Empfehlungen basierend auf "Michel Foucault"

Andrei Lankov has gone where few outsiders have ever been. A native of the former Soviet Union, he lived as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s. He has studied it for his entire career, using his fluency in Korean and personal contacts to build a rich, nuanced understanding. In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state. After providing an accessible history of the nation, he turns his focus to what North Korea is, what its leadership thinks, and how its people cope with living in such an oppressive and poor place. He argues that North Korea is not irrational, and nothing shows this better than its continuing survival against all odds. A living political fossil, it clings to existence in the face of limited resources and a zombie economy, manipulating great powers despite its weakness. Its leaders are not ideological zealots or madmen, but perhaps the best practitioners of Machiavellian politics that can be found in the modern world. Even though they preside over a failed state, they have successfully used diplomacy-including nuclear threats-to extract support from other nations. But while the people in charge have been ruthless and successful in holding on to power, Lankov goes on to argue that this cannot continue forever, since the old system is slowly falling apart. In the long run, with or without reform, the regime is unsustainable. Lankov contends that reforms, if attempted, will trigger a dramatic implosion of the regime. They will not prolong its existence.Based on vast expertise, this book reveals how average North Koreans live, how their leaders rule, and how both survive.

Now a Netflix biopic, Sergio, with Narcos star Wagner Moura playing diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello."The best way to understand today's messy world is to read about the inspiring life and diplomatic genius of Sergio Vieira de Mello." –Walter IsaacsonBefore his death in 2003 in Iraq's first major suicide bomb attack, Sergio Vieira de Mello--a humanitarian and peacemaker with the United Nations--placed himself at the center of the most significant geopolitical crises of the last half-century. He cut deals with the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, forcibly confronted genocidal killers from Rwanda, and used his intellect and charisma to try to tame militant extremists in Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Known as a "cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy," Vieira de Mello managed to save lives in the world's most dangerous places, while also pressing the world's most powerful countries to join him in grappling with such urgent dilemmas as: When should killers be engaged, and when should they be shunned? When is military force justified? How can outsiders play a role in healing broken people and broken places? He did not have the luxury of merely posing these questions; Vieira de Mello had to find answers, apply them, and live with the consequences.With Chasing the Flame, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Education of an Idealist Samantha Power offers a profile in courage and humanity--and an unforgettable meditation on how best to manage the deadly challenges of the twenty-first century.

Bestselling author Max Hastings offers a welcome re-evaluation of one of the most gripping and tense international events in modern history—the Cuban Missile Crisis—providing a people-focused narrative that explores the attitudes and conduct of Russians, Cubans, Americans, and a terrified world that followed each moment as it unfolded. In The Abyss, Max Hastings turns his focus to one of the most terrifying events of the mid-twentieth century—the thirteen days in October 1962 when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. Hastings looks at the conflict with fresh eyes, focusing on the people at the heart of the crisis—America President John F. Kennedy, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, and a host of their advisors. Combining in-depth research with Hasting’s well-honed insights, The Abyss is a human history that unfolds on a wide, colorful canvas. As the action moves back and forth from Moscow to Washington, DC, to Havana, Hastings seeks to explain, as much as to describe, the attitudes and conduct of the Soviets, Cubans, and Americans, and to recreate the tension and heightened fears of countless innocent bystanders whose lives hung in the balance. Reflecting on the outcome of these events, he reveals how the aftermath of this momentous crisis continues to reverberate today. Powerful, and riveting, filled with compelling detail and told with narrative flair, The Abyss is history at its finest.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2017#1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER‘The best political book of the year’ Andrew Marr‘A superb work of storytelling and reporting. Sets new benchmark for the writing of contemporary political history’ GuardianThe only book to tell the full story of how and why Britain voted to leave the EU.This is the acclaimed inside story of the EU referendum in 2016 that takes you behind the scenes of the most extraordinary episode in British politics since the Second World War.With unparalleled access to all key players, this is a story of calculation, attempted coups and people torn between principles and loyalty. It is a book about our leaders and their closest aides, the decisions they make, how and why they make them and how they feel when they turn out to be so wrong.In All Out War, Tim Shipman has written a political history that reads like a thriller, exploring how and why David Cameron chose to take the biggest political gamble of his life, and why he lost.

Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. This book tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities.The Depression was both a disaster and an opportunity. As David Kennedy vividly demonstrates, the economic crisis of the 1930s was far more than a simple reaction to the alleged excesses of the 1920s. For more than a century before 1929, America's unbridled industrial revolution had gyrated through repeated boom and bust cycles, wastefully consuming capital and inflicting untold misery on city and countryside alike.Freedom From Fear explores how the nation agonized over its role in World War II, how it fought the war, why the United States won, and why the consequences of victory were sometimes sweet, sometimes ironic. In a compelling narrative, Kennedy analyzes the determinants of American strategy, the painful choices faced by commanders and statesmen, and the agonies inflicted on the millions of ordinary Americans who were compelled to swallow their fears and face battle as best they could.Both comprehensive and colorful, this account of the most convulsive period in American history, excepting only the Civil War, reveals a period that formed the crucible in which modern America was formed.The Oxford History of the United StatesThe Atlantic Monthly has praised The Oxford History of the United States as "the most distinguished series in American historical scholarship," a series that "synthesizes a generation's worth of historical inquiry and knowledge into one literally state-of-the-art book. Who touches these books touches a profession."Conceived under the general editorship of one of the leading American historians of our time, C. Vann Woodward, The Oxford History of the United States blends social, political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, and military history into coherent and vividly written narrative. Previous volumes are Robert Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution; James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (which won a Pulitzer Prize and was a New York Times Best Seller); and James T. Patterson's Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-1974 (which won a Bancroft Prize).

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction • A New York Times bestseller“The CIA itself would be hard put to beat his grasp of global events . . . Deeply satisfying.” —The New York Review of BooksFrom the award-winning and bestselling author of Directorate S and The Achilles Trap comes the explosive first-hand account of America's secret history in Afghanistan.To what extent did America’s best intelligence analysts grasp the rising thread of Islamist radicalism? Who tried to stop bin Laden and why did they fail? Comprehensively and for the first time, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll recounts the history of the covert wars in Afghanistan that fueled Islamic militancy and sowed the seeds of the September 11 attacks. Based on scrupulous research and firsthand accounts by key government, intelligence, and military personnel both foreign and American, Ghost Wars details the secret history of the CIA’s role in Afghanistan (including its covert operations against Soviet troops from 1979 to 1989), the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of bin Laden, and the failed efforts by U.S. forces to find and assassinate bin Laden in Afghanistan.

An absorbing and definitive modern history of the Vietnam War from the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Secret War. Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the 1968 Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and also much less familiar miniatures such as the bloodbath at Daido, where a US Marine battalion was almost wiped out, together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh’s warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed two million people. Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming, naked girl seared by napalm, it forgets countless eviscerations, beheadings, and murders carried out by the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners’ victory in privation and oppression. Here is testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bargirls, and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, and Huey pilots from Arkansas. No past volume has blended a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal experiences, in the fashion that Max Hastings’ readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle with so many lessons for the twenty-first century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. He marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record.

'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past' Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal. George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four is perhaps the most pervasively influential book of the twentieth century.

The massive international bestseller—an epic historical novel that chronicles the birth and rise of fascism in Italy, witnessed through the eyes of its founder, the terrifyingly charismatic figure who would become one of the most notorious dictators of the twentieth century, Benito Mussolini.It is 1919, and the Great War that has ravaged Europe is over. In Italy, the people are exhausted. Tired of the political class. Tired of vague promises, inept moderates, and the agonizing machinations of a democracy that has failed ordinary citizens.While elite leaders have sat idly by, achieving nothing, one outsider—the director of a small opposition newspaper and a tireless political agitator—is electrifying the masses, promising hope for a demoralized nation hungry for change.A former socialist leader ousted by his own party, he is a drifter who knows what it is to feel lost. His voice speaks for the misfits and the outcasts; he is a protector of those who are forgotten.He is Benito Mussolini. And soon Italy—and the world—will be forever remade.In M: Son of the Century, Antonio Scurati tells the story of fascism from within the mind of its founder, the man known to his followers as Il Duce. Steeped in historical detail and interspersed with period documents and sources, this masterful saga explores the seductive power of nationalism and idolatry, revealing how authoritarianism took hold and a nation bent to the will of one ruthless strongman. Provocative and resonant, M is a chilling reminder that the past is never gone, and that it holds urgent lessons for us today.

In December 2013, David Satter became the first American journalist to be expelled from Russia since the Cold War. The Moscow Times said it was not surprising he was expelled, “it was surprising it took so long.” Satter is known in Russia for having written that the apartment bombings in 1999, which were blamed on Chechens and brought Putin to power, were actually carried out by the Russian FSB security police. � In this book, Satter tells the story of the apartment bombings and how Boris Yeltsin presided over the criminalization of Russia, why Vladimir Putin was chosen as his sucessor, and how Putin has suppressed all opposition while retaining the appreance of a pluralist state. As the threat represented by Russia becomes increasingly clear, Satter’s description of where Russia is and how it got there will be of vital interest to anyone concerned about the dangers facing the world today.