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History and Current Events April 2017
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| Blue on Blue: An Insider's Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops by Charles Campisi with Gordon DillowFormer Chief of the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau Charles Campisi's memoir is a compelling, no-holds-barred account of policing in New York City, with a focus on police misconduct. (Even before he joined Internal Affairs, he'd witnessed some shady cop behavior.) From stopping a fellow officer from shooting a suspect in the back, to the Amadou Diallou shooting and the Abner Louima case, Campisi chronicles internal controversies and public outrage while detailing his work to change the culture in the NYPD. In a starred review, Booklist calls Blue on Blue an "unflinching exposé and a riveting read." |
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| Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West by Tom ClavinWell known as an inspiration for many of Hollywood's Wild West shoot-em-ups, 1870s Dodge City, Kansas was a supply center, a railhead, and a host to gigantic stockyards. Attracting characters of all types, it existed on the fuzzy boundary between law and lawlessness, where tough and fearless men, among them Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, kept order. In this vivid portrait of the city and its denizens, award-winning journalist Tom Clavin traces Masterson's and Earp's careers, culminating with the final battle, called the Dodge City War, between lawmen and desperados. Wild West aficionados, especially fans of Jeff Guinn's The Last Gunfight, featuring Tombstone, Arizona, will find Dodge City un-put-downable. |
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Fallen Glory : The Lives and Deaths of History's Greatest Buildings
by James Crawford
Buildings are more like us than we realize. They can be born into wealth or poverty, enjoying every privilege or struggling to make ends meet. They have parents—gods, kings and emperors, governments, visionaries and madmen—as well as friends and enemies. They can succeed or fail. They can live. And, sooner or later, they die. James Crawford uncovers the biographies of some of the world’s most fascinating lost and ruined buildings. The lives of these iconic structures are packed with drama and intrigue. Soap operas on the grandest scale, they feature war and religion, politics and art, love and betrayal, catastrophe and hope. Frequently their afterlives have been no less dramatic—their memories used and abused down the millennia for purposes both sacred and profane. They provide the stage for a startling array of characters, including Gilgamesh, the Cretan Minotaur, Agamemnon, Nefertiti, Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Catherine the Great, Adolf Hitler, and even Bruce Springsteen. The twenty structures Crawford focuses on include The Tower of Babel, The Temple of Jerusalem, The Library of Alexandria, The Bastille, Kowloon Walled City, the Berlin Wall, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
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| We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most... by Noah IsenbergThe World War II-set film Casablanca, featuring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains, won multiple Oscars and became a perennial favorite. In this extensively researched history, film expert Noah Isenberg covers all the details, from the screenplay's source (an unproduced play titled Everybody Comes to Rick's), to casting and production, to credits, to isolationist objections and the wartime context of its release in 1942. He also adds some little-known facts, including that the cast included several refugees from the Nazi regime. Isenberg's discussion of the movie's enduring appeal will give classic film buffs much to discuss, perhaps with soft piano music in the background. |
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A Great Place to Have a War : America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA
by Joshua Kurlantzick
In 1960, President Eisenhower was focused on Laos, a tiny Southeast Asian nation few Americans had ever heard of. Washington feared the country would fall to communism, triggering a domino effect in the rest of Southeast Asia. So in January 1961, Eisenhower approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, a plan to create a proxy army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces in Laos. While remaining largely hidden from the American public and most of Congress, Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war, which continued under Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, lasted nearly two decades, killed one-tenth of Laos’s total population, left thousands of unexploded bombs in the ground, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. Joshua Kurlantzick gives us the definitive account of the Laos war and its central characters, including the four key people who led the operation—the CIA operative who came up with the idea, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew.
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Three Minutes to Doomsday : An Agent, a Traitor, and the Worst Espionage Breach in U.s. History
by Joe Navarro
In 1988 FBI Agent Joe Navarro divides his time among SWAT assignments, flying air reconnaissance, and working counterintelligence. A body-language expert with an uncanny ability to “read” the suspects he interrogates, Joe dreams of snaring an assignment that will get him noticed by headquarters. Then he interviews Rod Ramsay. Ramsay is a former American soldier who is linked to a soldier-turned-traitor, Clyde Conrad. When Navarro notices Ramsay’s hand twitch at the mention of Conrad's name, Joe thinks he smells a liar. He insists to his bosses that they launch an investigation. What follows is unique in the annals of espionage detection—a cat-and-mouse game played at the highest level. Navarro is the FBI agent who can’t overtly tip to his target that he suspects him of wrongdoing lest he clam up, and Rod Ramsey is the suspected traitor, an evil genius with the second highest IQ ever recorded by the US Army. Navarro must pre-choreograph every interview, becoming a chess master plotting twenty moves in advance. And the backdrop to this battle of wits is the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the very real possibility that Russian leaders may launch all-out war.
