Knowledge = Power

Julius Caesar wrote his exciting Commentaries during some of the most  grueling campaigns ever undertaken by a Roman army. The Gallic Wars and  The Civil Wars constitute the greatest series of military dispatches  ever written. As literature, they are representative of the finest  expressions of Latin prose in its "golden" age, a benchmark of elegant  style and masculine brevity imitated by young schoolboys for centuries. One  of the most daring and brilliant generals of all time, Julius Caesar  combined the elements of tactical genius with the shrewdness of a master  politician. He was an astute judge of men's character - their strengths  and weaknesses. Whenever possible, he exercised restraint and mercy  even when his worst enemies were in his power. But he also knew when and  how to mete out stern punishment and his swift retaliations became a  hallmark of his career. With his charismatic leadership, his powerful  intellect and his magnetic personal charm, Julius Caesar became the idol  of men and women everywhere. The fanatic loyalty of his troops and the  adulation of the Roman public propelled him to the pinnacle of power.  Historian Will Durant called him "the most complete man that antiquity  produced." Follow along in this recording as Julius Caesar in 50  B.C. undertakes the awesome enterprise of subduing savage Gaul, an area  roughly the size of Texas. That task was barely completed before his  enemies in Rome struck, igniting the bloody Civil War that engulfed most  of the Roman Empire and afterward left Caesar in supreme power.

Wilson is a sophisticated and marvelously humane writer. His vision is a  liberating one, and a reader of this splendid book comes away with a  sense of the kinship that exists among the people, animals, and insects  that share the planet. (New Yorker 20041219) Compellingly  interesting and enormously important...The most stimulating, the most  provocative, and the most illuminating work of nonfiction I have read in  some time. --William McPherson (Washington Post Book World 20050301) A  work of high intellectual daring...Here is an accomplished biologist  explaining, in notably clear and unprevaricating language, what he  thinks his subject now has to offer to the understanding of man and  society...The implications of Wilson's thesis are rather considerable,  for if true, no system of political, social, religious or ethical  thought can afford to ignore it. --Nicholas Wade (New Republic 20071124) Twenty-five years after its first publication, Harvard University Press has re-released Edward O. Wilson's classic work, On Human Nature.  A double Pulitzer Prize winner, Wilson is a writer of effortless grace  and stylish succinctness and this is one of his finest, most important  books...[A] highly influential, elegantly written book. --Robin McKie (The Observer ) A seminal, groundbreaking, informative, thought-provoking, enduringly valuable, and highly recommended read. (Bookwatch )

"It's hard to overestimate the impact that Robert Conquest's  extraordinary study had on the West's perceptions of Soviet history.  Using rare Soviet materials, some published during the Khrushchev thaw,  others in self-published samizdat format, the British historian put  together an authoritative chronicle of Stalin's murderous reign. Western  communists and fellow travelers dismissed the book as propaganda. But  when Soviet archives were partially opened in 1991, Conquest's estimates  of 700,000 "legal" executions during 1937-38 -- and of the total number  of other deaths thanks to the Soviet terror campaigns ("hardly lower  than some fifteen million") -- were proven chillingly accurate." -- Owen  Matthews, N/A, Wall Street Journal "Anthony Powell  once wrote of Robert Conquest that he had a 'capacity for taking  enormous pains in relation to any enterprise in hand.' It is beyond  dispute that, forty years after the publication of The Great Terror, this judgment requires no reassessment."--Michael Weiss, The New Criterion "The volume that tore the mask away from Stalinism before most people had even heard of Solzhenitsyn."--Christopher Hitchens, Wall Street Journal

South: The Story of Shackleton's 1914-1917 Expedition  Kindle Edition by                 Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton

Featuring extensive revisions to  the text as well as a new introduction and epilogue - bringing the book  completely up to date on the tumultuous politics of the previous decade  and the long-term implications of the Soviet collapse - this compact,  original, and engaging book offers the definitive account of one of the  great historical events of the last 50 years. Combining  historical and geopolitical analysis with an absorbing narrative, Kotkin  draws upon extensive research, including memoirs by dozens of insiders  and senior figures, to illuminate the factors that led to the demise of  Communism and the USSR. The new edition puts the collapse in the context  of the global economic and political changes from the 1970s to the  present day. Kotkin creates a compelling profile of post-Soviet Russia,  and he reminds us, with chilling immediacy, of what could not have been  predicted - that the world's largest police state, with several million  troops, a doomsday arsenal, and an appalling record of violence, would  liquidate itself with barely a whimper. Throughout the book,  Kotkin also paints vivid portraits of key personalities. Using recently  released archive materials, for example, he offers a fascinating picture  of Gorbachev, describing this virtuoso tactician and resolutely  committed reformer as "flabbergasted by the fact that his socialist  renewal was leading to the system's liquidation" - and more or less  going along with it. At once authoritative and provocative, Armageddon Averted illuminates the collapse of the Soviet Union, revealing how "principled  restraint and scheming self-interest brought a deadly system to meek  dissolution".

How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany Nazism  triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United  States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire  the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler’s American Model,  James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact  on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation  of the Nazi regime. Both American citizenship and antimiscegenation  laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws―the  Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Contrary to those who have insisted  otherwise, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained,  significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. He looks  at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices,  it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened but too  harsh. Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi  policies in Germany, Hitler’s American Model upends the understanding of America’s influence on racist practices in the wider world.

