Knowledge = Power

Alexander the Great, perhaps the most commanding leader in  history, united his empire and his army by the titanic force of his  will. His death at the age of thirty-two spelled the end of that unity. The  story of Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire is known to many  readers, but the dramatic and consequential saga of the empire’s  collapse remains virtually untold. It is a tale of loss that begins with  the greatest loss of all, the death of the Macedonian king who had held  the empire together. With his demise, it was as if the sun had  disappeared from the solar system, as if planets and moons began to spin  crazily in new directions, crashing into one another with unimaginable  force. Alexander bequeathed his power, legend has it, “to the  strongest,” leaving behind a mentally damaged half brother and a  posthumously born son as his only heirs. In a strange compromise, both figures—Philip III and Alexander IV—were elevated to the kingship,  quickly becoming prizes, pawns, fought over by a half-dozen Macedonian  generals. Each successor could confer legitimacy on whichever general  controlled him. At the book’s center is the monarch’s most  vigorous defender; Alexander’s former Greek secretary, now transformed  into a general himself. He was a man both fascinating and entertaining, a  man full of tricks and connivances, like the enthroned ghost of  Alexander that gives the book its title, and becomes the determining  factor in the precarious fortunes of the royal family. James  Romm, brilliant classicist and storyteller, tells the galvanizing saga  of the men who followed Alexander and found themselves incapable of  preserving his empire. The result was the undoing of a world, formerly  united in a single empire, now ripped apart into a nightmare of warring  nation-states struggling for domination, the template of our own times.

The  Spartans were a society of warrior-heroes who were the living exemplars  of such core values as duty, discipline, self-sacrifice, and extreme  toughness. This book, written by one of the world’s leading experts on  Sparta, traces the rise and fall of Spartan society and explores the  tremendous influence the Spartans had on their world and even on ours.  Paul Cartledge brings to life figures like legendary founding father  Lycurgus and King Leonidas, who embodied the heroism so closely  identified with this unique culture, and he shows how Spartan women  enjoyed an unusually dominant and powerful role in this hyper-masculine  society. Based firmly on original sources, The Spartans is the definitive book about one of the most fascinating cultures of ancient Greece.

The New York Times best-selling sequel to "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!" Like the "funny, brilliant, bawdy" (The New Yorker) "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!" this book’s many stories―some funny, others intensely moving―display  Richard P. Feynman’s unquenchable thirst for adventure and unparalleled  ability to recount important moments from his life. Here  we meet Feynman’s first wife, Arlene, who taught him of love’s  irreducible mystery as she lay dying in a hospital bed while he worked  on the atomic bomb at nearby Los Alamos. We listen to the fascinating  narrative of the investigation into the space shuttle Challenger’s  explosion in 1986 and relive the moment when Feynman revealed the  disaster’s cause through an elegant experiment: dropping a ring of  rubber into a glass of cold water and pulling it out, misshapen. In "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century lets us see the man behind the genius.

“Plutarch  regularly shows that great leaders transcend their own purely material  interests and petty, personal vanities. Noble ideals actually do matter,  in government as in life.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post Pompey,  Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Antony: the names still resonate across  thousands of years. Major figures in the civil wars that brutally ended  the Roman republic, their lives pose a question that haunts us still:  how to safeguard a republic from the flaws of its leaders. This  reader’s edition of Plutarch delivers a fresh translation of notable  clarity, explanatory notes, and ample historical context in the Preface  and Introduction.

Timeless wisdom on death and dying from the celebrated Stoic philosopher Seneca "It  takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die," wrote the Roman Stoic  philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC–65 AD). He counseled readers to "study death  always," and took his own advice, returning to the subject again and  again in all his writings, yet he never treated it in a complete work. How to Die gathers in one volume, for the first time, Seneca's remarkable  meditations on death and dying. Edited and translated by James S. Romm, How to Die reveals a provocative thinker and dazzling writer who speaks with a  startling frankness about the need to accept death or even, under  certain conditions, to seek it out. Seneca believed that life is  only a journey toward death and that one must rehearse for death  throughout life. Here, he tells us how to practice for death, how to die  well, and how to understand the role of a good death in a good life. He  stresses the universality of death, its importance as life's final rite  of passage, and its ability to liberate us from pain, slavery, or  political oppression. Featuring beautifully rendered new translations, How to Die also includes an enlightening introduction, notes, the original Latin  texts, and an epilogue presenting Tacitus's description of Seneca's grim  suicide.

An  introduction to modern physics and to Richard Feynman at his witty and  enthusiastic best, discussing gravitation, irreversibility, symmetry,  and the nature of scientific discovery. Richard Feynman  was one of the most famous and important physicists of the second half  of the twentieth century. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965,  celebrated for his spirited and engaging lectures, and briefly a star on  the evening news for his presence on the commission investigating the  explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, Feynman is best known for his  contributions to the field of quantum electrodynamics. The Character of Physical Law,  drawn from Feynman's famous 1964 series of Messenger Lectures at  Cornell, offers an introduction to modern physics—and to Feynman at his  witty and enthusiastic best. In this classic book  (originally published in 1967), Feynman offers an overview of selected  physical laws and gathers their common features, arguing that the  importance of a physical law is not “how clever we are to have found it  out” but “how clever nature is to pay attention to it.” He discusses  such topics as the interaction of mathematics and physics, the principle  of conservation, the puzzle of symmetry, and the process of scientific  discovery. A foreword by 2004 Physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek  updates some of Feynman's observations—noting, however, “the need for  these particular updates enhances rather than detracts from the book.”  In The Character of Physical Law, Feynman chose to grapple with issues at the forefront of physics that seemed unresolved, important, and approachable.

