History – Events & Issues That Shape Our Modern World:

Thunderstruck by Erik Larson

In July 1910, a sensational news story spread around the world: An American doctor wanted in London for the gruesome murder of his wife -- she was poisoned, flayed, deboned and buried in the couple's basement -- was fleeing justice on an ocean liner headed from Antwerp to Quebec City. As he and his unsuspecting lover attempted to escape in disguise on a luxury ocean liner, a Scotland Yard detective chased them on a faster boat. Unbeknownst to the couple, the world followed the pursuit through wireless transmissions on both sides of the Atlantic. Newspapers far and wide breathlessly reported the chase as it happened. A public that had been skeptical of this new technology suddenly grasped its power.

In Thunderstruck, this splendid, beautifully written follow-up to his blockbuster thriller, Devil in the White City, Erik Larson again tells the interwoven stories of two men whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time. The genius is Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of wireless communication. The murderer is the notorious Englishman Dr. H.H. Crippen. Larson parallels the story of Crippen's unhappy marriage and eventual love affair with young Ethel Le Neve with Marconi's struggles to develop and perfect wireless technology in the face of adverse weather, envious fellow scientists, and everything in between.

In an era when wireless communication has a whole new connotation, Larson beautifully captures the awe that greeted early wireless transmissions on shipboard: "First-time passengers often seemed mesmerized by the blue spark fired with each touch of the key and the crack of miniature thunder that followed." Larson's gift for rendering an historical era with vibrant tactility and filling it with surprising personalities makes Thunderstruck an irresistible tale.

http://www.amazon.com/Thunderstruck-Erik-Larson/dp/1400080665/ref=ed_oe_h/104-9438009-5029500

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan

On April 14, 1935, the biggest dust storm on record descended over five states, from the Dakotas to Amarillo, Texas. The Dust Bowl was the product of reckless, market-driven farming that had so abused the land that, when dry weather came, the wind lifted up millions of acres of topsoil and whipped it around in "black blizzards" that were like a biblical plague. But the plague was man-made: the plains weren't suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster—the Depression—and natural disaster—eight years of drought—resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan details with stunning specificity.

The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. The Worst Hard Time paints an unforgettable picture of a society in "terminal disorder": banks closed, stores bankrupt, people bartering eggs for shoes, hospitals that could not be reached on roads impassable with dust.

The Worst Hard Time won the 2006 National Book Award for non-fiction and is a searing history of the economic and ecological collapse of the southern Great Plains during the 1930s. With characters who seem to have sprung from a novel by Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, and Egan's powerful writing, this account will long remain in readers' minds. This was a nightmare for the ages, and a time when life and hell were the same thing.

http://www.amazon.com/Worst-Hard-Time-Survived-American/dp/061834697X/ref=ed_oe_h/103-8906807-2797459

DEFCON-2: Standing on the Brink of Nuclear War During the Cuban Missile Crisis by Norman Polmar and John D. Gresham

Spy-satellite and aerial-reconnaissance photos reveal that one of the United States' bitterest enemies may be acquiring weapons of mass destruction and the means to use them against the American homeland. This is the true story of the most terrifying moment in the 45-year Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union: the Cuban Missile Crisis. Veteran military analysts Norman Polmar and John D. Gresham tell the terrifying tale in DEFCON-2 with the help of hundreds of recently declassified U.S. and Soviet documents, as well as interviews of numerous former spies, military figures, and government officials who speak out here for the first time to fully reveal how close the world came to Armageddon in October 1962.

After the Korean War, the Americans used satellite reconnaissance, U-2 flights, and submarine surveillance to carefully monitor the Soviet's conventional arsenal. But the Soviets a contrived low cost, low-tech means to blind American surveillance. It had a name—maskirovka or “masking," and this is how the Soviets delivered dozens of IRBMs, SAMs and longer-range SS-4 missiles with one-megaton nuclear warheads to Cuba before Washington grasped just exactly what was going on. If U.S. forces invaded Cuba, the Soviet teams on the island may well have driven them off with tactical nukes, kindling a thermonuclear Armageddon.