From the New York Times bestselling author Robert D. Kaplan, named one of the world’s Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, comes a riveting journey through one of Europe’s frontier  countries—and a potent examination of the forces that will determine  Europe’s fate in the postmodern age. Robert Kaplan first  visited Romania in the 1970s, when he was a young journalist and the  country was a bleak Communist backwater. It was one of the darkest  corners of Europe, but few Westerners were paying attention. What ensued  was a lifelong obsession with a critical, often overlooked country—a  country that, today, is key to understanding the current threat that  Russia poses to Europe. In Europe’s Shadow is a vivid blend of  memoir, travelogue, journalism, and history, a masterly work thirty  years in the making—the story of a journalist coming of age, and a  country struggling to do the same. Through the lens of one country,  Kaplan examines larger questions of geography, imperialism, the role of  fate in international relations, the Cold War, the Holocaust, and more. Here Kaplan illuminates the fusion of the Latin West and the Greek East  that created Romania, the country that gave rise to Ion Antonescu,  Hitler’s chief foreign accomplice during World War II, and the country  that was home to the most brutal strain of Communism under Nicolae  Ceaușescu. Romania past and present are rendered in cinematic prose: the  ashen faces of citizens waiting in bread lines in Cold War–era  Bucharest; the Bărăgan Steppe, laid bare by centuries of foreign  invasion; the grim labor camps of the Black Sea Canal; the majestic  Gothic church spires of Transylvania and Maramureş. Kaplan finds himself  in dialogue with the great thinkers of the past, and with the Romanians  of today, the philosophers, priests, and politicians—those who struggle  to keep the flame of humanism alive in the era of a resurgent Russia. Upon his return to Romania in 2013 and 2014, Kaplan found the country  transformed yet again—now a traveler’s destination shaped by Western  tastes, yet still emerging from the long shadows of Hitler and Stalin. In Europe’s Shadow is the story of an ideological and geographic frontier—and the book you  must read in order to truly understand the crisis Europe faces, from  Russia and from within.

Tracing the extraordinary trajectory of Julius Caesar's life, Adrian  Goldsworthy covers not only the great Roman emperor's accomplishments as  charismatic orator, conquering general, and powerful dictator but also  lesser-known chapters. Ultimately, Goldsworthy realizes the full  complexity of Caesar's character and shows why his political and  military leadership continues to resonate some 2,000 years later. In  this landmark biography, Goldsworthy examines Caesar as a military  leader, as well as his other roles, and places his subject firmly within  the context of Roman society in the first century B.C.

“[The Rising Sun] is quite possibly the most readable, yet informative account of the Pacific war.”—Chicago Sun-Times This  Pulitzer Prize–winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic  rise  and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria  and China to the  atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from  the Japanese perspective, The  Rising Sun is, in the author’s  words, “a factual saga of people caught up in the  flood of the most  overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened—muddled, ennobling,   disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox.” In weaving together  the historical facts  and human drama leading up to and culminating in  the war in the Pacific, Toland crafts  a riveting and unbiased narrative  history. In his Foreword, Toland says that if we  are to draw any  conclusion from The Rising Sun, it is “that there are no simple lessons  in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.” “Unbelievably  rich . . . readable and exciting . . .The best parts of [Toland’s] book  are not the battle scenes but the intimate view he gives of the highest  reaches of Tokyo politics.”—Newsweek

A blend of Manhunt, Killing Pablo, and Zero Dark Thirty,  Andrew Hogan and Douglas Century's sensational investigative high-tech  thriller - soon to be a major motion picture from Sony - chronicles a  riveting chapter in the 20th-century drug wars: the exclusive inside  story of the American lawman and his dangerous eight-year hunt that  captured El Chapo - the world's most wanted drug kingpin who evaded the  law for more than a decade. Every generation has a  larger-than-life criminal: Jesse James, Billy the Kid, John Dillinger,  Al Capone, John Gotti, Pablo Escobar. But each of these notorious  lawbreakers had a "white hat" in pursuit: Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, Eliot  Ness, Steve Murphy. For notorious drug lord Joaquín Archivaldo  Guzmán-Loera - El Chapo - that lawman is former Drug Enforcement  Administration Special Agent Andrew Hogan. In 2006, fresh out of  the DEA Academy, Hogan heads west to Arizona, where he immediately  plunges into a series of gripping undercover adventures, all unknowingly  placing him on the trail of Guzmán, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, a  Forbes billionaire, and public enemy number one in the United  States. Six years later, as head of the DEA's Sinaloa Cartel desk in  Mexico City, Hogan finds his life and Chapo's are, ironically, on  parallel paths: They're both obsessed with the details. In a recasting of the classic American Western on the global stage, Hunting El Chapo takes us on Hogan's quest to achieve the seemingly impossible, from  infiltrating El Chapo's inner circle to leading a white-knuckle manhunt  with an elite brigade of trusted Mexican marines - racing door to door  through the cartel's stronghold and ultimately bringing the elusive and  murderous kingpin to justice. This cinematic crime story  following the relentless investigative work of Hogan and his team  unfolds at breakneck speed, taking the listener behind the scenes of one  of the most sophisticated and dangerous counternarcotics operations in  the history of the United States and Mexico.