The Parthenon enigma

Built in the fifth century b.c., the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West’s ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess ...

Return of a King

the battle for Afghanistan, 1839-1942

n 1839, nearly 20,000 British troops poured through the mountain passes into Afghanistan and installed the exiled Shah Shuja on the throne as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans exploded into rebellion. The British were forced to retreat—and ...

The utility of force

the art of war in the modern world

From a highly decorated general, a brilliant new way of understanding war and its role in the twenty-first century. Drawing on his vast experience as a commander during the first Gulf War, and in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Northern Ireland, General Rupert Smith gives us a ...

Treasure islands

tax havens and the men who stole the world

Dirty money, tax havens and the offshore system describe the ugliest and most secretive chapter in the history of global economic affairs. Billionaire Warren Buffet, currently the third wealthiest man in the world, paid the lowest rate of tax among his office staff, including his ...

13 Bankers

the Wall Street takeover and the next financial meltdown

Though this blistering book identifies many causes of the recent financial crisis, from housing policy to minimum capital requirements for banks, the authors lay ultimate blame on a dominant deregulatory ideology and Wall Street's corresponding political influence. Johnson, professor at the MIT Sloan School ...

House of cards

a tale of hubris and wretched excess on Wal Street

A blistering narrative account of the negligence and greed that pushed all of Wall Street into chaos and the country into a financial crisis. At the beginning of March 2008, the monetary fabric of Bear Stearns, one of the world#s oldest and largest investment ...

The future of liberalism

With one eye toward the Enlightenment and another toward contemporary politics, Wolfe (Does American Democracy Still Work?) mounts a passionate defense of why liberalism#broadly defined#continues to be relevant and essential in this thorough, scholarly text. The author refers to liberalism both in its ...

So damn much money

the triumph of lobbying and the corrosion of american government

A true insider, Robert G. Kaiser has monitored American politics for The Washington Post for nearly half a century. In this sometimes shocking and always riveting book, he explains how and why, over the last four decades, Washington became a dysfunctional capital. At the heart ...

Flat earth news

an award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media

'Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession.' When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by ...

Boeing versus Airbus

the inside story of the greatest international competition in business

The commercial airline industry is one of the most volatile, dog-eat- dog enterprises in the world, and in the late 1990s, Europe's Airbus overtook America's Boeing as the preeminent aircraft manufacturer. However, Airbus quickly succumbed to the same complacency it once challenged, and ...

The origin of financial crises

Central banks, credit bubbles and the efficient market fallacy

In a series of disarmingly simple arguments financial market analyst George Cooper challenges the core principles of today's economic orthodoxy and explains how we have created an economy that is inherently unstable and crisis prone. With great skill, he examines the very foundations of ...

The people's tycoon

Henry Ford and the american century

How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford#s outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry ...

The moral consequences of economic growth

From the author of Day of Reckoning, the acclaimed critique of Ronald Reagan#s economic policy (#Every citizen should read it,# said The New York Times): a persuasive, wide-ranging argument that broadly distributed economic growth provides benefits far beyond the material, creating and strengthening democratic ...

The future of ideas

The fate of the commons in a connected world

The nature of economies

From the revered author of the classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities comes a new book that will revolutionize the way we think about the economy. Starting from the premise that human beings "exist wholly within nature as part of natural order ...

A farewell to arms

Life's dominion

an argument about abortion, euthanasia, and individual freedom

Charges that the abortion debate misrepresents the complex opinions of Americans, contending that the key question is how to respect both individual freedom and the conviction that human life is sacred.