Anyone who lived through it remembers the terror that for thirteen days, the future seemed to hang by a thread. DEFCON-2 is the best single volume on the Cuban Missile Crisis published and is an important contribution to the history of the Cold War. Beyond the military and political facts of the crisis, Polmar and Gresham sketch the personalities that created and coped with the crisis and show us how close we came to the edge.

http://www.amazon.com/DEFCON-2-Standing-Nuclear-During-Missile/dp/0471670227/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-1856836-8503159?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196891761&sr=1-1

Man o' War: A Legend Like Lightning by Dorothy Ours

Man o' War is the extraordinary story of the legendary racehorse and the people near him whose lives he changed forever. Born in 1917, Man o' War grew from a rebellious youngster into perhaps the greatest racehorse of all time. His lone defeat, suffered a few weeks before gamblers fixed the 1919 World Series, spawned lasting rumors that he, too, had been victim of a fix. Both sports were in desperate need of heroes who could restore confidence and integrity, and, at the same time, win back the favor of a disillusioned American public. Baseball got Babe Ruth; horseracing got Man o’ War.

Horseracing expert Dorothy Ours offers a biography of the phenomenal Man o’ War that is worthy of this great horse’s legacy. In so doing, she also tells the story of an America entering the Roaring Twenties—a country eager to forget the hardships of the Great War, throw off the restraints of post-Victorian Puritanism, and plunge headlong into the celebrity-mad Jazz Age. Man o' War explores a colorful sports struggle for integrity through the career of one of its brightest stars. The heroics of Man o' War, tribulations of his archrival Sir Barton (America's first Triple Crown winner), and temptations of their Hall of Fame jockeys and trainers weave a compelling tale of grace, disgrace, and elusive redemption.

Seabiscuit’s literal granddaddy, Man o’ War, is, with the possible exception of Secretariat, the most impressive and accomplished Thoroughbred racehorse of all time, and Man o’ War’s story, beginning in the years immediately following World War I, is every bit as dramatic as his offspring’s. Riveting and authentic, Man o' War illuminates the mystique of this legendary horse.

http://www.amazon.com/Man-War-Legend-Like-Lightning/dp/0312340990/ref=ed_oe_h/002-5009593-0044834

The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism by Ross King

While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris: The artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amidst scorn and derision from the French artistic establishment. Indeed, no artistic movement has ever been, at its inception, quite so controversial.

The Judgment of Paris chronicles the dramatic decade between two famous exhibitions—the scandalous Salon des Refuses in 1863 and the first Impressionist showing in 1874 - set against the rise and dramatic fall of Napoleon III and the Second Empire after the Franco-Prussian War. A tale of many artists, it revolves around the lives of two – Ernest Meissonier, the most famous and successful painter of the 19th century, hailed for his precision and devotion to history; and Edouard Manet, reviled in his time, who nonetheless heralded the most radical change in the history of art since the Renaissance.

With a novelist's skill and the insight of an historian, Ross King recalls a seminal period when Paris was the artistic center of the world, and a revolutionary movement had the power to electrify and divide a nation. Writing with zest and offering keen insights into the matrix of art, politics, social mores and technology, The Judgment of Paris charts the coalescence of a movement that changed not only painting for all time but also our way of seeing the world.

http://www.amazon.com/Judgment-Paris-Revolutionary-Decade-Impressionism/dp/0802714668/ref=sr_oe_1_1/105-6494713-9950000?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196891839&sr=1-1

The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise by Michael Grunwald

The Everglades was once reviled as a liquid wasteland and Americans dreamed of draining it. Now it is revered as a national treasure and Americans have launched the largest environmental project in history to try to save it. The Swamp is the stunning story of the Everglades saga of man's abuse of nature and his unprecedented efforts to make amends. Michael Grunwald takes readers on a riveting journey illuminating the natural, social and political history of one of America's most beguiling but least understood patches of land.

The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and reclaim it, and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will. The Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast by converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations. Though the southern Everglades was preserved as a national park, it soon deteriorated into an ecological mess.

In The Swamp, Grunwald, a prize-winning national reporter for The Washington Post, strikes just the right balance of awe, ire, and analysis in his masterly narrative of the history of the Everglades. This provocative book combines history and investigative journalism to explore not only the Everglades but also the larger tensions of a society's relationship with the environment. It is a riveting story, the definitive account of south Florida's incredible journey from natural marshland to man-made megalopolis and about the evolution of a reviled bog into America's -- if not the world's -- most valuable wetland.

http://www.amazon.com/Swamp-Everglades-Florida-Politics-Paradise/dp/0743251059/ref=sr_oe_1_2/103-2895284-0742263?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196891869&sr=1-1

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

When does American history begin? The old answer used to be with the 1492 arrival of the Europeans, but that answer is no longer historically correct. During the last thirty years historians, geographers and archaeologists have built up an arsenal of evidence about the residents of North America after the ice receded and before the Europeans arrived. 1491 is not the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party.

