World

In 2006, journalist Deborah Cassrels embarked on a personal odyssey to the Indonesian island of Bali. She was quickly enchanted by everything that most tourists find - its beauty, easy lifestyle, exotic culture, stunning beaches and striking landscapes. Three years later she moved there and became The Australian newspaper's first Bali-based correspondent, covering events throughout Indonesia. Peeling back the tourist veneer, Cassrels soon found herself caught up in a tapestry of beauty, mystery, power, corruption and violence.

Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil present an unprecedented look into the murky world of Chinese espionage both past and present, enabling a better understanding of how pervasive and important its influence is, both in China and abroad. 

Cubans today, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, are hesitantly embracing the future. In his new book, Anthony DePalma, a veteran reporter with years of experience in Cuba, focuses on a neighborhood across the harbor from Old Havana to dramatize the optimism as well as the enormous challenges that Cubans face: a moving snapshot of Cuba with all its contradictions as the new regime opens the gate to the capitalism that Fidel railed against for so long. 

In what has become a classic of Middle Eastern literature, Raja Shehadeh, in Palestinian Walks, wrote of his treks through the hills surrounding Ramallah over a period of three decades under Israel's military occupation. In Where the Line Is Drawn, Shehadeh explores how occupation has affected him personally, chronicling the various crossings that he undertook into Israel over a period of forty years to visit friends and family, to enjoy the sea, to argue before the Israeli courts, and to negotiate failed peace agreements.

They are a mass migration of thousands, yet each one travels alone. Solito, Solita (Alone, Alone) is an urgent collection of oral histories that tells - in their own words - the story of young refugees fleeing countries in Central America and traveling for hundreds of miles to seek safety and protection in the United States. Fifteen narrators describe why they fled their homes, what happened on their dangerous journeys through Mexico, how they crossed the borders, and for some, their ongoing struggles to survive in the United States. 

The form of constitution that replaced feudalism and absolutism was democracy; the form of government, plutocracy. Today, democracy is a façade of plutocracy: Since nations would not tolerate a pure form of plutocracy, they were granted nominal powers, while the real power rests in the hands of plutocrats. In republican as well as monarchical democracies, the statesmen are puppets, the capitalists are the puppeteers; they dictate the guidelines of politics, rule through purchase the public opinion of the voters, and through professional and social relationships, the ministers.

A vivid, heartbreaking portrait of the fate that so many African countries suffered after independence. The dictator who grew so rich on his country's cocoa crop that he built a 35-storey-high basilica in the jungles of the Ivory Coast. The austere, incorruptible leader who has shut Eritrea off from the world in a permanent state of war and conscripted every adult into the armed forces. In Equatorial Guinea, the paranoid despot who thought Hitler was the saviour of Africa and waged a relentless campaign of terror against his own people. 

To understand the significance of the parts played by Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher in East-West relations in the second half of the 1980s, Brown addresses several specific questions: What were the values and assumptions of these leaders, and how did their perceptions evolve? What were the major influences on them? To what extent were they reflecting the views of their own political establishment or challenging them? How important for ending the East-West standoff were their interrelations?

Less than a decade ago, China did not have a single high-speed train in service. Today, it owns a network of 14,000 miles of high-speed rail, far more than the rest of the world combined. Now, China is pushing its tracks into Southeast Asia, reviving a century-old colonial fantasy of an imperial railroad stretching to Singapore, and kicking off a key piece of the One Belt One Road initiative, which has a price tag of $1 trillion, and reaches inside the borders of more than 60 countries.

...And What Do You Do? is a hard-hitting analysis of the royal family, exposing its extravagant use of public money and the highly dubious behaviour of some among its ranks, whilst being critical of the knee-jerk sycophancy shown by the press and politicians. Baker also considers the wider role the royals play in society, including the link with House of Lords reform, and the constitutional position of the monarch, which is important given Prince Charles’ present and intended approach. 

Journalist Krithika Varagur's Da'wa chronicles the House of Saud as it systematically transforms the Muslim world in its own image, in one of the major imperial projects in today's world, on par with China's economic diplomacy. Since 1979, Saudi Arabia has spent $1.8 billion per year, by one estimate, to propagate its puritanical brand of Islam, called Salafism or Wahhabism. It has kept scrupulous records of its religious activity in 27 countries, with over 4,000 Salafi preachers on its payroll worldwide. 

