Bøger udgivet af Basic Books

In five sharply drawn chapters, Flight Maps charts the ways in which Americans have historically made connections -- and missed connections -- with nature. Beginning with an extraordinary chapter on the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and the accompanying belligerent early view of nature's inexhaustibility, Price then moves on to discuss the Audubon Society's founding campaign in the 1890s against the extravagant use of stuffed birds to decorate women's hats. At the heart of the book is an improbable and extremely witty history of the plastic pink flamingo, perhaps the totem of Artifice and Kitsch -- nevertheless a potent symbol through which to plumb our troublesome yet powerful visions of nature. From here the story of the affluent Baby-Boomers begins. Through an examination of the phenomenal success of The Nature Company, TV series such as Northern Exposure and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and the sport-utility vehicle craze, the author ruminates on our very American, very urbanized and suburbanized needs, discontents, and desires for meaningful, yet artificially constructed connections to nature. Witty, at times even whimsical, Flight Maps is also a sophisticated and meditative archaeology of Americans' very real and uneasy desire to make nature meaningful in their lives

With "verve and panache," this magisterial history of Europe since 1453 shows how struggles over the heart of the continent have shaped the world we live in today (The Economist). Whoever controls the core of Europe controls the entire continent, and whoever controls Europe can dominate the world. Over the past five centuries, a rotating cast of kings, conquerors, presidents, and dictators have set their sights on the European heartland, desperate to seize this pivotal area or at least prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. From Charles V and Napoleon to Bismarck and Cromwell, from Hitler and Stalin to Roosevelt and Gorbachev, nearly all the key power players of modern history have staked their titanic visions on this vital swath of land. In Europe, prizewinning historian Brendan Simms presents an authoritative account of the past half-millennium of European history, demonstrating how the battle for mastery of the continent's center has shaped the modern world. A bold and compelling work by a renowned scholar, Europe integrates religion, politics, military strategy, and international relations to show how history -- and Western civilization itself -- was forged in the crucible of Europe.

Seeking to come to terms with the haunting memories of his childhood in the deep South-Charles Marsh has crafted a memoir of small-town Southern life caught up in the whirlwind of the Civil Rights movement. As minister of the First Baptist Church in Laurel, Mississippi, Charles Marsh's father Bob Marsh, was a prominent man who was beloved by the community. But Laurel was also home to Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Mississippi KKK and the director of their daily, unchallenged installments of terror and misery. Bowers was known and tolerated by the entire white community of Laurel. This included Bob Marsh, who struggled to do the right thing while reeling between righteous indignation and moral torpor, only slowly awakening to fear, suffering, and guilt over his unwillingness to take a public stand against Bowers. At the same time, The Last Days examines the collision of worlds once divided-white Protestant conservatism, the African American struggle for civil rights, and late 1960s counter culture-that propelled the dramatic changes in everyday life in a small Southern town.

Sir Winston Churchill was a well-traveled man. By the time he was twenty-five, his thirst for adventure had taken him to Cuba, India's North-West frontier, the Sudan, and South Africa, as well as to battle, prison, and worldwide fame. During World War II, when as prime minister he held Britain's destiny in his hands, he hazarded arduous journeys not only to confer face-to-face with his allies Roosevelt and Stalin, but also to witness firsthand the action at the front. In later years, his enduring passion for painting prompted travels to locales like Marrakech. (He took President Roosevelt there in 1943, simply to view a splendid sunset.) Celia Sandys actually accompanied her famous grandfather on some of his later travels, most memorably on a cruise aboard Aristotle Onassis's yacht Christina, but for this always-engaging book she herself has retraced his many journeys over seventy years on four continents, and sought the people who knew, entertained, consulted, or simply crossed paths with him. In their long-untold stories she finds her grandfather's character illuminated in new, revealing, and often surprising ways.

Winston Churchill fought the World War II twice over-first as Prime Minister during the war, and then later as the war's premier historian. From 1948-54, he published six volumes of memoirs. They secured his reputation and shaped our understanding of the conflict to this day. Drawing on the drafts of Churchill's manuscript as well as his correspondence from the period, David Reynolds masterfully reveals Churchill the author. Reynolds shows how the memoirs were censored by the British government to conceal state secrets, and how Churchill himself censored them to avoid offending current world leaders. This book illuminates an unjustly neglected period of Churchill's life-the Second Wilderness Years of 1945-51, when Churchill wrote himself into history, politicked himself back into the prime-ministership, and delivered some of the most important speeches of his career.