Every American knows that Columbus found a vast new world in 1492. Most imagine it was a thinly peopled paradise of plants, animals, and hunter-gatherers waiting for civilization. The reality, Charles C. Mann discloses, was very different – two continents teeming with languages, cultures, and mighty cities as big, rich and more populous than the capitals of Europe. Yet there was one thing the new world lacked – resistance to the diseases of the old. Mann presents evidence of a sudden calamity that was among the greatest epidemics in human history. Smallpox and other diseases inadvertently introduced by Europeans to a population without immunity left behind a land that was only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before.

Mann, a correspondent for Science and The Atlantic Monthly, dives right into this thorny topic in 1491 – one fraught with political tension and intertwined with a nation’s identity. His riveting portrait of the pre-Columbian Americas radically alters our understanding of the history of the Americas.

http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/140004006X/ref=sr_oe_1_1/105-0035643-1907653?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196891933&sr=1-1

The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry

What happens when science, politics, and human nature collide in deadly con­flict? In his powerful book, The Great Influenza, award-winning historian John M. Barry explores how early 20th­century advances in epidemiology and the efforts of heroic health profession­als left lasting legacies for today, but failed in the face of their own era's political, institution­al, and cultural obstacles. No disease the world has ever known even remotely resembles the great influenza epi­demic of 1918 that exploded across the world with unequaled ferocity and speed. It killed more people in twenty weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty years; it killed more people in a year than the plagues of the Middle Ages killed in a century.

In this first great collision between science and epidem­ic disease, even as society approached collapse, a hand­ful of heroic researchers stepped forward, risking their lives to confront this strange disease. Titans like William Welch at the newly formed Johns Hopkins Medical School and colleagues at Rockefeller University and others from around the country revolutionized American science and public health, and their work in this crisis led to crucial discoveries that we are still using and learning from today.

In this sweeping history, Barry explores how the deadly confluence of biology and politics created conditions in which the virus thrived. Barry captures the sense of panic and despair that overwhelmed stricken communi­ties and hits hard at those who failed to use their power to protect the public good. Society's ability to survive another devastating flu pandemic, Barry argues, is as much a political question as a medical one. The Great Influenza may also change the way we see the world. It's a topic that is as fascinating as it is deadly. You'll be the first in line for flu shots this fall.

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Influenza-Deadliest-Plague-History/dp/0670894737/ref=sr_oe_1_2/102-6319273-7112956?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196891961&sr=1-1

Oil: Anatomy of an Industry by Matthew Yeomans

In Oil: Anatomy of an Industry, freelance journalist Matthew Yeomans explores the role of oil in America - from driv­ing the U.S. economic engine, to consolidating the U.S.'s position as unilateral superpower - and explains the American consumer's love affair with gasoline and the automobile. Along the way, Yeomans offers a brief history of gasoline: where oil comes from, how the global crude oil market works, and how the price of oil is regulated and set. Illustrated with maps and graphics, Oil spotlights the companies involved in global oil production, considering their relationships with oil­ rich countries and the power they wield in the global marketplace. Finally, the book explains why a continued dependence on oil will soon inhibit America's growth and become a liability to its economy, environment, and national security - not to mention the security of hundreds of millions of others.­

The strength of this book lies in its first half, when Yeomans shows the importance of oil in world history during the last 125 years. After depicting the humble discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in the 19th century, Yeomans shows how it became the dominant force in diplomacy. Oil played a factor in both world wars, and since then, it's become even more prominent. Giant American oil companies saw great profit in the Arab world, and this helped feed, perhaps even create, the growth in American consumer culture after WWII. Then the Arab world real­ized that its oil was power and began to turn against Western megacompanies and the West itself.