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought-provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, the enmity is between these three "tiger" nations and what prevents them from making peace.

In Going Home, Raja Shehadeh, the Orwell Prize-winning author of Palestinian Walks, takes us on a series of journeys around his hometown of Ramallah. Set in a single day - the day that happens to be the 50th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank - the audiobook is a powerful and moving record and chronicle of the changing face of his city. 

In Putin's People, former Moscow correspondent and investigative journalist Catherine Belton tells the untold story of the rise of Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him. Delving deep into the workings of Putin's Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the free-wheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs who in turn subverted their country's economy and legal system and expanded its influence in the West.

China and America are world powers without serious rivals. They eye each other warily across the Pacific; they communicate poorly; there seems little natural empathy. A massive geopolitical contest has begun. America prizes freedom; China values freedom from chaos. America values strategic decisiveness; China values patience.America is becoming society of lasting inequality; China a meritocracy. America has abandoned multilateralism; China welcomes it.

Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world....

Blowout is a call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on Earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world’s most destructive industry and its enablers. The stakes have never been higher....

From Wired senior writer Andy Greenberg comes the true story of the most devastating cyberattack in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it.... 

An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships - and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom....

The defining geopolitical contest of the 21st century is between China and the US. But is it avoidable? And if it happens, is the outcome already inevitable....

The Last Punisher is a bold, no-holds-barred first-person account of the Iraq War. With wry humor and moving testimony, Kevin Lacz tells the story of his tour in Iraq with SEAL Team Three....

One of the US government's leading China experts reveals the hidden strategy fueling that country's rise - and how Americans have been seduced into helping China overtake us....

In 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, three young Arab men ventured into the town of Ramle, in what is now Jewish Israel....

In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research, brilliant synthesis and narrative élan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and lives of Stalin’s court from the time of his acclamation as “leader” in 1929, five years after Lenin’s death, until his own death in 1953 at the age of 73....

The Man Without a Face is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to its own people and to the world....

Kim Ghattas delivers a gripping account of the largely unexplored story of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, born from the sparks of the 1979 Iranian revolution and fueled by American policy....

Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, with disturbing resonances for our own time....

Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil present an unprecedented look into the murky world of Chinese espionage both past and present, enabling a better understanding of how pervasive and important its influence is, both in China and abroad....

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joby Warrick traces how the strain of militant Islam behind ISIS first arose in a Jordanian prison and spread with the unwitting aid of two American presidents....

This is the intimate story of 20 tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness, but all inspired by holy autocracy and imperial ambition....

Insightful and shocking, The Plot to Destroy Democracy puts a professional spy lens on Putin's plot and unravels it play-by-play. In the end, Malcolm Nance provides a better understanding of why Putin's efforts are a serious threat to our national security and global alliances....

Steve Coll tells the epic and enthralling story of America's intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11....

Putin's best-selling biographer reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy....

The great lesson of the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was the danger of misreading the statements, actions, and intentions of the adversary. Today, Vladimir Putin has become the greatest challenge to European security and the global world order....

Modern Cuba comes alive in a vibrant portrait of a group of families' varied journeys in one community over the last 20 years....

In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story....

The untold story of how Russia refined the art and science of targeted assassination abroad - while Western spies watched in horror as their governments failed to guard against the threat....

The dictator who grew so rich on his country's cocoa crop that he built a 35-storey-high basilica in the jungles of the Ivory Coast. The austere, incorruptible leader who has shut Eritrea off from the world in a permanent state of war and conscripted every adult into the armed forces....

The signs are everywhere. China unilaterally claims the entire South China Sea as sovereign territory, then builds artificial islands to bolster its claim.... 

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Dead Hand comes the riveting story of the CIA's most valuable spy in the Soviet Union and an evocative portrait of the agency's Moscow station....

In this rare insider's view into contemporary North Korea, a high-ranking counterintelligence agent describes his life as a former poet laureate to Kim Jong-il....

In The Nordic Theory of Everything, Partanen compares and contrasts life in the United States with life in the Nordic region, focusing on four key relationships....

November 2009. Sergei Magnitsky is led to an isolation cell in a Moscow prison and beaten to death by eight police officers....

Richard J. Evans's gripping narrative ranges across a century of social and national conflicts, from the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 to the unification of both Germany and Italy....

The incredible, harrowing account of how American democracy was hacked by Moscow as part of a covert operation to influence the US election and help Donald Trump gain the presidency....