Child prodigy and brilliant MIT mathematician, Norbert Wiener founded the revolutionary science of cybernetics and ignited the information-age explosion of computers, automation, and global telecommunications. His best-selling book, Cybernetics, catapulted him into the public spotlight, as did his chilling visions of the future and his ardent social activism. Based on a wealth of primary sources and exclusive access to Wiener's closest family members, friends, and colleagues, Dark Hero of the Information Age reveals this eccentric genius as an extraordinarily complex figure. No one interested in the intersection of technology and culture will want to miss this epic story of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and colorful figures.

FIRST IN WAR, FIRST IN PEACE, FIRST IN LEADERSHIP. Richard Brookhiser's revolutionary biography, Founding Father, took George Washington off the dollar bill and made him live. Now, with his trademark wit and precision, Brookhiser expertly examines the details of Washington's life that fullscale biographies sweep over, to instruct us in true leadership. George Washington on Leadership is a textbook look at Washington's three spectacularly successful careers as an executive: general, president, and tycoon. Brookhiser explains how Washington maximized his strengths and overcame his flaws, and inspires us to do likewise. It shows how one man's struggles and successes 200 years ago can be a model for leaders today. Washington oversaw two startups-the army and the presidency. He chaired the most important meeting in American history-the Constitutional Convention. Washington rose from being a third son who was a major in the militia, to one of the most famous men in the world. At every stage in his career, he had to deal with changing circumstances, from tobacco prices to geopolitics, and with wildly different classes of men, from frontiersmen to aristocrats. Washington's example is so crucial because of the many firsts he is responsible for.

Founded in 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was initially perceived as a movement of polygamous, radical zealots; now in parts of the U.S. it has become synonymous with the establishment. In reevaluating its preoccupation with issues of church and state, Abanes uncovers the political agenda at Mormonism's core: the transformation of the world into a theocratic kingdom under Mormon authority. This illustrated edition has been revised and offers a new postscript by the author.

What if there had been no American War of Independence? What if Hitler had invaded Britain? What if Kennedy had lived? What if Russia had won the Cold War? Niall Ferguson, author of the highly acclaimed The Pity of War, leads the charge in this historically rigorous series of separate voyages into "imaginary time" and provides far-reaching answers to these intriguing questions.Ferguson's brilliant 90-page introduction doubles as a manifesto on the methodology of counter-factual history. His equally masterful afterword traces the likely historical ripples that would have proceeded from the maintenance of Stuart rule in England. This breathtaking narrative gives us a convincing, detailed "alternative history" of the West--from the accession of "James III" in 1701, to a Nazi-occupied England, to a U.S. Prime Minister Kennedy who lives to complete his term.

The nineteenth-century eccentric Ida C. Craddock was by turns a secular freethinker, a religious visionary, a civil-liberties advocate, and a resolute defender of belly-dancing. Arrested and tried repeatedly on obscenity charges, she was deemed a danger to public morality for her candor about sexuality. By the end of her life Craddock, the nemesis of the notorious vice crusader Anthony Comstock, had become a favorite of free-speech defenders and women's rights activists. She soon became as well the case-history darling of one of America's earliest and most determined Freudians. In Heaven's Bride, prize-winning historian Leigh Eric Schmidt offers a rich biography of this forgotten mystic, who occupied the seemingly incongruous roles of yoga priestess, suppressed sexologist, and suspected madwoman. In Schmidt's evocative telling, Craddock's story reveals the beginning of the end of Christian America, a harbinger of spiritual variety and sexual revolution.

