American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home 1945-2000

Joshua B. Freeman. A terrifically useful wide-lens survey of the United States in the last half of the 20th century. Freeman has full command of his vast material, fashioning a structured history that is both readably general and restrained of scholarly matter as well as nicely specific regarding meaty information. The author demonstrates how postwar economic growth helped spur the great process of democratization that placed America in the first rank among nations in terms of standard of living and basic rights for all citizens. Yet, along with the rise of consumerism, globalism and prosperity, the power shifted from the public to the private realm, specifically corporate. A liberal-minded but still evenhanded primer for all students of U.S. history.

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Yankee Come Home: On the Road from San Juan Hill to Guantanamo

William Craig. With a half-century of U.S. antagonism to Cuba's revolution as the back story, a freelancer visits the island nation to report on both its history and current situation. The author's lively history follows locale, not chronology, and he analyzes sugar politics, empire building and the blood-spattered history of slaves, Indians and Spaniards in the New World. We also learn about Cuban culture, including music, spirits, the real Che Guevara, pickpockets, drinking habits and much more. Craig beats his professional predecessors with his skilled and accessible personal journal and blunt history.--Kirkus

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Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World

John W. Dower. No historian writes with more authority than this leading U.S. historian of modern Japan. MIT professor Dower's new work brings together a number of his essays written between 1993 and 2007, and they show him at the top of his form. He's at his best, and unabashedly critical, when analyzing national hypocrisy and the misuses of history and memory, American as well as Japanese. A set of serious, cautionary reflections from a superb historian.--Publisher's Weekly

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Code Name Caesar: The Secret Hunt for U-Boat 864 During World War II

Kenneth R. Sewell. On February 9, 1945, the German U-boat 864 sank in the North Sea off the western coast of Norway. The undersea battle of U-864 and the British Navyas HMS Venturer is the only recorded instance of one submarine stalking and sinking another while both were submerged. With suspense surfacing amid the military intrigue, this latest by Preisler and former submariner Sewell reads like a tense thriller, but the authors also keep a steady course on the human aspect of their tale as they reconstruct the events behind this little-known WWII incident and its aftermath.--Publishers Weekly

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Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq

Greg Muttitt. In this well-reported debut, Muttitt never insists that oil was the sole motive for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As both an activist and freelancer, he makes his sympathies plain from the beginning, but he rejects crude conspiracy theories in favor of a more subtle take: that the occupiers genuinely saw themselves as liberators, never acknowledging their own self-interest in securing an energy supply. He's contemptuous of today's scramble for profits among the likes of ExxonMobil, BP and Shell. No, the war wasn't only about oil, but as one State Department adviser asked, "What did Iraq have that we would like to have? It wasn't the sand." There will be readers who disagree with Muttitt's thesis. They will now be obliged to marshal similarly convincing evidence.--Publisher's Weekly

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