"Herodotus, the 5th century chronicler, scarcely figured in the curriculum when famed Polish writer and traveler Ryszard Kapuscinski attended university in the 1950s. After he finished college, Ryszard became a foreign correspondent who hoped to go abroad, perhaps to Czechoslovakia. Instead, he was sent to India—the first stop on a decades-long tour of the world that took him from Iran to El Salvador, from Angola to Armenia. His only companion on his travels was a volume of Herodotus, a gift from his first boss. In his journey across continents, Kapuscinski discovers his life's work: to understand and describe the non-Western world in its remotest reaches, in all its variety, through his still-virginal Western eyes. Throughout his travels, the journalist tests and emulates Herodotus' methods—to wander, look, talk, and listen—so that he can later recount what he saw and learned."
"Like many other philosophical writings, the Tao Te Ching is a timeless Chinese treasure. The ancient writings are credited to Lao Tzu, although some believe them to be authored by a number of persons writing under the Lao Tzu pen name.
Nevertheless, this abridged audio version gives the listener, a taste of the wisdom of age, and the important values of human existence. Even though the text is over 2500 years old, it is still fresh, alive and relevant to our own current culture."
"Written in China over two thousand years ago, The Art of War provides the first known attempt to formulate a rational basis for the planning and conduct of military operations.
This complete reading of the classic text by Sun Tzu brings to life the timeless strategic principles of the ancient art of warfare. It soon becomes apparent how this book is still applicable today, and not just for military operations, but to so many other aspects of life. Sun Tzu teaches in a straightforward style how to command an operation of utmost efficiency and effectiveness, and the elements required to win."
"In this illuminating study, Dower explores the ways in which the shattering defeat of the Japanese in World War II, followed by over six years of American military occupation, affected every level of Japanese society. He describes the countless ways in which the Japanese met the challenge of 'starting over'—from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes, fears, and activities of ordinary men and women in every walk of life. He shows us the intense and turbulent interplay of conqueror and conquered, West and East, in a way no Western historian has done before.
This is a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary moment in history, when new values warred with the old, and early ideals of demilitarization and radical reform were soon challenged by the United States' decision to incorporate Japan in the Cold War Pax Americana."
"The architects of America’s cultural revolution of the 1960s were Beat authors like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and celebrated figures like Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver and Susan Sontag. In examining the lives and works of those who spoke for the 1960s, Roger Kimball conceives a series of cautionary tales, an annotated guidebook of wrong turns, dead-ends, and blind alleys.
According to Kimball, the revolutionary assaults on “The System” in the 1960s still define the way we live now, with intellectually debased schools and colleges, morally chaotic sexual relations and family life, and a degraded media and popular culture. While some may think of the 1960s as “the Last Good Time,” Kimball paints the decade as a seedbed of excess and moral breakdown"
"Minutes after 2 A.M. on November 21, 1970, more than one hundred U.S. war planes shattered the dark calm of the skies over Hanoi. Their mission: rescue sixty-one American POWs from Son Tay prison. Less than thirty minutes later, the raid was over, but no Americans had been rescued. The prisoners had been moved from Son Tay four and a half months earlier and that wasn’t all. Part of the raiding force landed at the wrong compound, a “school” bristling with enemy soldiers, but the soldiers weren’t Vietnamese . . .
Replete with fascinating insights into the workings of high-level intelligence and military command, The Raid is Benjamin Schemmer’s unvarnished account of the courageous mission that was quickly labeled an intelligence failure by Congress and a Pentagon blunder by the world press. Determined to ferret out the truth, Schemmer uncovers one of the CIA’s most carefully guarded secrets. From the planning and live-fire rehearsals to the explosive reactions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff watching the drama unfold to the aftermath as the White House and Pentagon struggled for damage control, Schemmer tackles the tough questions. What really happened during the twenty-seven minutes the raiders spent on the ground? Did the CIA know the whole time that the Americans were gone? Had the Agency in fact been responsible for the POWs being moved? And perhaps most intriguing, why was the rescue—though it never freed a single prisoner—not a failure after all?"
"In this comprehensive history, Stanley Karnow demystifies the tragic ordeal of America's war in Vietnam. The book's central theme is that America's leaders, prompted as much by domestic politics as by global ambitions, carried the United States into Southeast Asia with little regard for the realities of the region. Karnow elucidates the decision-making process in Washington and Asia and recounts the political and military events that occurred after the Americans arrived in Vietnam. Throughout, he focuses on people, those who shaped strategy and those who suffered, died, or survived as a result.
Panoramic in scope and filled with fresh revelations drawn from secret documents and from exclusive interviews with hundreds of participants on both sides, Vietnam: A History transcends the past with lessons relevant to the present and the future."
