"A rousing, well-researched biography" of the Texan piano prodigy who crossed the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War (Kirkus, starred review).
A National Book Critic's Circle Finalist
In 1958, an unheralded young pianist named Van Cliburn traveled to Moscow to compete in the First International Tchaikovsky Competition. The Soviets had no intention of bestowing their coveted prize on an unknown American; a Russian...

"A provocative and urgent analysis of the U.S.-China rivalry. It has become conventional wisdom that America and China are running a "superpower marathon" that may last a century. Yet Hal Brands and Michael Beckley pose a counterintuitive question: What if the sharpest phase of that competition is more like a decade-long sprint? The Sino-American contest is driven by clashing geopolitical interests and a stark ideological dispute over whether authoritarianism...

In We Are Not One, historian Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins. Following Israel's 1948-1949 War of Independence (called the "nakba" or "catastrophe" by Palestinians), few Americans, including few Jews, paid much attention to Israel or the challenges it faced. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, however, almost overnight support for Israel became the primary component of American Jews' collective identity. Over time,...

Sarah Zuckerman and Jennifer Jones are best friends in an upscale part of Washington, D.C., in the politically charged 1980s. Sarah is the shy, wary product of an unhappy home: her father abandoned the family to return to his native England; her agoraphobic mother is obsessed with fears of nuclear war. Jenny is an all-American girl who has seemingly perfect parents. With Cold War rhetoric reaching a fever pitch in 1982, the ten-year-old girls write...

"CNN's Chief National Security Correspondent reveals the invisible fronts of twenty-first century warfare and identifies the ongoing battles being waged -- often without the public's full knowledge -- from disinformation campaigns to advanced satellite weaponry. The United States is currently under attack from multiple adversaries -- yet most Americans have no idea of the dangers threatening us. In this eye-opening book, military and intelligence...

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offers a persuasive, wide-ranging set of recommendations to the prospective winner of the 2008 Presidential election. Secretary Albright explains how to select a first-rate foreign policy team, how to avoid the pitfalls that plagued earlier presidents, how to ensure that decisions, once carefully made, are successfully implemented, and how to employ the full range of tools available to a president to persuade...

A New York Times best-selling author and conservative U.S. Senator reveals the untold inside story of how progressive ideologues and Democratic politicians abandoned the American tradition of strength, pride and honor, providing a formidable and urgent roadmap to restore American strength before it's too late.

"In this deeply informed book, Geoff Dyer makes a lucid and convincing argument that China and the United States are now embarking on a great power-style competition that will dominate the century. This contest will take place in every arena: from control of the seas, where China's new navy is trying to ease the United States out of Asia and reassert its traditional leadership, to rewriting the rules of the global economy, with attempts to turn the...