"From master storyteller and historian H.W. Brands, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes the riveting story of how President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur squared off to decide America's future in the aftermath of World War II. At the height of the Korean War, President Harry S. Truman committed a gaffe that sent shock waves around the world. When asked by a reporter about the possible use of atomic weapons in response to China's...

Chronicles the final months of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. August 27, 2010. Three CIA officers inform CIA Director Leon Panett that agents have tracked a courier with deep Al Qaeda ties to a heavily protected fortress at the end of a dead-end street in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It may be the end of the race to apprehend and bring to justice the mastermind of the most consequential terrorist attack in American history: Osama bin Laden. Wallace delivers...

The author argues that our secret operations in Iraq and elsewhere around the globe will continue to exact a price at home unless President Obama begins to crack down on the Pentagon before it successfully dismantles the American Dream.

From the former secretary of defense, a strikingly candid, vivid account of serving Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After working for six presidents in both the CIA and the National Security Council, Robert M. Gates was happily serving as president of Texas A&M University. But when he was asked to help a nation mired in two wars and to aid the troops doing the fighting, he answered what he felt was...

"As U.S. troops prepare to withdraw, the shocking tale of how the American military had triumph in sight in Afghanistan--and then brought the Taliban back from the dead. In the popular imagination, Afghanistan is often regarded as the site of intractable conflict, the American war against the Taliban a perpetually hopeless quagmire. But as Anand Gopal demonstrates in this stunning chronicle, top Taliban leaders were in fact ready to surrender within...

"Why have the major post-9/11 US military interventions turned into quagmires? Despite huge power imbalances in the United States's favor, significant capacity-building efforts, and repeated tactical victories by what many observers call the world's best military, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned intractable. The US government's fixation on zero-sum, decisive victory in these conflicts is a key reason why military operations to overthrow two...

"This suspenseful and propulsive account of the days leading up to the end of World War II, is told through the stories of three men: Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, who had overall responsibility for decisions about the atomic bomb; Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in Europe and the Pacific, who was in charge of actually dropping the bombs; and Shigenori T�og�o, the Japanese Foreign Minister, who was the only one in Emperor...