Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI 5

b

By Christopher Andrew

Commissioned by Britain's Security Service, the formal name of MI5, this history unrolls under the reputable authorship of a veteran scholar on intelligence. Two motifs dominate Andrew's work: specific domestic security investigations and MI5's organizational evolution in terms of personnel and leadership. Headed for its first three decades by its founder, Vernon Kell, MI5 earned its spurs in World War I by detecting German spies. The interwar years, Andrew recounts, were not MI5's best; failing to identify Soviet agents who penetrated MI5 itself, it suffered disruptive internal investigations until the 1970s. However, its successes against Nazi spies in World War II raised its reputation, which has generally remained high ever since with British prime ministers, except for the two Harolds, Macmillan and Wilson, who suspected MI5 of connivance against their administrations. Acquitting MI5 from accusations of domestic political interference, Andrew concludes with accounts of recent decades' cases of counter subversion, counterespionage, and counter terrorism. An important publication, this history will become part of the foundation of any collection on the history of intelligence agencies.

Check Catalog

FRANKLIN PIERCE

By Michael F. Holt


Pierce deserves his low ranking by historians, but not, Holt argues, because he was a bad man or politician. Handsome and athletic, he'd been a state representative at 24, a congressman at 29, a one-term U.S. senator at 34, and was New Hampshire's leading Democrat when he became the first dark-horse candidate to secure the presidency in 1852. With congressional, state-legislative, and governorship majorities, the Democrats were riding high, and Pierce aimed to keep it that way. He chose cabinet members to represent the party's factions and crafted his domestic policy to quash divisive squabbles. But his era's big issue was slavery. He backed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, arguing that it nullified all previous limitations on the extension of slavery, and stood by during subsequent terrorism in Kansas on the grounds that the Constitution barred the president from intervening. Despite foreign-policy successes and a squeaky-clean administration, he wasn't nominated for a second term because Kansas-Nebraska, foreboding all too well what lay ahead, fractured his beloved party. Another excellent American Presidents series volume.

Check Catalog

The Enemy in Our Hands: America's Treatment of Enemy Prisoners of War from the Revolution to the War on Terror

By Robert C. Doyle

Casting a wide net, this book delivers a scholarly, lucid overview of America's handling of POWs of all stripes: military, civilian, and irregular. Historian Doyle (A Prisoner's Duty) emphasizes that uniformed foreign soldiers received humane treatment from the Revolution through the Iraq invasion, peaking during WWII when hundreds of thousands of German troops brought to the U.S. received "relatively benign" treatment. Prisoners fared worse when Americans fought Americans. Loyalists during the Revolution were abused and often killed. Both sides during the Civil War neglected prisoners disgracefully. Historically, irregular fighters enjoyed no protection, but while soldiers rarely objected to mistreating opponents who didn't play fair, civilians were often outraged. In Korea, the screening of prisoners to separate combatants from noncombatants, and their future repatriation, led to prisoner uprisings. No ideologue, Doyle explains that sometimes abuse is unavoidable; at other times it's ineffective, infuriates world opinion, and puts American soldiers at risk for reprisals. Doyle delves deeply, and military buffs will consider it the definitive treatment.

Check Catalog

Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918

By Grigoris Balakian

Immediately after World War I, Grigoris Balakian, a prelate of the Armenian Apostolic Church, set down this account of the massacres of Armenians instigated by the Ottoman government during that conflict, telling his personal story of endurance and commemorating the sufferings of named companions as well as the Armenian nation. Crediting his religious faith for his survival to bear witness, he could also have credited his proficiency in German, which rescued him from tight spots during his ordeal, which started with the opening move of arresting Armenian leaders. Those not killed were force-marched through the desert to Syria—if they lived. Balakian fills the framework afforded by that procedure with painfully observant descriptions of cruelty, expressions of gratitude to German railroad officials and fellow Armenians who concealed him, and detached recording of the magnitude of the crime perpetrated against the Armenians. At present, when denial of this crime is still heard, Balakian's testimony stands as vital refutation.