If oil is the most significant industry of the past 100 years, this book is one of the most important accounts of that industry since Daniel Yergin's The Prize. From the origins of the petroleum industry in 1900 to the petroeconomics of 2000 and 2004, Yeomans’ Oil explains it all in a lively, engaging, and illuminating style. It's a story that's been told elsewhere, but Yeomans tells it deftly and concisely.

http://www.amazon.com/Oil-Anatomy-Industry-Matthew-Yeomans/dp/1565848853/ref=sr_1_1/103-5928442-6178268?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196891993&sr=1-1

China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia by James R. Lilley and Jeffrey Lilley

Ambassador James Lilley's memoir China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy In Asia begins with his childhood in China, where his father served with Standard Oil. Lilley left China to attend Exeter and Yale, but upon graduation, he was recruited into the newly formed CIA for what would turn out to be a career spent mostly back in Asia. After clandestine service in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Laos, Lilley became a member of the first official U.S. team posted in Beijing after President Richard Nixon's opening of relations with China. Shortly after returning to Washington to be the national intelligence officer on China, Lilley left the CIA to return to Asia as Director of the American Institute in Taiwan and, later, as ambassador to Seoul and then Beijing - the culmination of an extraordinary career.

Lilley offers firsthand accounts of America's crude "gunboat, oil can, and Bible" diplomacy in Asia at the turn of the last century through the more nuanced approach at the end of the Cold War. Lilley's unique personal history distinguishes his version of events from similar efforts by journalists. His vivid and enlightening account of the Tiananmen Square massacre includes details that could be known only by him, as he was U.S. ambassador to China at the time. That chapter, which details the strafing of the American embassy by Chinese soldiers and the clandestine housing of dissident Fang Lizhi, is among several in which the book is aided by Lilley's high perch in government.

Lilley and his family have at different times been helpless witnesses, tortured participants and active U.S. patriots in Asia throughout what has arguably been the region's most tumultuous century since the Mongol invasion. His insider's account of key policy decisions related to both Taipei and Beijing, as well as personal relations among Washington elites, adds considerably to our understanding of four critical decades in East Asia - and offers a great deal of wisdom about how Washington should manage relations with the region today. This impor­tant contribution to the crowded field of histories detailing Sino-U.S. relations in the 20th century is singular in its scope and perspective. Written with his son, a journalist, China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy In Asia is a must-read for students of Asia and intelligence work.

http://www.amazon.com/China-Hands-Adventure-Espionage-Diplomacy/dp/1586481363/ref=sr_oe_1_1/105-2043499-8575641?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196892026&sr=1-1

Civilization and It's Enemies: The Next Stage of History by Lee Harris

Lee Harris is one of a few scholars and commentators who recognize that September 11th was what the German philosopher G.W.E Hegel called a "world-historical moment;" that is to say, an event that forced a fundamental shift in the way we think about the world. In his acclaimed book, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History. Harris argues that if we want to defeat the Islamists we must understand them on their terms. "Our first task is to try to grasp what the concept of the enemy really means. Before September 11^th, 2001, the very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary (but) the enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the enemy always hates us for a reason, it is his reason, and not ours."

Harris explores everything from the concept of the enemy and the dangers of false tolerance to the nature of western rationalism and the chances of bringing democracy to the Islamic world. He not only works through why Islam's extremist adherents want to kill westerners, but, more importantly, why westerners are so reluctant to acknowledge this hatred. Harris takes readers on a historical tour through the stages of civilization from Sparta to the French Revolution to the present.

Civilization and Its Enemies, an extraordinary tour de force by America's "reigning philosopher of 9/11," Lee Harris. The author of three of the most controversial and widely shared pieces in the history of Policy Review, Harris has emerged as one of the most talked-about writ­ers of recent times. His work has been hailed by thinkers from across the spectrum and his message will change the way readers think ­about the war with Iraq, about terrorism, and about our future.

http://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Its-Enemies-Stage-History/dp/0743257499/ref=sr_1_1/102-7879586-1164939?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196892054&sr=1-1

Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation by Cokie Roberts

While much has been written about the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, battled the British, and framed the Constitution, the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters they left behind have been little noticed by history. Cokie Roberts brings us the women who fought the Revolution as valiantly as the men, often defending their very doorsteps. While the men went off to war or to Congress, the women managed their businesses, raised their children, provided them with political advice, and made it possible for the men to do what they did. The behind-the-scenes influence of these women - and their sometimes very public activities - was intelligent and pervasive.