The Cold War dominated history for nearly half a century, locking two superpowers in a global rivalry that ended only with the collapse of the Soviet Union. For millennia, the outcomes of war had been determined on the battlefield, but the most decisive moments of the Cold War occurred in the carefully worded exchanges of world leaders meeting face to face. In the shadow of the bomb, the summit meeting offered an opportunity for heads of state to rattle sabers and cross swords without triggering nuclear apocalypse. Drawing on extensive archival material, prizewinning historian David Reynolds describes the outsized personalities who negotiated the course of twentieth-century history: Neville Chamberlain, Adolph Hitler, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Richard Nixon, Leonid Brezhnev, Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Ronald Reagan. While these men addressed epochal issues, the outcome of each meeting was often determined more by individual personality than by international politics. Mishandled summits-Munich in 1938 and Yalta in 1945-brought about World War II and the Cold War, respectively. Kennedy's disastrous performance in Vienna in 1961 nearly brought about World War III. But successful summits in Moscow (1972), Camp David (1978), and Geneva (1985) led to dÃ(c)nte, a partial settlement in the Middle East, and a peaceful end to the Cold War. Written with verve and insight, Summits vividly describes the statesmen who stood, if only briefly, on top of the world. By revealing both the promise and the pitfalls of international diplomacy, David Reynolds offers valuable lessons as we find ourselves confronting once again a war without end.

The Lost Oasis tells the true story behind The English Patient. An extraordinary episode in World War II, it describes the Zerzura Club, a group of desert explorers and adventurers who indulged in desert travel by early-model-motor cars and airplanes, and who searched for lost desert oases and ancient cities of vanished civilizations. In reality, they were mapping the desert for military reasons and espionage. The club's members came from countries that soon would be enemies: England and the Allied Forces v. Italy and Germany. When war erupted in 1939, Ralph Bagnold founded the British Long Range Desert Group to spy on and disrupt Rommel's advance on Cairo, while a fellow club member, Hungarian Count Almasy, succeeded in placing German spies there. Ultimately, the British prevailed. Saul Kelly's riveting history draws on interviews with survivors and previously unknown documentary material in England, Italy, Germany, Hungary, and Egypt. His book reads like a thriller -- with one key difference: it's all true.

Amiri Baraka - dramatist, poet, essayist, orator, and fiction writer - is one of the preeminent African-American literary figures of our time. The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader provides the most comprehensive selection of Baraka's work to date, spanning almost 40 years of a brilliant, prolific, and controversial career, in which he has produced more than 12 books of poetry, 26 plays, eight collections of essays and speeches, and two books of fiction. This updated edition contains over 50 pages of previously unpublished work, as well as a chronology and full bibliography.

David Stevenson's widely acclaimed history of World War I changes forever our understanding of that pivotal conflict. Countering the commonplace assumption that politicians lost control of events, and that the war, once it began, quickly became an unstoppable machine, Stevenson contends that politicians deliberately took risks that led to war in July 1914. Far from being overwhelmed by the unprecedented scale and brutality of the bloodshed, political leaders on both sides remained very much in control of events throughout. According to Stevenson, the disturbing reality is that the course of the war was the result of conscious choices -- including the continued acceptance of astronomical casualties. In fluid prose, Stevenson has written a definitive history of the man-made catastrophe that left lasting scars on the twentieth century. Cataclysm is a truly international history, incorporating new research on previously undisclosed records from governments in Europe and across the world. From the complex network of secret treaties and alliances that eventually drew all of Europe into the war, through the bloodbaths of Gallipoli and the Somme, to the arrival of American forces, and the massive political, economic, and cultural shifts the conflict left in its wake, Cataclysm is a major revision of World War I history.

One of the most enduring and influential of all human institutions, the papacy has also been amongst the most controversial. No one who seeks to make sense of modern issues within Christendom -- or, indeed, world history -- can neglect the vital shaping role of the popes. In Keepers of the Keys of Heaven, eminent religion scholar Roger Collins offers a masterful account of the entire arc of papal history -- from the separation of the Greek and Latin churches to the contemporary controversies that threaten the unity of the one billion-strong worldwide Catholic community. A definitive and accessible guide to what is arguably the world's most vaunted office, Keepers of the Keys of Heaven is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of faith in the shaping of our world.

