Knowledge = Power

There may be no hotter company on the planet than Xiaomi. In less  than a decade, the company has gone from being a Chinese start-up to a  global player in the smartphone market. Driven by the philosophy of  "Innovation for all", Xiaomi has a cult fan following; after all, it  offers high-end features at relatively low prices. Besides, it  does not only sell phones. It also sells earphones, Bluetooth speakers,  televisions, fitness bands, weighing scales, power banks, and air  purifiers, among other products. Each one of them offering the best  possible value for money. How did a small Chinese start-up  become so big in a matter of years? How has it managed a cult following  in such a short time period when a company like Apple took decades?  What's the secret behind Xiaomi's success? Such are the answers this  book will provide at length.

An engrossing insider's account of how a teacher built one of the  world's most valuable companies - rivaling Walmart and Amazon - and  forever reshaped the global economy. In just a decade and a  half, Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an  English teacher, founded Alibaba and built it into one of the world's  largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of  Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba's $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the  largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs  and presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China's booming  private sector and the gatekeeper to hundreds of millions of  middle-class consumers. Duncan Clark first met Jack in 1999 in  the small apartment where Jack founded Alibaba. Granted unprecedented  access to a wealth of new material including exclusive interviews, Clark  draws on his own experience as an early advisor to Alibaba and two  decades in China chronicling the Internet's impact on the country to  create an authoritative, compelling narrative account of Alibaba's rise. How did Jack overcome his humble origins and early failures to  achieve massive success with Alibaba? How did he outsmart rival  entrepreneurs from China and Silicon Valley? Can Alibaba maintain its 80  percent market share? As it forges ahead into finance and  entertainment, are there limits to Alibaba's ambitions? How does the  Chinese government view its rise? Will Alibaba expand further overseas,  including in the US? Clark tells Alibaba's tale in the context  of China's momentous economic and social changes, illuminating an  unlikely corporate titan as never before.

"I hope everyone reads this book. It has become such a crucial thing for all of us to understand." —Erin Burnett, CNN "An  ideal tour guide for your journey into the depths of the rabbit hole  that is QAnon. It even shows you a glimmer of light at the exit." —Cullen Hoback, director of HBO's Q: Into the Storm Its  messaging can seem cryptic, even nonsensical, yet for tens of thousands  of people, it explains everything:  What is QAnon, where did it come  from, and is the Capitol insurgency a sign of where it’s going next? On October 5th, 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark in the  State Dining Room at a gathering of military officials. He said it felt  like “the calm before the storm”—then refused to elaborate as puzzled  journalists asked him to explain.  But on the infamous message boards of  4chan, a mysterious poster going by “Q Clearance Patriot,” who claimed  to be in “military intelligence,” began the elaboration on their own. In the days that followed, Q’s wild yarn explaining Trump's remarks  began to rival the sinister intricacies of a Tom Clancy novel, while  satisfying the deepest desires of MAGA-America.  But did any of what Q  predicted come to pass? No. Did that stop people from clinging to every  word they were reading, expanding its mythology, and promoting it wider  and wider? No. Why not? Who were these rapt listeners? How do  they reconcile their worldview with the America they see around them?  Why do their numbers keep growing? Mike Rothschild, a journalist  specializing in conspiracy theories, has been collecting their stories  for years, and through interviews with QAnon converts, apostates, and  victims, as well as psychologists, sociologists, and academics, he is  uniquely equipped to explain the movement and its followers. In The Storm Is Upon Us,  he takes readers from the background conspiracies and cults that fed  the Q phenomenon, to its embrace by right-wing media and Donald Trump,  through the rending of families as loved ones became addicted to Q’s  increasingly violent rhetoric, to the storming of the Capitol, and on. And as the phenomenon shows no sign of calming despite Trump’s loss of  the presidency—with everyone from Baby Boomers to Millennial moms  proving susceptible to its messaging—and politicians starting to openly  espouse its ideology, Rothschild makes a compelling case that mocking  the seeming madness of QAnon will get us nowhere. Rather, his  impassioned reportage makes clear it's time to figure out what QAnon  really is — because QAnon and its relentlessly dark theory of everything  isn’t done yet.

An award-winning historian plumbs the depths of Hitler and Stalin's  vicious regimes, and shows the extent to which they brutalized the world  around them. Two 20th century tyrants stand apart from all  the rest in terms of their ruthlessness and the degree to which they  changed the world around them. Briefly allies during World War II,  Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin then tried to exterminate each other in  sweeping campaigns unlike anything the modern world had ever seen,  affecting soldiers and civilians alike. Millions of miles of Eastern  Europe were ruined in their fight to the death, millions of lives  sacrificed. Laurence Rees has met more people who had direct  experience of working for Hitler and Stalin than any other historian.  Using their evidence he has pieced together a compelling comparative  portrait of evil, in which idealism is polluted by bloody pragmatism,  and human suffering is used casually as a political tool. It's a  jaw-dropping description of two regimes stripped of moral anchors and  doomed to destroy each other, and those caught up in the vicious  magnetism of their leadership.