Drawing upon personal correspondence, private journals, and even favored recipes, Roberts reveals the often sur­prising stories of these fascinating women, bringing to life the everyday trials and extraordinary triumphs of indi­viduals like Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Deborah Read Franklin, Eliza Pinckney, Catherine Littlefield Green, Esther DeBerdt Reed, and Martha Washington - proving that without our exemplary women, the new country might never have survived. Social history at its best, Founding Mothers unveils the drive, determination, creative insight, and passion of the other patriots, the women who raised our nation.

Roberts proves beyond a doubt that like every generation of American women that has followed, the founding mothers used the unique gifts of their gender – courage, pluck, sadness, joy, energy, grace, sensitivity, and humor - to do what women do best, put one foot in front of the other in remarkable circumstances and carry on. Founding Mothers is an intimate and illuminating look at the fervently patriotic and passionate women whose tire­less pursuits on behalf of their families - and their country - proved just as crucial to the forging of a new nation as the rebellion that established it.

http://www.amazon.com/Founding-Mothers-Women-Raised-Nation/dp/0060090251/ref=sr_oe_1_1/104-3473525-4284754?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196892079&sr=1-1

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson

The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson, author of Isaac's Storm, tells the spellbinding true story of two men, an architect and a serial killer, whose fates were linked by the greatest fair in American history: the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, nicknamed "The White City." Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America's rush toward the twentieth century.

The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair's brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country's most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his "World's Fair Hotel" just west of the fairgrounds -- a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.

The Devil in the White City draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. In this book, the smoke, romance and mystery of the Gilded Age come alive as never before. Larson's gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.

http://www.amazon.com/Devil-White-City-Madness-Changed/dp/0609608444/ref=sr_oe_1_2/103-7849723-6271819?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196892107&sr=1-1

Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand

Seabiscuit: An American Legend is the ultimate underdog story. Seabiscuit was an unlikely, champion; his legs were crooked, he had a sad little tail, and he was precisely, the color of mud. For two years, he floundered at the lowest level of racing, misunderstood and mishandled, as slow as growing grass, before his dormant talent was discovered by three men. One was Tom Smith, known as “The Lone Plainsman," a virtually, mute mustang breaker who had come from the vanishing frontier, bearing the secrets of horses. One was Red Pollard, a half-blind failed prizefighter and failing jockey who had been living in a horse stall since being abandoned at a makeshift racetrack as a boy. The third was Charles Howard, a former bicycle repairman who made a fortune by introducing the automobile to the American West.

Bought for a bargain-basement price by Howard and rehabilitated by Smith and Pollard. Seabiscuit overcame a phenomenal run of bad fortune to become one of the most spectacular, dominant and charismatic performers in sports history. Competing in the cruelest years of the Depression, the rags­-to-riches horse emerged as an American cultural icon, drawing an immense and fanatical following, inspiring an avalanche of merchandising, and establishing himself as the single biggest newsmaker of 1938.

The book builds toward two climaxes - the match race against War Admiral and the ever elusive Santa Anita Handicap. Although historical, the book has a novel-like suspense that keeps the uninformed reader rapt and engrossed. This book, which describes the regional split between east and west coast race horses, fundamentally describes the potential and scrappy nature of the American west. A terrific read.

http://www.amazon.com/Seabiscuit-American-Legend-Laura-Hillenbrand/dp/0375502912/ref=sr_oe_2_1/104-2200904-3783953?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196892133&sr=1-2

The New Jackals: Ramzi Youser, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism by Simon Reeve

In the aftermath of the despicable terrorist attacks that took place on September 11, 2001, fingers are being pointed in the direction of Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden. In The New Jackals, journalist Simon Reeve documents the activities and motives of bin Laden and his accomplice Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 bomb blast at the World Trade Center. Written prior to the destruction of the World Trade Center, Reeve's book offers some clues to the mind-set behind the mass murder of inno­cents and stands as a chilling and prophetic early warning of a new era in the war against global terrorism.­

Drawing on unpublished reports, interrogation files, interviews with senior FBI agents who hunted Yousef, intelligence sources and government figures including Benazir Bhutto, Simon Reeve gives a harrowing account of Yousef's bombings, offers a revealing insight into his background, and details the FBI's man-hunt to catch him. Reeve explains how Yousef was one of bin Laden's first operatives and documents bin Laden's life and emergence as the leader of a potent terrorist organization, giving fascinating insights into the man President Clinton has called "the pre-eminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today."