When government consultant Professor Marco Biagi was assassinated in Italy by the New Red Brigades in the aftermath of September 11, the country was transported back 30 years to the violent "Years of Lead." In the 1970s Neo-Fascists planted bombs, Marxist-Leninists kneecapped and assassinated, and ordinary Italians were afraid to go to their offices in the morning. There were over 500 killed by terrorists in those years, thousands wounded, burned, scarred; there are hundreds in jail or who have done time, and thousands still out there, like "Giorgio," having lived decades as clandestine soldiers. The most shocking document of that unstable era and one of the primary source documents in the history of terrorism is this anonymous firsthand narrative of a life devoted to the bloody cause of The Red Brigades. In candid and grim detail, "Giorgio" tells of his "transition to living underground." He coldly narrates his mundane routine that prefigures the methods of al-Quaeda: the long patient shadowing of potential targets (never victim, always "target"), the clinical monitoring of the news for opportunities for destruction, and the relentless study of target companies to identify the strategic personnel to kneecap or assassinate. He describes the succession of events that took him from simple troublemaking to full-fledged terrorism, from a gleeful "proletarian expropriation" of Levis from a Milanese "jeanseria" to shooting at the police in a famous demonstration in which one policeman was killed, and on to outright political assassinations. Fascinating and horrifying to the end, Giorgio's story resonates with the current situation in the United States as much as it did with Italy's when it was first published. A best-seller in Europe and a classic in Italy, this is the first U.S. publication of these uncensored memoirs of an unrepentant terrorist.

Richard Brookhiser wrote his first cover story for National Review at age fourteen, and became the magazine's youngest senior editor at twenty-three. William F. Buckley Jr. was Brookhiser's mentor, hero, and admirer; within a year of Brookhiser's arrival at the magazine, Buckley tapped him as his successor as editor-in-chief. But without warning, the relation ship soured -- one day, Brookhiser returned to his desk to find a letter from Buckley unceremoniously informing him "you will no longer be my successor." Brookhiser remained friends and colleagues with Buckley despite the breach, and in Right Time, Right Place he tells the story of that friendship with affection and clarity. At the same time, he provides a delightful account of the intellectual and political ferment of the conservative resurgence that Buckley nurtured and led. Witty and poignant, Right Time, Right Place tells the story of a young man and a political movement coming of age -- and of the man who inspired them both.

John Rae's accomplishments, surpassing all nineteenth-century Arctic explorers, were worthy of honors and international fame. No explorer even approached Rae's prolific record: 1,776 miles surveyed of uncharted territory; 6,555 miles hiked on snowshoes; and 6,700 miles navigated in small boats. Yet, he was denied fair recognition of his discoveries because he dared to utter the truth about the fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew, Rae's predecessors in the far north. Author Ken McGoogan vividly narrates the astonishing adventures of Rae, who found the last link to the Northwest Passage and uncovered the grisly truth about the cannibalism of Franklin and his crew. A bitter smear campaign by Franklin's supporters would deny Rae his knighthood and bury him in ignominy for over one hundred and fifty years. Ken McGoogan's passion to secure justice for a true North American hero in this revelatory book produces a completely original and compelling portrait that elevates Rae to his rightful place as one of history's greatest explorers.

What history calls the "Battle of the Atlantic" was really a full-scale war-within-a-war, fought from the beginning of hostilities in 1939 to the moment of cease-fire in 1945. Andrew Williams focuses on the first four years of this bitter conflict, during which time German submarines sank an astounding twelve million tons of Allied shipping. The story reaches its climax in May 1943, when the introduction of new weapons and tactics turned the tide of the battle and enabled the Allies to contain and finally defeat the dreaded German "wolf packs." Interweaving scores of first-person accounts from survivors of both sides, The Battle of the Atlantic follows the exploits of the charismatic U-boat commanders who led their crews to the hunt-and often to their deaths. It goes aboard the merchantmen and escort ships that were both victim and nemesis to the "gray wolves" of the sea. And it enters the war rooms of the German, British, and American navies, where code-breakers and strategists angled for any advantage in a race that spelled doom to its loser. This dramatic chronicle sheds new light on one of the most dangerous conflicts of the Second World War.

In the history of the modern world, there have been few characters more sadistic, sinister, and deeply demented as Baron Ungern-Sternberg. An anti-Semitic fanatic with a penchant for Eastern mysticism and a hatred of communists, Baron Ungern-Sternberg took over Mongolia in 1920 with a ragtag force of White Russians, Siberians, Japanese, and native Mongolians. While tormenting friend and foe alike, he dreamed of assembling a horse-borne army with which he would retake communist controlled Moscow. In this epic saga that ranges from Austria to the Mongolian Steppe, historian and travel writer James Palmer has brought to light the gripping life story of a madman whose actions fore shadowed the most grotesque excesses of the twentieth century.

