriage from the revolutionary oral history project, revealing the many and remarkable paths that relationships can take. From the excitement and anticipation of courtship to the deep connection of lifelong commitment, we discover that love is found in the most unexpected of places-a New...

Thinking the Twentieth Century is the final book of unparalleled historian and indomitable public critic Tony Judt. Where Judt's masterpiece Postwar redefined the history of modern Europe by uniting the stories of its eastern and western halves, Thinking the Twentieth Century unites the century's conflicted intellectual history into a single soaring...

An unforgettable voyage across the reaches of America and the depths of memory, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay tells the story of America's artistic birth. Following his family back through the generations, renowned critic Christopher Benfey unearths an ancestry-and an aesthetic-that is quintessentially American. His mother descends from colonial...

In this richly detailed history, Lizzie Collingham reveals how control of food and its production shaped the events of World War II. At least twenty million people died from starvation, malnutrition, and its associated diseases during the war, a number equal to the nineteen and a half million military deaths. Tracing the interaction between food and...

Sales permeates everything we do-not just moving product, but convincing people of an argument, or getting a job, or attracting a mate, or getting a child to eat his broccoli. And as Delves Broughton discovers, selling well is an art that demands creativity, mindfulness, selflessness, resilience, and more. He travels around the world to teach himself...

A vivid and astonishing reckoning with the Gaddafi endgame, a marriage of courageous reportage and beautiful storytelling from one of our most acclaimed and gifted international journalists.

In recent decades, the world has seen an unprecedented shift of people from the countryside into cities. As Steve Inskeep, host of NPR's Morning Edition, so aptly puts it, we are now living in the age of the "instant city," when megacities emerge practically overnight. One such place, Karachi, Pakistan, has grown from fewer than half a million residents in...

In today's fast-paced world, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the mind-boggling number of new things-whether products, ideas, or bits of data-bombarding us daily. But adapting to new circumstance is so crucial to our survival that "love of the new," or neophilia, is hardwired into our brains at the deepest levels. Navigating between our innate love of...

Just about every human being knows how to listen to music, but what does it take to make music? Is musicality something we are born with? Or a skill that anyone can develop at any time? If you don’t start piano at the age of six, is there any hope? Is skill learning best left to children or can anyone reinvent him—or herself at any time?

In The Conference of the Birds Caldecott Honor-winning children's book author and illustrator Peter Sís breathes new life into this foundational...