Highly detailed and yet immensely readable, The New Jackals sheds new light on two of the world's most notorious terrorists. Reeve warns that Yousef and bin Laden are just the first of a new breed of terrorist, men with no restrictions on mass killing. He also offers evidence that bin Laden's organization may already have chemical and nuclear weapons and explains why the world could soon face attacks by terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.

http://www.amazon.com/New-Jackals-Simon-Reeve/dp/0233050485/ref=sr_1_4/105-1156499-2035647?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196892163&sr=1-4

Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II's Heroic Army of Deception by Philip Gerard

They were masters of the craft of illusion and deception, and their greatest disappearing act was to vanish from history. The men of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops were recruited to become phantom warriors in a ghost army to help win the Battle of Europe. A thousand strong, they fought in more campaigns, from D Day to the Rhine River, with more Allied armies, than any other unit in the European Theater of Operations - yet not even their fellow American soldiers were aware of their presence. After Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., USNR, completed a tour of England and its special forces installations, the Hollywood star convinced the Navy brass to train an elite unit that eventually evolved into the only Army force of its kind. These elite soldiers counted among their number designer Bill Blass and painter Ellsworth Kelly, and was inspired by Hilton Howell Railey, the "P.T. Barnum of Deception."

The Special Troops' mission was two-fold: to deceive the German Army into believing that the Allies possessed more troops and material than they actually did and, even more heroically, to draw enemy fire on their position to allow other units to advance free of lethal resistance. Through the art of camouflage, sonic deception, and illusion this extraordinary troop of brave, ingenious men saved countless American lives-while sometimes losing their own. From the use of inflatable rubber tanks and howitzers to elaborate sound effects, fake radio transmissions, special effects artillery, and other elments of stagecraft, these shadow soldiers put their lives on the line for their brother soldiers and for their country-only to disappear from history and memory.

Secret Soldiers tells the astonishing story of this special troop whose mission was so top secret, information about it was only recently declassified. More than half a century later, these uniquely talented patriots can at long last take their place alongside the other honored veterans of World War II.

http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Soldiers-American-Designers-Deception/dp/B000H2MOSM/ref=ed_oe_p/104-4058059-6685563

“Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!” - Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History by Jeff Greenfield

Few people know the absurdities of American politics better then Jeff Greenfield, CNN's award winning political and media analyst. Now for all those millions of Americans who are still trying to figure how we got there, Greenfield takes us behind the scenes to explore Election Night 2000, the campaign that produced it, and the tumultuous weeks that followed it, and their surreal glory. From the long election battle itself to November 7 and its famous media flip-flops to its hard fought finale, Greenfield leads us through an Alice-in-Wonderland world of butterfly ballots, hanging chads and newsroom hysteria.

Breezy, witty, urbane, sophisticated and erudite all describe Greenfield's "You Are There"-style chronicle of what it was like to be at the CNN anchor desk election eve 2000. He flawlessly matches laugh-out-loud humor with genuine insight into the factors that shaped the Bush-Gore contest for the presidency and the bitter political trench warfare that was the fight for Florida. Making ample use of satire, skewering members of the working press, legal scholars of the left and right, and the political establishments of both Republicans and Democrats, Greenfield captures the sublime and the ridiculous of this history-making election.

Greenfield takes readers through each of the pivotal moments in the campaign and

its aftermath, specifically highlighting the primaries, the conventions, the debates, the recount battles and the court arguments and decisions with a characteristically unpretentious approach that will be familiar to readers who have followed his career as a political commentator for ABC and CNN. And although the touch is light, the analysis is never lightweight. This is a valuable political commentary wrapped in a wonderfully entertaining package.

http://www.amazon.com/Strangest-Presidential-Election-American-History/dp/0399147764/ref=sr_1_1/002-0032111-6363242?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196892358&sr=1-1

Rule By Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids by Jim Marrs

A most thought provoking view of how world society evolves by influences too powerful that they are beyond everyday conception. One could easily be caught up in the views presented by Jim Marrs. The book is definitely worth the thought provocations.

If the world around is as Marrs suggests, then life and its values are not as we have all been taught or as they seem. Imagining that the only source of fuel additive for engines of war came from the "enemy" or that the enemy was the largest consumer of your product. How does that happen? Try to imagine how Hitler was able to take Germany from a bankrupt country with heavy reparations and still have resources to build a massive war machine. Where did the money to do that come from?