Check Catalog

They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq

By Kelly Kennedy

A superior, blow-by-blow account of a courageous and embattled infantry company.Times News Service reporter Kennedy was embedded in Charlie Company, 26th battalion, 101st Airborne Division during its 2006-07 effort to pacify a nondescript Baghdad neighborhood. Although professionals, many with previous tours, most soldiers accepted the radical new rules of counterinsurgency. As the company commander explains, 400,000 people under their protection want to get on with their lives except for 4,000 insurgents, who look identical: "You will have to assume they want to hurt you while you treat them as neighbors." Embedded reporters tend to bond with their subjects, and Kennedy is no exception, delivering admiring portraits of dozens of officers and men. She vividly communicates their intense love for each other; none pretend to fight for anything but comradeship and pride in their profession. To these men, insurgents are a murderous, shadowy army that fights dirty, hiding in mosques and paying boys $50 to throw a grenade at passing patrols. Their increasingly powerful roadside bombs produce most American casualties in Iraq, including those in this book. Many chapters begin with portraits of soldiers who, readers quickly realize to their distress, will die or suffer crippling injuries. At the end of a 15-month tour, their area showed modest reductions in violence, but the soldiers were consuming sleeping pills daily, obsessing over lost friends and undergoing counseling. Few felt that they struck a significant blow against world terrorism. Small-unit heroics in Iraq, engrossing despite eschewing the traditional optimistic outcome.

Check Catalog

The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History

By Paul Clark

The Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, conventionally dated 1966-1976, has generally been studied narrowly as a political event. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals's Mao's Last Revolution (2006) is probably the best political history of these years. Yet the movement was also an attempt to create a modern socialist culture. Clark (Univ. of Auckland), author of two highly regarded studies of Chinese cinema, has put culture back into the Cultural Revolution. Here he focuses on opera, film, dance, music, fine arts, architecture, and literature of the period, examining audience response as well as the work of artists, performers, and writers. The culture of this period was highly politicized, of course, subjected to obsessive standards of ideological correctness or heresy. Those who took risks and failed suffered greatly, and the range of works approved for public consumption--"eight hundred million people watching eight shows"--was limited indeed. But cultural production in the Cultural Revolution also drew upon decades of experimentation and shaped the development of Chinese culture after the 1970s. Clark's work is an important contribution to scholarship on the Cultural Revolution.

Check Catalog

Abundance of Valor: Resistance, Survival, and Liberation: 1944-45

By Will Irwin

A thoroughly enthralling book for serious students of World War II, this is the labor of love of a Special Forces veteran with a rare talent for writing and research. He tells the story of the handful of small Jedburgh Teams dropped into the Netherlands to lead local resistance groups in offensive action. They immediately got sucked into the disastrous failure of Operation Market Garden, better known as the Arnhem operation (see Cornelius Ryan's classic A Bridge Too Far, 1974). After that mismanaged affair crumbled, they faced survival against long odds in the ranks of the hard-pressed Dutch Resistance, death at the hands of the still resilient German occupation troops, and in one case survival by a hair's breadth as a POW endured not only confinement but also grueling marches from east to west ahead of the advancing Russians. For exhaustive studies of little-known episodes that add much to general WWII knowledge as well as provide enthralling reading, this book is hard to beat.

Check Catalog

The Long Way Home: An American Journey From Ellis Island to the Great War

By David Laskin

This is an engrossing and moving story of 12 men, all of them immigrants to the U.S., who were transformed by their brief but intense experiences as soldiers in WWI. They included Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Slovaks, Jews, and Irishmen. Most of them did not relish military service, and some of them fled their homelands to avoid conscription. Before they were drafted or enlisted in the U.S. military, few of them understood or cared about the issues that had torn apart a Europe that they had left behind. These men were not atypical, since an estimated 20 percent of U.S. military draftees were foreign born. Laskin tells their individual stories with eloquence and feeling while avoiding cheap sentimentality As he traces their paths from bootcamp to combat in France, one can see their gradual merging with their fellow soldiers into a true "band of brothers." This is a superb chronicle that illustrates how some young men were transformed into Americans.