Communism has decisively shaped the modern world. After the Second   World War, Marxist regimes ruled over one-third of the population of the  globe.  Even today, after the fall of the Soviet Union, communist ideas  continue to steer  current events in Eastern Europe and East Asia. According  to award-winning historian Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius  of the  University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to understand the inner dynamics of   communist thought and rule (and the reasons they linger in places like  Cuba,  North Korea, and China), you have to go back to the crucial  beginnings of  communism. How did it become such a pervasive economic  and political philosophy?  Why, of all places, did it first take root in  early 20th-century  Russia? These and other questions all get  addressed as part of a  fascinating story that stretches from the  intellectual partnership between Karl  Marx and Friedrich Engels in the  late 19th century to the Russian  Revolution of 1917 to the death of  Vladimir Lenin in 1924. It's a story whose  drama, Professor Liulevicius  notes, “has few equals in terms of sheer scale,  scope, or suffering.”

This second edition of McLellan's comprehensive selection of Marx's writings  includes carefully selected extracts from the whole range of Marx's  political, philosophical, and economic thought. Each section of the book  deals with a different period of Marx's life, allowing readers to trace  the development of his thought from his early years as a student and  political journalist in Germany up through the final letters he wrote in  the early 1880s. A fully updated editorial introduction and  bibliography has been included for each extract in this new edition. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

What extremism is, how extremist ideologies are constructed, and why extremism can escalate into violence. A  rising tide of extremist movements threaten to destabilize civil  societies around the globe. It has never been more important to  understand extremism, yet the dictionary definition—a logical starting  point in a search for understanding—tells us only that extremism is “the  quality or state of being extreme.” In this volume in the MIT Press  Essential Knowledge series, J. M. Berger offers a nuanced introduction  to extremist movements, explaining what extremism is, how extremist  ideologies are constructed, and why extremism can escalate into  violence. Berger shows that although the ideological content of  extremist movements varies widely, there are common structural elements. Berger, an expert on extremist movements and terrorism, explains  that extremism arises from a perception of “us versus them,”  intensified by the conviction that the success of “us” is inseparable  from hostile acts against “them.” Extremism differs from ordinary  unpleasantness—run-of-the-mill hatred and racism—by its sweeping  rationalization of an insistence on violence. Berger illustrates his  argument with case studies and examples from around the world and  throughout history, from the destruction of Carthage by the Romans—often  called “the first genocide”—to the apocalyptic jihadism of Al Qaeda,  America's new “alt-right,” and the anti-Semitic conspiracy tract The  Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He describes the evolution of identity  movements, individual and group radicalization, and more. If we  understand the causes of extremism, and the common elements of extremist  movements, Berger says, we will be more effective in countering it.

The author of the widely praised Wordslut analyzes  the social science of cult influence: how cultish groups from Jonestown  and Scientology to SoulCycle and social media gurus use language as the  ultimate form of power. What makes “cults” so intriguing and  frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us  binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes  researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a  satisfying explanation for what causes people to join - and more  importantly, stay in - extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could  it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it  already has.... Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy  answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague  talk of “brainwashing”. But the true answer has nothing to do with  freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell  argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and  us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and  shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear - and are influenced  by - every single day. Through juicy storytelling and cutting  original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide  spectrum of communities “cultish”, revealing how they affect followers  of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our  modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive  and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of  power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish”  everywhere.

“Masterful. . . . Evans demonstrates a fluent style and a sweeping  grasp of the Third Reich’s history and of the enormous historical  literature. . . . Evans’s fellow historians as well as a broader public  will read this work, not quite with pleasure, for there is little joy in  this story, but with admiration for the author’s narrative powers.” ―Publisher’s Weekly (starred review) A New York Times bestseller! An absorbing, revelatory, and definitive account of one of the greatest tragedies in human history Adroitly blending narrative, description, and analysis, Richard J.  Evans portrays a society rushing headlong to self-destruction and taking  much of Europe with it. Interweaving a broad narrative of the war's  progress from a wide range of people, Evans reveals the dynamics of a  society plunged into war at every level. The great battles and events of  the conflict are here, but just as telling is Evans's re- creation of  the daily experience of ordinary Germans in wartime. At the center of  the book is the Nazi extermi­nation of the Jews. The final book in  Richard J. Evan's three-volume history of Hitler's Germany, hailed "a  masterpiece" by The New York Times, The Third Reich at War lays bare the most momentous and tragic years of the Nazi regime.

The second book in his acclaimed trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, Richard J. Evans' The Third Reich in Power: How the Nazis Won Over the Hearts and Minds of a Nation explores how Hitler turned Germany from a vibrant democracy into a one-party state. Before Hitler seized power in 1933, Germany had been famous for its  sophistication and complexity. So how was it possible for a group of  ideological obsessives to re-mould it into a one-party state directed at  war and race hate? How did the Nazis win over the hearts and minds of  Germany's citizens, twist science, religion and culture, and transform  the country's politics to achieve total dominance so quickly? From the Nuremberg Laws to the Olympic Games, Kristallnacht to  the Hitler Youth, this gripping account shows how a whole population  became enmeshed in a dictatorship that was consumed by hatred and driven  by war. 'Impressive ... perceptive ... humane'   Ian Kershaw 'Excellent ... powerful ... it makes an indelible impression'   Robert Service, Sunday Times 'Likely to be the standard work for some years to come' Spectator Books of the Year 'A rich and detailed description of just what the Third Reich did in  every compartment of the state and every corner of society ... Evans's  magisterial study should be on our shelves for a long time to come' Economist 'Written with great style and human sympathy' Daily Telegraph Books of the Year 'Evans brilliantly conveys how the Fuhrer reignited Germans' pride as he led them to catastrophe'   Neal Ascherson, Observer Sir Richard J. Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. His previous books include In Defence of History, Telling Lies about Hitler and the companions to this title, The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich at War.