Book cover of Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior by Ric Prado
Biography & Autobiography

Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior 

A memoir by the highest-ranking covert warrior to lift the veil of secrecy and offer a glimpse into the shadow wars that America has fought since the Vietnam Era.

Enrique Prado found himself in his first firefight at age seven. The son of a middle-class Cuban family caught in the midst of the Castro Revolution, his family fled their war-torn home for the hope of a better life in America. […Learn More]

Book cover of Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism by Carla Power
Health and Psychology

Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

What are the roots of radicalism? Journalist Carla Power came to this question well before the January 6, 2021, attack in Washington, D.C., turned our country’s attention to the problem of domestic radicalization. Her entry point was a different wave of radical panic—the way populists and pundits encouraged us to see the young people who joined ISIS or other terrorist organizations as simple monsters. Power wanted to chip away at the stereotypes by focusing not on what these young people had done but why: What drew them into militancy? What visions of the world—of home, of land, of security for themselves and the people they loved—shifted their thinking toward radical beliefs? And what visions of the world might bring them back to society?  […Learn More]

Book cover of One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway
Europe

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway 

Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, Åsne Seierstad’s One of Us is essential reading for a time when mass killings are so grimly frequent.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister’s office in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the wooded island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of the country’s governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and its reverberations. How did Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become Europe’s most reviled terrorist? […Learn More]

Africa

Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power

For two decades, militant jihadism has been one of the world’s most pressing security crises. In civil wars and insurgencies across the Muslim world, certain Islamist groups have taken advantage of the anarchy to establish political control over a broad range of territories and communities. In effect, they have built radical new jihadist proto-states. […Learn More]

Book cover of Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement by Alexander Thurston
Africa

Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement

A comprehensive history of one of the world’s deadliest jihadist groups

Boko Haram is one of the world’s deadliest jihadist groups. It has killed more than twenty thousand people and displaced more than two million in a campaign of terror that began in Nigeria but has since spread to Chad, Niger, and Cameroon as well. This is the first book to tell the full story of this West African affiliate of the Islamic State, from its beginnings in the early 2000s to its most infamous violence, including the 2014 kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls. […Learn More]

Book cover of They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate by James Verini
History

They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate

James Verini arrived in Iraq in the summer of 2016 to write about life in the Islamic State. He stayed to cover the jihadis’ last great stand, the Battle of Mosul, not knowing it would go on for nearly a year. This “urgent, scalding, hallucinatory work of war reportage” (Patrick Radden Keefe) takes the reader into the conflict against the most lethal insurgency of our time. […Learn More]

Book cover of Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett Graff
History

Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

The first comprehensive oral history of September 11, 2001—a panoramic narrative woven from voices on the front lines of an unprecedented national trauma.

Over the past eighteen years, monumental literature has been published about 9/11, from Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower to The 9/11 Commission Report. But one perspective has been missing up to this point—a 360-degree account of the day told through firsthand. […Learn More]

History

The Spymasters of Baghdad: A True Story of Bravery, Family, and Patriotism in the Battle Against ISIS

From the former New York Times bureau chief in Baghdad comes the gripping and heroic story of an elite, top-secret team of unlikely spies who triumphed over ISIS. 

The Spymaster of Baghdad tells the dramatic yet intimate account of how a covert Iraqi intelligence unit called “the Falcons” came together against all odds to defeat ISIS. The Falcons, comprised of ordinary men with little conventional espionage background, infiltrated the world’s most powerful terrorist organization, ultimately turning the tide of war against the terrorist group and bringing safety to millions of Iraqis and the broader world. […Learn More]

Book Cover of Reign of Terror How the 9/11 Era Destablized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman
History

Reign of Terror: How 9/11 Era Destablized America and Produced Trump

An examination of the profound impact that the War on Terror had in pushing American politics and society in an authoritarian direction

For an entire generation, at home and abroad, the United States has waged an endless conflict known as the War on Terror. In addition to multiple ground wars, it has pioneered drone strikes and industrial-scale digital surveillance, as well as detaining people indefinitely and torturing them. These conflicts have yielded neither peace nor victory, but they have transformed America. […Learn More]