Check Catalog

The Long Way Home: An American Journey From Ellis Island to the Great War

By David Laskin



This is an engrossing and moving story of 12 men, all of them immigrants to the U.S., who were transformed by their brief but intense experiences as soldiers in WWI. They included Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Slovaks, Jews, and Irishmen. Most of them did not relish military service, and some of them fled their homelands to avoid conscription. Before they were drafted or enlisted in the U.S. military, few of them understood or cared about the issues that had torn apart a Europe that they had left behind. These men were not atypical, since an estimated 20 percent of U.S. military draftees were foreign born. Laskin tells their individual stories with eloquence and feeling while avoiding cheap sentimentality As he traces their paths from bootcamp to combat in France, one can see their gradual merging with their fellow soldiers into a true "band of brothers." This is a superb chronicle that illustrates how some young men were transformed into Americans.

Check Catalog

The Long Way Home: An American Journey From Ellis Island to the Great War

B

By David Laskin

This is an engrossing and moving story of 12 men, all of them immigrants to the U.S., who were transformed by their brief but intense experiences as soldiers in WWI. They included Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Slovaks, Jews, and Irishmen. Most of them did not relish military service, and some of them fled their homelands to avoid conscription. Before they were drafted or enlisted in the U.S. military, few of them understood or cared about the issues that had torn apart a Europe that they had left behind. These men were not atypical, since an estimated 20 percent of U.S. military draftees were foreign born. Laskin tells their individual stories with eloquence and feeling while avoiding cheap sentimentality As he traces their paths from bootcamp to combat in France, one can see their gradual merging with their fellow soldiers into a true "band of brothers." This is a superb chronicle that illustrates how some young men were transformed into Americans.

Check Catalog

The Line Upon a Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793-1815

By Noel Mostert

Traces the twenty-two-year conflict between France and Britain, profiling the war as one of history's longest and most devastating while profiling the new naval tactics and weapons it brought into action, in a narrative account that covers a range of topics, from the contributions of Napoleon and Nelson to ship-construction strategies and related land battles.

Check Catalog

Sabra And Shatila: September 1982

By Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout

The book covers the history of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which took place over three bloody days in the Lebanese capital Beirut. It was committed against Palestinian refugees by Lebanese militias, aided and supervised by the Israeli Army, which had encircled the district.Now available for the first time in English, this classic book is the most comprehensive, authoritative account of what happened and who was responsible. The author, Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout, was a Professor at the Lebanese University at the time. Driven by the horror of what occurred, she interviewed survivors and set up an oral history project immediately after the massacre to preserve testimonies. This book is the result. Following a general introduction, the first part contains interviews mainly with victims' families. The second part analyses statistical data and attempts to determine the number of victims. The conclusion, 'Who Was Responsible?', sheds light on the various parties responsible. Over five-hundred pages long, illustrated with photographs and maps, unrivalled in detail and scope, this book is a courageous attempt to make sense of what happened and an important political document in its own right.

Check Catalog

The Arabs: A History

 By Eugene Rogan



Rogan, an Oxford University lecturer, comments that Western intellectuals and leaders have an inadequate grasp of how Arabs understand their own history, which generates many grievances. He accordingly offers this political history of Arab lands since 1517, the year the Ottoman Empire conquered Egypt, adopting as his theme the response of Arabs to foreign rule or influence. In succession, Rogan presents the imperial structures of the Ottomans, then those of colonizing European powers, and his discussion of their evolution is guided by narratives of the numerous revolts and wars that punctuated the era of colonization. With that era's passing in the wake of World War II, leaving a legacy of boundaries drawn by the former empires, Rogan then focuses on the creation of Israel in 1948 as a point of protest for Arab leaders—though his accounts of intra-Arab wars and dictatorial governments underscore sources of conflict that have nothing to do with Israel. Framing modern history as viewed from the Arab world, Rogan eruditely furnishes Western readers with a background to current events.