Based  on an extraordinary collaboration between Steve Forbes, chairman, CEO,  and editor in chief of Forbes Media, and classics professor John Prevas,  Power Ambition Glory provides intriguing comparisons between six great leaders of the ancient world and contemporary business leaders. •  Great leaders not only have vision but know how to build structures to  effect it. Cyrus the Great did so in creating an empire based on  tolerance and inclusion, an approach highly unusual for his or any age.  Jack Welch and John Chambers built their business empires using a  similar approach, and like Cyrus, they remain the exceptions rather than  the rule. • Great leaders know how to build consensus and motivate  by doing what is right rather than what is in their self-interest.  Xenophon put personal gain aside to lead his fellow Greeks out of a  perilous situation in Persia–something very similar to what Lou Gerstner  and Anne Mulcahy did in rescuing IBM and Xerox. • Character matters  in leadership. Alexander the Great had exceptional leadership skills  that enabled him to conquer the eastern half of the ancient world, but  he was ultimately destroyed by his inability to manage his phenomenal  success. The corporate world is full of similar examples, such as the  now incarcerated Dennis Kozlowski, who, flush with success at the head  of his empire, was driven down the highway of self-destruction by an  out-of-control ego. • A great leader is one who challenges the  conventional wisdom of the day and is able to think out of the box to  pull off amazing feats. Hannibal did something no one in the ancient  world thought possible; he crossed the Alps in winter to challenge Rome  for control of the ancient world. That same innovative way of thinking  enabled Serge Brin and Larry Page of Google to challenge and best two  formidable competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo! • A leader must have  ambition to succeed, and Julius Caesar had plenty of it. He set Rome on  the path to empire, but his success made him believe he was a living god  and blinded him to the dangers that eventually did him in. The  parallels with corporate leaders and Wall Street master-of-the-universe  types are numerous, but none more salient than Hank Greenberg, who built  the AIG insurance empire only to be struck down at the height of his  success by the corporate daggers of his directors. • And finally,  leadership is about keeping a sane and modest perspective in the face of  success and remaining focused on the fundamentals–the nuts and bolts of  making an organization work day in and day out. Augustus saved Rome  from dissolution after the assassination of Julius Caesar and ruled it  for more than forty years, bringing the empire to the height of its  power. What made him successful were personal humility, attention to the  mundane details of building and maintaining an infrastructure, and the  understanding of limits. Augustus set Rome on a course of prosperity and  stability that lasted for centuries, just as Alfred Sloan, using many  of the same approaches, built GM into the leviathan that until recently  dominated the automotive business.

Throughout  this lively and concise historical account of Mao Zedong's life and  thought, Rebecca E. Karl places the revolutionary leader's personal  experiences, social visions and theory, military strategies, and  developmental and foreign policies in a dynamic narrative of the Chinese  revolution. She situates Mao and the revolution in a global setting  informed by imperialism, decolonization, and third worldism, and  discusses worldwide trends in politics, the economy, military power, and  territorial sovereignty. Karl begins with Mao's early life in a small  village in Hunan province, documenting his relationships with his  parents, passion for education, and political awakening during the fall  of the Qing dynasty in late 1911. She traces his transition from  liberal to Communist over the course of the next decade, his early  critiques of the subjugation of women, and the gathering force of the  May 4th movement for reform and radical change. Describing Mao's rise to  power, she delves into the dynamics of Communist organizing in an  overwhelmingly agrarian society, and Mao's confrontations with Chiang  Kai-shek and other nationalist conservatives. She also considers his  marriages and romantic liaisons and their relation to Mao as the  revolutionary founder of Communism in China. The book is published by Duke University Press.

“Amazing stories . . . Intimate portraits of how [these five  ruthless leaders] were at home and at the table.” —Lulu Garcia-Navarro,  NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday Anthony Bourdain meets  Kapuściński in this chilling look from within the kitchen at the  appetites of five of the twentieth century's most infamous dictators, by  the acclaimed author of Dancing Bears. What was Pol  Pot eating while two million Cambodians were dying of hunger? Did Idi  Amin really eat human flesh? And why was Fidel Castro obsessed with one  particular cow? Traveling across four continents, from the  ruins of Iraq to the savannahs of Kenya, Witold Szabłowski tracked down  the personal chefs of five dictators known for the oppression and  massacre of their own citizens—Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Uganda’s Idi  Amin, Albania’s Enver Hoxha, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Cambodia’s Pol  Pot—and listened to their stories over sweet-and-sour soup, goat-meat  pilaf, bottles of rum, and games of gin rummy. Dishy, deliciously  readable, and dead serious, How to Feed a Dictator provides a knife’s-edge view of life under tyranny.

Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term  impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of  contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist. Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,”  Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s  radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the  damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of  personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had  stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng  opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions  of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to  his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in  June 1989 at Tiananmen Square. Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in  Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that  also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese  Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous  rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before  becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992.  When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy  much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a  loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.