Author: Richard Timothy Conroy Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 0312264933 Category : Diplomats Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
"This is the second (and most likely the last) volume of my memoirs of the Foreign Service. The first, Our Man in Belize ..."--Page xi.
Author: Allan Janik Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher ISBN: 9781566631327 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This is a remarkable book about a man (perhaps the most important and original philosopher of our age), a society (the corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of dissolution), and a city (Vienna, with its fin-de si cle gaiety and corrosive melancholy). The central figure in this study of a crumbling society that gave birth to the modern world is Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker. With others, including Freud, Viktor Adler, and Arnold Schoenberg, he forged his ideas in a classical revolt against the stuffy, doomed, and moralistic lives of the old regime. As a portrait of Wittgenstein, the book is superbly realized; it is even better as a portrait of the age, with dazzling and unusual parallels to our own confused society. "Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have acted on a striking premise: an understanding of prewar Vienna, Wittgenstein's native city, will make it easier to comprehend both his work and our own problems....This is an independent work containing much that is challenging, new, and useful."--New York Times Book Review.
Author: Mark Skousen Publisher: Regnery Capital ISBN: Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
In his new book, Vienna and Chicago, Friends or Foes? economist and author Mark Skousen debates the Austrian and Chicago schools of free-market economics, two schools in constant, heated disagreement in their theories of money, business cycle, government policy, and methodology.
Author: George Packer Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 030794817X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 626
Book Description
*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography* *Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography* *Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize* "Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it."--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself."--David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.
Author: Robert Wright Publisher: Other Press, LLC ISBN: 1590514149 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 433
Book Description
For the true story behind Argo, read Our Man in Tehran The world watched with fear in November 1979, when Iranian students infiltrated and occupied the American embassy in Tehran. The Americans were caught entirely by surprise, and what began as a swift and seemingly short-lived takeover evolved into a crisis that would see fifty-four embassy personnel held hostage, most for 444 days. As Tehran exploded in a fury of revolution, six American diplomats secretly escaped. For three months, Ken Taylor, the Canadian ambassador to Iran—along with his wife and embassy staffers—concealed the Americans in their homes, always with the prospect that the revolutionary government of Ayatollah Khomeini would exact deadly consequences. The United States found itself handcuffed by a fractured, fundamentalist government it could not understand and had completely underestimated. With limited intelligence resources available on the ground and anti-American sentiment growing, President Carter turned to Taylor to work with the CIA in developing their exfiltration plans. Until now, the true story behind Taylor’s involvement in the escape of the six diplomats and the Eagle Claw commando raid has remained classified. In Our Man in Tehran, Robert Wright takes us back to a major historical flashpoint and unfolds a story of cloak-and-dagger intrigue that brings a new understanding of the strained relationship between the Unites States and Iran. With the world once again focused on these two countries, this book is the stuff of John le Carré and Daniel Silva made real.
Author: Angus Robertson Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1639361960 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 358
Book Description
"From the Congress of Vienna to the Austria World Summit, the city of Vienna has hosted key meetings on peace to climate action. This is a first-class book about Vienna as the crossroads of civilization and as the international capital." —Arnold Schwarzenegger A rich and illuminating history of the world capital that has transformed art, culture, and politics. Vienna is unique amongst world capitals in its consistent international importance over the centuries. From the ascent of the Habsburgs as Europe's leading dynasty to the Congress of Vienna, which reordered Europe in the wake of Napoleon's downfall, to bridge-building summits during the Cold War, Vienna has been the scene of key moments in world history. Scores of pivotal figures were influenced by their time in Vienna, including: Empress Maria Theresa, Count Metternich, Bertha von Suttner, Theodore Herzl, Gustav Mahler, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, John F. Kennedy, and many others. In a city of great composers, artists, and thinkers, it is here that both the most positive and destructive ideas of recent history have developed. From its time as the capital of an imperial superpower, through war, dissolution, dictatorship to democracy Vienna has reinvented itself and its relevance to the rest of the world.