Check Catalog

Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath

By Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman

Unlike historians who have spotlighted the titans MacArthur and Wainwright, Yamashita and Homma, who matched strategies in the Philippines in 1942, the Normans focus on the ordinary soldiers who bore the brunt of the wartime savagery. At the center of this searing narrative stands Ben Steele, a Montana cowboy remarkable for the fortitude that sustains him through fierce combat, humiliating surrender, and then the infamous Bataan Death March into imprisonment: four years of unrelenting slave labor, starvation, torture, beatings, and disease. Because Steele went on in his postwar life to capture his wartime ordeal in harrowing drawings (here reproduced), readers confront in both image and word the brutality of war and the desperation of captivity. Readers learn how news of Japanese atrocities inflamed an American passion for vengeance and justified horrific bombing raids, incendiary and then nuclear, against Japanese cities. But readers will find it hard to view such raids as fitting punishment of a bestial enemy after reading the Normans' chronicle of the bitter experiences of very human and often guilt-wracked Japanese soldiers. The narrative even humanizes the anguished Japanese commanders condemned by a victors' justice that held them accountable for offenses of out-of-control subordinates.

Check Catalog

Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution

By Joel Richard Paul

More than 200 years ago, three very different men found themselves with something in common. Silas Deane, a Connecticut merchant and politician; Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont (better known as Chevalier d'Eon), a top-level French spy; and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a French watchmaker and writer: these strange bedfellow were important, even vital, to the success of the American Revolution. It's a bit of a labyrinthine story, its details no doubt unfamiliar to many readers, its players forgotten or remembered for other things. Beaumarchais, for example, is best known these days as the author of The Barber of Seville and other plays. Paul traces the life of the three up to their coming together in 1776 and then follows them as they carried out a plan as complex and dangerous as any spy-novel plot, at one point, success hinged on d'Eon successfully passing himself off as a woman (luckily, he did that a lot, apparently). A rip-roaring account of the American Revolution, told from a fresh, and undeniably offbeat, perspective.

Check Catalog

War in the Pacific: 1941-1945

By Richard Overy

Examines the war against Japan in the Pacific Islands, starting with Pearl Harbor and the attacks on the US bases on Guam and Wake Island, and the battles fought in Guadalcanal, the Philippines, and the seas of the Pacific.

Check Catalog

Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security-from World War II to the War on Terrorism

 By Julian E. Zelizer

Written by a university professor, this history tracks the post World War II electoral competition on foreign policy between the Democratic and Republican parties. Zelizer focuses on every national political campaign since 1946, outlining the two parties' struggle (and that between factions within the parties) for advantage as an outgrowth of the constitutional tension between the Congress and the president for control of foreign affairs, pure partisanship, and each party's intuition about voters' attitudes toward the national-security apparatus. Favoring the Democrats in the 1940s, the electorate's switch to Republicans in 1952, reversion to the Democrats in 1960, and general preference from 1968 to 2008 for Republican leadership on national security guide the author's discussion. Foreign policy, as such, lies beyond the book's scope; instead, it is the domestic ramifications of events overseas, such as the draft and war casualties that characterize this detailed and evenhanded account. Covering election campaigns, election winners' interpretation of the results, and votes on Capitol Hill, Zelizer makes the case to general-interest readers that American politics have never stopped at the water's edge.

Check Catalog

Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II

By J. Todd Moye

Moye draws on records from the Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project while recalling the intense political negotiations behind the group's origins and development. Rather than focusing on their much-lauded combat achievements in Europe, he recounts how individuals were selected for training and their all-too-frequent encounters with racism in the Deep South. In several particularly moving passages, veterans recall the heavy load they carried to attain not only personal success but also achievement for their entire race. They knew the world was watching. Although readers may find the general history familiar, the personal nature of the examples Moye cites make it a far deeper and richer narrative then typical WWII fare. The expected framework from the NAACP to Eleanor Roosevelt is present, but so are dozens of names and events far beyond traditional mention. As both civil rights and U.S. military history, the Tuskegee Airmen comprise a worthy subject, while the author's friendly style should open the title up to even casual readers. Copious endnotes and a full bibliography add value.