In Interop, technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser explore the immense importance of interoperability -- the standardization and integration of technology -- and show how this simple principle will hold the key to our success in the coming decades and beyond. The practice of standardization has been facilitating innovation and economic growth for centuries. The standardization of the railroad gauge revolutionized the flow of commodities, the standardization of money revolutionized debt markets and simplified trade, and the standardization of credit networks has allowed for the purchase of goods using money deposited in a bank half a world away. These advancements did not eradicate the different systems they affected; instead, each system has been transformed so that it can interoperate with systems all over the world, while still preserving local diversity. As Palfrey and Gasser show, interoperability is a critical aspect of any successful system -- and now it is more important than ever. Today we are confronted with challenges that affect us on a global scale: the financial crisis, the quest for sustainable energy, and the need to reform health care systems and improve global disaster response systems. The successful flow of information across systems is crucial if we are to solve these problems, but we must also learn to manage the vast degree of interconnection inherent in each system involved. Interoperability offers a number of solutions to these global challenges, but Palfrey and Gasser also consider its potential negative effects, especially with respect to privacy, security, and co-dependence of states; indeed, interoperability has already sparked debates about document data formats, digital music, and how to create successful yet safe cloud computing. Interop demonstrates that, in order to get the most out of interoperability while minimizing its risks, we will need to fundamentally revisit our understanding of how it works, and how it can allow for improvements in each of its constituent parts. In Interop, Palfrey and Gasser argue that there needs to be a nuanced, stable theory of interoperability -- one that still generates efficiencies, but which also ensures a sustainable mode of interconnection. Pointing the way forward for the new information economy, Interop provides valuable insights into how technological integration and innovation can flourish in the twenty-first century.

Hurst shows how Grant and Forrest brought to the battlefield the fabled virtues of the American working-class: hard work, ingenuity, and intense determination. Each man's background contributed to his triumphs on the battlefield, but the open-mindedness of his fellow commanders proved just as important. When the North embraced Grant, it won a stalwart defender. When the South rejected Forrest, by contrast, it sealed its fate.

This pathbreaking book paints a radical new picture of alcoholism, offering powerful evidence that most chronic alcoholics live out their lives in intact, relatively quiet family environments. The authors show, however, that living in an alcoholic family--in which alcoholism is the central theme around which family life is organized--has profound effects on family members both drinkers and nondrinkers.

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular, liberal elites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course. Their failure lost them the faith of their constituents, paving the way for a Christian revival that offered America a firm new moral vision -- one rooted in the Protestant values of the founders. A groundbreaking reappraisal of the country's spiritual reawakening, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment shows how America found new purpose at the dawn of the Cold War.

Here, for the first time in one volume, is the full story of crimes committed by the Nazi leaders and of the trials in which they were brought to judgement. Conot reconstructs in a single absorbing narrative not only the events at Nuremburg but the offenses with which the accused were charged. He brilliantly characterizes each of the twenty-one defendants, vividly presenting each case and inspecting carefully the process of indictment, prosecution, defense and sentencing.

John Whitehead began life in Montclair, New Jersey, as a child of the Depression and went on to lead an exemplary life in the years of the Greatest Generation. In this intimate, charming autobiography, he shares his stories and the lessons he's learned about quiet leadership. He describes how on D-Day he commanded one of the landing crafts at Omaha Beach, and witnessed one of the greatest battles in American military history. Later, in his role as co-chair of Goldman Sachs, he was one of the pioneers of the globalization of international finance that was to change the face of American business. In 1985, Whitehead was appointed Deputy Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan and became the architect of the Reagan administration's successful efforts to wean the countries of Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union and to open up space there for the democratic movements that eventually resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most recently, he was appointed by New York Governor George Pataki as Chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is charged with the task of rebuilding Ground Zero. Whitehead provides a first-hand account of the difficult decisions the LMDC has made in meeting its goals of re-developing lower Manhattan and honoring the victims of 9/11 as the capstone of his remarkable career.