Author: Christopher Dickey Publisher: Crown ISBN: 0307887286 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
Between the Confederacy and recognition by Great Britain stood one unlikely Englishman who hated the slave trade. His actions helped determine the fate of a nation. When Robert Bunch arrived in Charleston to take up the post of British consul in 1853, he was young and full of ambition, but even he couldn’t have imagined the incredible role he would play in the history-making events to unfold. In an age when diplomats often were spies, Bunch’s job included sending intelligence back to the British government in London. Yet as the United States threatened to erupt into Civil War, Bunch found himself plunged into a double life, settling into an amiable routine with his slavery-loving neighbors on the one hand, while working furiously to thwart their plans to achieve a new Confederacy. As secession and war approached, the Southern states found themselves in an impossible position. They knew that recognition from Great Britain would be essential to the survival of the Confederacy, and also that such recognition was likely to be withheld if the South reopened the Atlantic slave trade. But as Bunch meticulously noted from his perch in Charleston, secession’s red-hot epicenter, that trade was growing. And as Southern leaders continued to dissemble publicly about their intentions, Bunch sent dispatch after secret dispatch back to the Foreign Office warning of the truth—that economic survival would force the South to import slaves from Africa in massive numbers. When the gears of war finally began to turn, and Bunch was pressed into service on an actual spy mission to make contact with the Confederate government, he found himself in the middle of a fight between the Union and Britain that threatened, in the boast of Secretary of State William Seward, to “wrap the world in flames.” In this masterfully told story, Christopher Dickey introduces Consul Bunch as a key figure in the pitched battle between those who wished to reopen the floodgates of bondage and misery, and those who wished to dam the tide forever. Featuring a remarkable cast of diplomats, journalists, senators, and spies, Our Man in Charleston captures the intricate, intense relationship between great powers on the brink of war.
Author: William Boyd Publisher: A&C Black ISBN: 1408830396 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 449
Book Description
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERVienna, 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor, sits in the waiting room of the city's preeminent psychiatrist as he anxiously ponders the particularly intimate nature of his neurosis. When the enigmatic, intensely beautiful Hettie Bull walks in, Lysander is immediately drawn to her, unaware of how destructive the consequences of their subsequent affair will be. One year later, home in London, Lysander finds himself entangled in the dangerous web of wartime intelligence - a world of sex, scandal and spies that is slowly, steadily, permeating every corner of his life...
Author: Panagiotis Dimitrakis Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 085773377X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 326
Book Description
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in support of a Marxist-Leninist government, and the subsequent nine-year conflict with the indigenous Afghan Mujahedeen was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the Cold War. Key details of the circumstances surrounding the invasion and its ultimate conclusion only months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 have long remained unclear; it is a confidential narrative of clandestine correspondence, covert operations and failed intelligence. The Secret War in Afghanistan undertakes a full analysis of recently declassified intelligence archives in order to asses Anglo-American secret intelligence and diplomacy relating to the invasion of Afghanistan and unveil the Cold War realities behind the rhetoric. Rooted at every turn in close examination of the primary evidence, it outlines the secret operations of the CIA, MI6 and the KGB, and the full extent of the aid and intelligence from the West which armed and trained the Afghan fighters. Drawing from US, UK and Russian archives, Panagiotis Dimitrakis analyses the Chinese arms deals with the CIA, the multiple recorded intelligence failures of KGB intelligence and secret letters from the office of Margaret Thatcher to Jimmy Carter. In so doing, this study brings a new scholarly perspective to some of the most controversial events of Cold War history. Dimitrakis also outlines the full extent of China's involvement in arming the Mujahedeen, which led to the PRC effectively fighting the Soviet Union by proxy. This will be essential reading for scholars and students of the Cold War, American History and the Modern Middle East.
Author: Gordon Korman Publisher: Scholastic Book Service ISBN: 9780590437554 Category : Mystery and detective stories. Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Twin brothers Sidney and Tom Weston take summer jobs as bellboys at the Pine Grove Resort Hotel and become detectives when a series of strange events leads them to suspect that an international spy ring is in operation.
Author: Richard Timothy Conroy
Author: Allan Janik
Author: Mark Skousen
Author: George Packer
Author: Robert Wright
Author: Angus Robertson
Author: Christopher Dickey
Author: William Boyd
Author: Panagiotis Dimitrakis
Author: Gordon Korman