Whether one believes all that is written by Marrs, one cannot read this book without revising his thinking about the world around. Seemingly well documented, Marrs has done considerable background research in this subject matter. It may become one of the more important books that you will ever read on this subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Rule-Secrecy-Trilateral-Commission-Freemasons/dp/0060931841/ref=sr_1_1/002-1236034-8801668?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196892410&sr=1-1

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

When the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary put out a call during the late 19th century pleading for "men of letters" to provide help with their mammoth undertaking, hundreds of responses came forth. The compilation of the OED, begun in 1857, was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American expatriate in England and a Civil War veteran, was actually a certified lunatic who turned in his dictionary entries from the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

Simon Winchester, author of The Map That Changed the World, traces the origins of the drive to create a "Big Dictionary" down through Murray and far back into the past; the result is a fascinating compact history of the English language. That Murray and Minor, whose lives took such wildly disparate turns yet were united in their fierce love of language, were able to view one another as peers and foster a warm friendship is just one of the delicately turned subplots of this compelling book. For nearly 20 years, Murray and Minor corresponded regularly regarding the finer points of their lexicographical endeavors.

The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary and literary history. The Oxford English Dictionary still stands as the distinctive and definitive history of the English Language.

http://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dictionary/dp/0060839783/ref=pd_bbs_2/103-7964279-0467041?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196892480&sr=1-2

The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw

Veteran reporter and NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw went to France to make a documentary marking the 40th anniversary of D-day in 1984. Although he was thoroughly briefed on the historical background of the invasion, he was totally unprepared for how it would affect him emotionally. Flooded with childhood memories of World War II, Brokaw began asking veterans at the ceremony to revisit their past and talk about what happened, triggering a chain reaction of war-torn confessions and Brokaw's compulsion to capture their experiences.

The Greatest Generation is more than a mere chronicle of a tumultuous time. It's history made personal by a cast of everyday people transformed by extraordinary circumstances: the first women to break the homemaker mold, minorities suffering countless indignities to boldly fight for their country, infantrymen who went on to become some of the most distinguished leaders in the world, small-town kids who became corporate magnates. The greatest generation learned resourcefulness in adversity early - the Depression - and then they went to war against two of the greatest military machines ever created. They won the war, they saved their enemies through the Marshall Plan, and then they came home to re-create America - its communities, roads, businesses, government, arts, and sciences. They never complained and they never told their stories.

In this superb book, Brokaw goes out into America, to tell through the stories of individual men and women the story of a generation, America's citizen heroes and heroines who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America. This generation was united not only by a common purpose, but also by common values - duty, honor, economy, courage, service, love of family and country, and, above all, responsibility for oneself. The Greatest Generation salutes those whose sacrifices changed the course of American history.

http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Generation-Tom-Brokaw/dp/1400063140/ref=ed_oe_h/002-8992429-7620004

Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate by Bob Woodward

Twenty-five years ago, after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Gerald Ford promised a return to normalcy. "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over," President Ford declared. But it was not. The Watergate scandal, and the remedies against future abuses of power, would have an enduring impact on presidents and the country.

In Shadow, Bob Woodward takes us deep into the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton to describe how each discovered that the presidency was forever altered. Gerald Ford, found his incumbency tarred by the pardon he issued Nixon, and many believe he lost the election for that reason; Jimmy Carter felt compelled to say that he would never lie to the American people and was embarrassed when he could not sustain the fiction; Ronald Reagan was unaffected until the Iran-contra scandal broke; George Bush seemed unaware that the media could turn on him once Desert Storm was behind him and could not handle the results; and Bill Clinton entered scandal after scandal and made many of the same errors of dissimulation that Nixon did and barely survived, being only the second president in history to be impeached.

With special emphasis on the human toll, Woodward shows the consequences of the new ethics laws, and the emboldened Congress and media. Powerful investigations increasingly stripped away the privacy and protections once expected by the nation's chief executive. The common thread throughout these years was, in part, the altered attitude of the press, which at one time overlooked behaviors that now are the targets of aggressive investigative reporting. Presidential privacy in particular has faded with the times, and Woodward describes its continued erosion. Shadow is an authoritative, unsettling narrative of the modern, beleaguered presidency.

http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Five-Presidents-Legacy-Watergate/dp/0684852632/ref=sr_1_2/105-2276023-7467616?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196892567&sr=1-2