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Amazing Stories of the Space Age : True Tales of Nazis in Orbit, Soldiers on the Moon, Orphaned Martian Robots, and Other Fascinating Accounts from the Annals of Spaceflight
by Rod Pyle
Rod Pyle presents an insider's perspective on the most unusual and bizarre space missions ever devised inside and outside of NASA. The incredible projects described here were not merely flights of fancy dreamed up by space enthusiasts, but actual missions planned by leading aeronautical engineers. Some were designed but not built; others were built but not flown; and a few were flown to failure but little reported. A giant rocket that would use atomic bombs as propulsion (never mind the fallout), military bases on the moon that could target enemies on earth with nuclear weapons, a scheme to spray-paint the lenses of Soviet spy satellites in space, the rushed Soyuz 1 spacecraft that ended with the death of its pilot, the near-disaster of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the mysterious Russian space shuttle that flew only once and was then scrapped--these are just some of the unbelievable tales that Pyle has found in once top-secret documents as well as accounts that were simply lost for many decades.
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| The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are... by Brad StoneIn The Upstarts, Bloomberg News senior executive editor Brad Stone chronicles the rise of the sharing economy, built on the success of Airbnb and Uber. After the 2007-08 Wall Street slump, the business climate in Silicon Valley was ready for new strategies. Several young entrepreneurs stepped in -- first among them Brian Chesky of Airbnb's homestay scheme and Travis Kalanick of Uber's ride-sharing app -- and analyzed market trends, crunched numbers, discovered niche opportunities, and capitalized on them. Though their roads were often bumpy, their global businesses are worth billions. Whether you're interested in business history or consider yourself an entrepreneur, you'll want to read Stone's detailed, accessible analysis. |
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Monarchs and Their Monarchies
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| King Peggy: An American Secretary, Her Royal Destiny, and the Inspiring Story of How She... by Peggielene Bartels and Eleanor HermanChances are, most of us will never be crowned king...especially if we're women! But that's just what happened to Ghana-born Peggielene Bartels, who'd been working in the U.S. for three decades. After receiving a phone call telling her that her uncle, the king of a 7,000-person African village, was dead, and that she had been elected the new king, Peggy found the resources to provide what her kingdom needed -- including clean water and schools with computers. Otuam isn't the kind of place that the word "monarchy" conjures up for most of us, but King Peggy offers an authentic and inviting look at a small African kingdom. |
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| Princes at War: The Bitter Battle Inside Britain's Royal Family in the Darkest Days of WWII by Deborah CadburyIn 1936, England's King George V died leaving four sons whose fitness to rule was widely debated. There are numerous books and films about the abdication of Edward VIII and the accession of King George VI. Less well known are their brothers, Princes George and Henry. In Princes at War, former BBC television producer Deborah Cadbury profiles each of the princes and details the crisis the monarchy faced over Edward VIII's abdication. She explores the capabilities of the younger sons (the Dukes of Kent and Gloucester), and sensitively details George VI's commanding leadership during the war. This portrait of a conflicted monarchy will please modern history enthusiasts as well as fans of British royalty. |
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| Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42 by William DalrympleThe British imperial forces restored the exiled Shah Shuja ul-Mulk to the throne of Afghanistan in 1839, but the Afghan people soon rebelled, and the British suffered a humiliating defeat in 1842. In Return of a King, travel writer William Dalrymple draws on previously unused materials, including Persian and Pashtu sources, to chronicle the history of the Shah's family and Britain's efforts to use Afghanistan as a buffer against French and Russian imperialism. He also draws parallels between this British foray into the region and the 20th- and 21st-century wars in Afghanistan. Check out this richly descriptive and insightful analysis to learn about the country's global significance. |
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| Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia by Robert LaceyThe Kingdom of Saudi Arabia owns one of the richest oil deposits in the world, but this wealth is only one among many social and political factors the royal family deals with. In this engaging and accessible analysis, author Robert Lacey incorporates his interviews with a variety of Saudi citizens, information about Islamic movements and history, foreign secularizing influences, and Saudi-led modernization efforts. He also looks at Saudi Arabia's shifting global political alliances. Publishers Weekly calls Inside the Kingdom "indispensable," praising the "depth, breadth, and evenhandedness" of Lacey's research. |
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| The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His... by Jack WeatherfordIn Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, bestselling author Jack Weatherford examined the life and legacy of the much-maligned 13th-century empire builder. He continues his study with the polygamous and prolific leader's daughters, at least four of whom became queens and provided stability among the lands that made up the Mongol empire. Unfortunately, soon after Genghis Khan's death their male relatives took over, and the empire declined until another powerful queen -- Manduhai the Wise -- reunited the Mongols. Whether you're interested in Asian history or in women's studies, you'll enjoy this "uplifting, entertaining" (Kirkus Reviews) account. |
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