Why do Europeans and Americans see the world so differently? Why do Europeans and Americans have such different understandings of democracy and its discontents in the twenty-first century? Contrasting the civilization that produced the starkly modernist "cube" of the Great Arch of La Defense in Paris with the civilization that produced the "cathedral" of Notre-Dame, George Weigel argues that Europe's embrace of a narrow secularism has led to a crisis of morale that is eroding Europe's soul and threatening its future -- with dire lessons for the rest of the democratic world. Weigel traces the origins of "Europe's problem" to the atheistic humanism of the nineteenth-century European intellectual life, which set in motion a historical process that produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, the Gulag, Auschwitz, the Cold War -- and, most ominously, the Continent's de-population, which is worse today than during the Black Death. And yet, many Europeans still insist -- most recently, during the debate over a new EU constitution -- that only a public square shorn of religiously-informed moral argument is safe for human rights and democracy. Precisely the opposite, Weigel suggests, is true: the people of the "cathedral" can give a compelling account of their commitment to everyone's freedom; the people of the "cube" cannot. Can there be any true "politics" -- any true deliberation about the common good, and any robust defense of freedom -- without God? George Weigel makes a powerful case that the answer is "No," because, in the final analysis, societies are only as great as their spiritual aspirations.

This important book brings the ignored population of abused upper-income women to light, revealing for the first time the depth and severity of "upscale abuse" How is it possible for a highly educated woman with a career and resources of her own to stay in a marriage with an abusive husband? How can a man be considered a pillar of his community, run a successful business and regularly give his wife a black eye? That we can even ask these startling questions proves how convinced we are that domestic abuse is restricted to the lower classes. In "Not to People Like Us" psychotherapist Susan Weitzman dramatically challenges this assumption. It is the first book to explore a previously overlooked population of emotionally and physically battered wives-the upper-educated and upper-income women, who rarely report abuse and remain trapped by their own silence. Weitzman draws on an in-depth study to document the shocking nature and incidence of abuse among the wives of professors, physicians and CEOs-many of them professionals and executives themselves. With keen insight and profound sensitivity, she reveals the unique path taken by the upscale wife-the early warning signs, the dilemmas and decisions, the dangerous desire to cover up and maintain appearances. The first book to condemn the legal and social service system for failing to recognize domestic violence among upper-income families, "Not to People Like Us" offers crucial information to help women find their way out of abusive relationships and toward safety and independence.

When Harry S. Truman left the White House in 1953, his reputation was in ruins. Tarred by corruption scandals and his controversial decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan, he ended his second term with an abysmal approval rating, his presidency widely considered a failure. But this dim view of Truman ignores his crucial role in the 20th century and his enduring legacy, as celebrated historian Aida D. Donald explains in this incisive biography of the 33rd president. In Citizen Soldier, Donald shows that, for all his failings, Truman deserves recognition as the principal architect of the American postwar world. The son of poor Missouri farmers, Truman overcame professional disaster and personal disillusionment to become something of a hero in the Missouri National Guard during World War I. His early years in politics were tainted by the corruption of his fellow Missouri Democrats, but Truman's hard work and scrupulous honesty eventually landed him a U.S. Senate seat and then the Vice-Presidency. When Franklin Roosevelt passed away in April 1945, Truman unexpectedly found himself at the helm of the American war effort -- and in command of the atomic bomb, the most lethal weapon humanity had ever seen. Truman's decisive leadership during the remainder of World War II and the period that followed reshaped American politics, economics, and foreign relations; in the process, says Donald, Truman delineated the complex international order that would dominate global politics for the next four decades. Yet his accomplishments, such as the liberal reforms of the Fair Deal, have long been overshadowed by a second term marred by scandal. Until we reevaluate Truman and his presidency, Donald argues, we cannot fully understand the world he helped create. A psychologically penetrating portrait, Citizen Soldier candidly weighs Truman's moments of astonishing greatness against his profound shortcomings, offering a balanced treatment of one of America's most consequential -- and misunderstood -- presidents.

This eye-opening book shows how Communist state and party authorities stage-managed the Soviets' memory of World War II, transforming a national trauma into a heroic exploit that glorified the party while systematically concealing the disastrous mistakes and criminal cruelties committed by the Stalinist tyranny.