Check Catalog

Crisis and Command: The History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush

By John Yoo

Using a popular technique for ranking American presidents, Yoo refracts their historical status through the lens of Article II of the Constitution. George Washington rates number one in Yoo's book for setting precedents: all his successors have the power to remove officials, to wage war, and to invoke executive privilege (keep secrets from Congress) none of which is explicit in Article II because of Washington. Yoo rates Lincoln and FDR second and third, respectively, for reasons familiar to history readers. Readers will learn about Supreme Court decisions that have pertained to the president's powers, along with Yoo's expansive interpretation thereof. Addressing criticism that the power pendulum has historically swung too far from Congress, Yoo rebuts with arguments that the legislature could, but rarely does, reclaim powers it has delegated to the executive. This will appeal to the core audience for constitutional law but will also draw interest based on the author's frequent TV appearances and his notoriety many critics regarded his legal advice to the Bush administration as anathema.

Check Catalog

The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War

B

By James Bradley

Bradley's first books, Flags of Our Fathers (2000) and Flyboys (2003), were sensationally popular World War II combat stories. His new one, about U.S.-Japanese diplomacy in 1905, represents a departure. Asserting a causal connection between diplomatic understandings reached then and war 36 years later, Bradley dramatizes his case with a delegation Theodore Roosevelt dispatched to Japan in the summer of 1905. Led by Secretary of War William Taft and ornamented by the president's quotable daughter Alice, it sailed while TR hosted the peace conference between victorious Japan and defeated Russia. As he recounts the itinerary of Taft's cruise, Bradley discusses attitudes of social Darwinism and white superiority that were then prevalent and expressed by TR and Taft. They modified their instincts, Bradley argues, in dealing with nonwhite Japan, and secretly conceded it possession of Korea. This is what Bradley asserts was a prerequisite to Pearl Harbor in 1941, a dubious thesis when the tensions of the 1930s stemmed from general Japanese aggressiveness, not its control of Korea per se. Bradley does fine on 1905 but falters when predicting the future.

Check Catalog

Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics

By Lewis L. Gould

Gould (Univ. of Texas) has long set a standard for the writing of superb political history, and this volume does not disappoint. Grounded in a host of manuscript collections, doctoral theses, scholarly writings, and contemporary articles, this book is unquestionably the definitive work on the seminal election of 1912, in the process superseding Frank K. Kelly, The Fight for the White House (1961); Francis L. Broderick, Progressivism at Risk (CH, Nov'89, 27-1692); and James Chace, 1912 (CH, Feb'05, 43-3599). The author ably recaptures the excitement of the presidential race between "Old Guard" Republican William Howard Taft, "Bull Moose" Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and Socialist Eugene Victor Debs. Certain conclusions, not usually captured by historians, make this work somewhat revisionist: the already existing voter decline was not checked by such a crucial race; Roosevelt and Debs were both poor political strategists, squandering their political strength by electioneering in weak locales; public revelations concerning Wilson's health and a possible extramarital relationship could have killed his candidacy. Perhaps most important of all, the Roosevelt-Taft split so weakened Republican progressivism that the GOP has remained on a rightward course for close to a century.

Check Catalog

John Marshall: Writings

E

Edited by Charles F. Hobson

"It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department," John Marshall wrote in Marbury v. Madison, "to say what the law is." As its Chief Justice from 1801 to 1835, Marshall made the Supreme Court a full and equal branch of the federal government. In so doing, he joined Washington, his mentor, and Jefferson, his ideological rival, in the first rank of American founders. His legacy extends far beyond Marbury, which held for the first time that the Supreme Court has the power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. Under his leadership, the Court upheld the constitutionality of a national bank, established the supremacy of the federal judiciary over state courts and legislatures in matters of constitutional interpretation, and profoundly influenced the economic development of the nation through vigorous interpretation of the contract and interstate commerce clauses. His major judicial opinions are eloquent public papers, written with the conviction that "clearness and precision are most essential qualities," and designed to inform and persuade the citizens of the new republic about the meaning and purpose of their Constitution.

