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The death of the Celtic tiger is not an extinction event to trouble naturalists. There was, in fact nothing natural about this tiger, if it ever really existed. The"Irish Economic miracle&rdquo was built on good old-fashioned subsidies (from the European Union) and the simple fact that until the 1980s Ireland was by the standards of the developed world so economically backward that the only way was up. And as it began to catch up to European and American averages, the Irish economy could boast some seemingly remarkable statistics. These lured in investors, the Irish deregulated and all but abandoned financial oversight, and a great Irish financial ceilidh began. It would last for a decade. When the global financial crash of 2008 arrived it struck Ireland harder than anywhere-even Iceland looked like a model of rectitude compared to the fiasco that stretched from Cork to Dublin. There was an avalanche of statistics as toxic as the property-based assets that lay beneath many of them: type="disc" The International Monetary Fund was predicting that Ireland's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would shrink by 13.5 per cent in 2009 and 2010-the worst performance among all the advanced economies and one of the worst ever recorded in peacetime in the developed world. type="disc" Government debt almost doubled in a year. type="disc" In May 2008, &euro13.5 million was paid for a 450-acre farm in Warrenstown, County Meath-one of the highest prices ever paid for agricultural land anywhere in the world. By 2009 the level of debt among Irish households and companies was the highest in the European Union. type="disc" The country's gross indebtedness was larger than Japan's, which has thirty times the population. type="disc" Between 1994 and 2006, the average second-hand house price in Dublin increased from &euro82,772 to &euro512,461-a rise of 519 per cent. By 2009 Irish house prices had fallen more rapidly than any others in Europe. type="disc" With a fifth of its office spaces empty, Dublin had the highest vacancy rate of any European capital and was rated as having the worst development and investment potential of twenty-seven European cities. type="disc" The Irish stock exchange fell by 68 per cent in 2008 type="disc" The average Irish family had lost almost half its financial assets type="disc" Unemployment rose faster than in any other Western European country, increasing by 85 per cent in a year. type="disc" Ireland's bad bank, the National Assets Management Agency (Nama), which had to take over &euro90 billion in loans to developers from banks that would otherwise be insolvent holds more assets [sic] than any publicly quoted property company in the world, dwarfing giants such as GE Capital Real Estate and Morgan Stanley Real Estate, which own assets of &euro60 billion and &euro48 billion respectively.And under all this rubble lay the corpse of the Celtic Tiger. How Ireland managed to achieve such a spectacular implosion is a stunning story of corruption, carelessness and venality, told with passion and fury by one of Ireland's most respected journalists and commentators.

William Shawcross, one of Britain's most admired journalists, eloquently and forcefully defends the war in Iraq and explores its implications for our relationship with Europe and the rest of the world

A savagely witty account of the last quarter century, when despite a great leap forward in technology there has been a huge, regressive collapse in our ability to think straight--so that everything has begun to stop making sense

Was Benjamin Franklin's famous electric kite experiment a fraud? And did it determine the course of the American Revolution?

U.S. foreign policy official Eizenstat tells how the Holocaust became a political and diplomatic battleground 50 years after the war's end, as the issues of dormant bank accounts, slave labor, confiscated property, looted art, and unpaid insurance policies shook Europe and America.

Meyer examines the present and past of the Asian heartland in a book that blends scholarship with reportage, providing fascinating detail about regions and peoples now of urgent concern to America.

After losing his brother to cancer and a painful divorce that left him the sole charge d'affaires of two decidedly spirited children, environmental reporter Daniel Glick knew he and his little family desperately needed some karmic rejuvenation. He opted for an epic adventure. In the summer of 2001, Dan, Zoe, and Kolya packed up and set off on a six-month tour to see the world's most exotic and endangered habitats. Monkey Dancing takes readers along for this incredible journey. From the python-infested rivers of Borneo to the highest summits of Bali, from Nepal's Gangeatic Plains to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, Glick recounts the adventures they met with, the challenges they confronted, and how they learned to cope with grief, loss, and one another. Along the way, he offers intimate reflection on life, fatherhood, change, and the fragile health of our troubled planet. Acclaimed by reviewers, a BookSense Parenting bestseller, Monkey Dancing is a "poignant, affirming, ultimately courageous book" ,Audubon Magazine.

One of the world's leading philanthropists describes his experiences helping to bring about democratic change in Eastern Europe--experiences that are especially relevant now that America has begun to intervene to create functioning democracies.