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From bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steve Coll, the definitive story of the decades-long relationship between the United States and Saddam Hussein, and a deeply researched and news breaking investigation into how human error, cultural miscommunication, and hubris led to one of the costliest geopolitical conflicts of our time.

In this definitive history of the modern Arab world, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan draws extensively on Arab sources and texts to place the Arab experience in its crucial historical context for the first time. Tracing five centuries of Arab history, Rogan reveals that there was an age when the Arabs set the rules for the rest of the world. Today, however, the Arab world's sense of subjection to external powers carries vast consequences for both the region and Westerners who attempt to control it.

At its height in 660 BCE, the kingdom of Assyria stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. It was the first empire the world had ever seen. Here, historian Eckart Frahm tells the epic story of Assyria and its formative role in global history. Assyria’s wide-ranging conquests have long been known from the Hebrew Bible and later Greek accounts. But nearly two centuries of research now permit a rich picture of the Assyrians and their empire beyond the battlefield.

From the high-ranking officer who wrote the still-classified British military analysis of the war in Iraq comes the authoritative history of two conflicts which have overshadowed the beginning of the 21st century. Inextricably linked to the ongoing ‘War on Terror’, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dominated more than a decade of international politics and their influence is felt to this day.

An award-winning military journalist tells the amazing stories of 22 soldiers who've won the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military award.

The history of reportage has often depended on outsiders—Ryszard Kapuściński witnessing the fall of the shah in Iran, Frances FitzGerald observing the aftermath of the American war in Vietnam. What would happen if a native son was so estranged from his city by war that he could, in essence, view it as an outsider? What kind of portrait of a war-wracked place and people might he present? A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s vivid, shattering response.

In 2002, Sam Faddis was named to head a CIA team that would enter Iraq to facilitate the deployment of follow-on conventional military forces numbering more than 40,000 American soldiers. This force, built around the 4th Infantry Division, would, in partnership with Kurdish forces and with the assistance of Turkey, engage Saddam's army in the North as part of a coming invasion. Faddis expected to be on the ground in Iraq within weeks, the entire campaign likely to be over by summer. The 4th Infantry Division never arrived, nor did any other conventional forces in substantial number.

The Sumerians settled in the area known as Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, around 5,000 years ago. They produced many fundamental changes to the way in which human societies developed - these were the first city-builders, the first people to use wheeled vehicles, the first methodical astronomers, and the first people to develop a sophisticated written language. The Sumerians also produced art, music, and literature as well as created some of the first professional soldiers the world had ever seen.

A delightful, well-written, and vastly informative ethnographic study, this is an account of Elizabeth Warnock Fernea's two-year stay in a tiny rural village in Iraq, where she assumed the dress and sheltered life of a harem woman. This volume gives a unique insight into a part of the Midddle Eastern life seldom seen by the West.

While serving a portion of his time under the Special Operations Command, Benjamin Sledge fought to keep his humanity amid the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. But war never leaves its participants unscathed. In Where Cowards Go to Die, Sledge reveals an unflinchingly honest portrait of war that few dare to tell.

ISIS - the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria - has taken on the mantle of being the single most dangerous terrorist threat to global security since al-Qaeda. In Defeating ISIS, internationally renowned intelligence veteran, author, and counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance gives an insider's view to explain the origins of this occult group, its violent propaganda, and how it spreads its ideology throughout the Middle East and to disaffected youth deep in the heart of the Western world.

Selected in 2005 by the army to be the first airborne reconnaissance squadron, 5th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, better known as 5-73 CAV, was formed from 3rd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. The members of the squadron were hand-selected by the squadron command team, Lieutenant Colonel Poppas and Command Sergeant Major Edgar. With just more than 400 paratroopers, they were half the size of a full-strength battalion and the smallest unit in the Panther Brigade.

Only once in a lifetime does a war so brutal erupt. A war that becomes an official genocide, causes millions to run from their homes, compels the slaughtering of thousands in the most horrific of ways, and inspires terrorist attacks to transpire across the world. That is the chilling legacy of the ISIS onslaught, and Only Cry for the Living takes a profoundly personal, unprecedented dive into one of the most brutal terrorist organizations in the world.

In Enki & Enlil, My Brother My Enemy, we will take you on an unimaginable and profound journey into the heart of ancient settings, musings, ancient mind-set, ancient histories, and ancient practices to reveal a breathtaking, hidden reality that will transform your understanding and life forever and in many ways. The suggestions in this work will show that we are debating present and ancient matters that will help uplift you spiritually. Spirituality, in this sense, is enlightenment—nothing else. Enlightenment is perhaps one of the reasons even the Gods are at each other’s throats up to ...

Fallujah. Few names conjure up as many images of blood, sacrifice, and valor as does this ancient city in Al Anbar province 40 miles west of Baghdad. This sprawling concrete jungle was the scene of two major US combat operations in 2004. The first was Operation Vigilant Resolve, an aborted effort that April by US Marines intent on punishing the city’s insurgents. The second, Operation Phantom Fury, was launched seven months later. Richard Lowry’s New Dawn: The Battles for Fallujah is the first comprehensive history of this fighting.

From the earliest days of his dictatorship, Saddam Hussein had vowed to destroy Israel. So, when France sold Iraq a top-of-the-line nuclear reactor in 1975, the Israelis were justifiably concerned, especially when they discovered that Iraqi scientists had already formulated a secret program to extract weapon-grade plutonium from the reactor, a first critical step in creating an atomic bomb.

From the winter of 2006 through the spring of 2007, 250 marines from Echo Company, Second Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment, fought daily in the dangerous, dense city streets of Ramadi, Iraq, during the Multi-National Forces Surge ordered by President George W. Bush. The marines' mission: to kill or capture anti-Iraqi forces. Their experience: like being in hell. Now Major Scott A. Huesing, the commander who led Echo Company through Ramadi, takes listeners back to the streets of Ramadi in a visceral, gripping portrayal of modern urban combat.

This audiobook includes tales of gods and goddesses, both major and minor, as well as kings and heroes, both historical and mythical. One such king is the hero of what many scholars believe to be the first written epic: Gilgamesh. In addition to creating connections between the human world and the divine, Sumerian myths explain how the world came to be in the first place. These myths establish the cosmic order, which places the greater gods, or Annunaki, at the top of the hierarchy, with the lesser gods, or Igigi, below them.

James Verini arrived in Iraq in the summer of 2016 to write about life in the Islamic State. He stayed to cover the jihadis' last great stand, the Battle of Mosul, not knowing it would go on for nearly a year, nor that it would become, in the words of the Pentagon, "the most significant urban combat since WWII." They Will Have to Die Now takes the listener into the heart of the conflict against the most lethal insurgency of our time. We see unspeakable violence, improbable humanity, and occasional humor.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East Editor, has been covering the region since 1989 and is uniquely placed to explain its complex past and its troubled present. In this new book, in part based on his acclaimed podcast, Bowen takes us on a journey across the Middle East and through its history. He meets ordinary men and women on the front line, their leaders, whether brutal or benign, and he explores the power games that have so often wreaked devastation on civilian populations as those leaders, whatever their motives, jostle for political, religious and economic control.