This volume collects 200 documents written between 1779 and 1835, including Marshall's most important judicial opinions, his influential rulings during the Aaron Burr treason trial, speeches, newspaper essays, and revealing letters to friends, fellow judges, and his beloved wife, Polly. It follows Marshall's varied career before becoming Chief Justice: as an officer in the Revolution, a supporter of the ratification of the Constitution, an envoy to France during the notorious "XYZ Affair," a congressman, and secretary of state in the Adams administration. The personal correspondence gathered here reveals the conviviality, good humor, and unpretentiousness that helped him unite the Court behind many of his landmark decisions, while selections from his biography of George Washington offer vivid descriptions of battles he fought in as a young man.

Check Catalog

My Life With the Taliban

By Abdul Salam Zaeef

Keen observers of Afghanistan have invariably referred to that country as the graveyard of empires. In recent years, its political destiny has largely been affected by the policies of the Taliban movement. In this highly readable book, Western readers are given a glimpse of the movement's goals via the words of Zaeef, a former senior member of the Taliban who was held as an American prisoner, including several years in Guantánamo. This autobiography has been ably translated from the Pashto and edited by Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn (cofounders, AfghanWire.com), who are based in the city of Kandahar, a major Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan. In this fluid narrative, the reader learns of Zaeef's formative years as a fighter against the Soviet occupation of his country, his subsequent administrative position in the Taliban government, his experience in Guantánamo, his eventual release without charge, and his resettlement in Kabul as a private citizen. In addition, Zaeef provides perspectives on Afghan issues that are largely ignored by the international media and recounts his criticisms of the U.S.-supported Afghan government.

Check Catalogue

Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires: a New History of the Borderlands

BB

Veteran defense analyst and Afghanistan expert David Isby provides an insightful and meticulously researched look at the current situation in Afghanistan, her history, and what he believes must be done so that the US and NATO coalition can succeed in what has historically been known as “the graveyard of empires.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world with one of the lowest literacy rates. It is rife with divisions between ethnic groups that dwarf current schisms in Iraq, and all the groups are lead by warlords who fight over control of the drug trade as much as they do over religion. The region is still racked with these confrontations along with conflicts between rouge factions from Pakistan, with whom relations are increasingly strained. After seven years and billions of dollars in aid, efforts at nation-building in Afghanistan has produced only a puppet regime that is dependent on foreign aid for survival and has no control over a corrupt police force nor the increasingly militant criminal organizations and the deepening social and economic crisis.

The task of implementing an effective US policy and cementing Afghani rule is hampered by what Isby sees as separate but overlapping conflicts between terrorism, narcotics, and regional rivalries, each requiring different strategies to resolve. Pulling these various threads together will be the challenge for the Obama administration, yet it is a challenge that can be met by continuing to foster local involvement and Afghani investment in the region.

Check Catalogue

Islands of the damned : a marine at war in the Pacific

 by R.V. Burgin. This well-narrated tale of a marine's Pacific campaigns on New Britain, Peleliu, and Okinawa inevitably invites comparison with E. B. Sledge's famed With the Old Breed (1981). Indeed, Sledge was part of Burgin's mortar platoon in the latter two campaigns. But Burgin's tale is more plainly told, as he was a Texas farm boy instead of a college student who dropped out of OCS to get into combat. But they were both good marines, who carried their weight through some of the ugliest fighting Americans have ever faced. One reads Burgin's narrative knowing that he survived and smiles when he comes home to marry his Australian fiancée and settle down to a career in the Postal Service and a retirement of attending First Marine Division reunions. --Booklist. (Check catalog)