A top strategic analyst explains what the Cold War can teach us about the War on Terror

September 11 was a product of bad intelligence and wrongheaded expectations about al-Qaeda’s motivations, intentions, resourcefulness, and capabilities. But it also sprang from a failure of the kind of predictive strategic thinking that kept the world from becoming atomic rubble in the fifties and sixties. In Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable, strategic analyst Jonathan Stevenson illuminates both the genius of nuclear deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), plus the blind spots that limited the great Cold War civilian strategists’ intellectual fertility and flexibility. Once the Soviet Union collapsed and the existential threat of nuclear holocaust abated, the American strategic community— from intelligence officers to policymakers to think tanks—lost the capacity to forecast and prepare for impending new threats to U.S. and global security. Complementing the cold-eyed revelations of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower and Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco, Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable is a probing, urgent exhortation: if we are to extricate America from its current strategic predicament, we must regenerate for a new age the pragmatic creativity that once distinguished its strategic brain trust.

Jonathan Stevenson is a professor of strategic studies at the Naval War College. He spent most of the 1990s in sub-Saharan Africa and Northern Ireland, and his previous books include “We Wrecked the Place”: Contemplating an End to the Northern Irish Troubles and Losing Mogadishu. He has published articles in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The National Interest, as well as in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic. 

Fledgling private investigator Molly Murphy's latest assignment gives her the opportunity to escape the typhoid epidemic sweeping across New York City in the summer of 1902 for the lush Hudson River Valley. And it comes from an unlikely source-Captain Daniel Sullivan, a New York City police detective and erstwhile beau of Molly's. She has vowed to keep him at arm's length until he can rid himself of his socialite fiancée, but she can't pass up the chance to take advantage of his offer of a real detective job.

Daniel hires Molly to go undercover inside the country household of Senator Barney Flynn, in Peekskill, New York. Flynn's wife, Theresa, has become the latest devotee of a pair of spiritualists known as the Sorensen Sisters. The frail Theresa is desperate to use the sisters' alleged abilities to hold a séance to contact her infant son, who was kidnapped five years ago and never found; the accused kidnapper was killed before he could tell police where the boy was being held. But the police are sure the women are frauds.

When Molly allows herself to be distracted from the Sorensen Sisters and the members of the Flynn household by the unsolved kidnapping, it is a race against time to find out what's really going on before it's too late.

In Like Flynn is the latest captivating installment in a series which has garnered an impressive array of awards and nominations in just three books: Rhys Bowen's Molly Murphy mysteries have won the Agatha Award, the Anthony Award, the Bruce Alexander Historical Award, and the Herodotus Award, and have been shortlisted for the Agatha Award, the Macavity Award, and the Mary Higgins Clark Award.

In turn-of-the-century New York City, Irish immigrant Molly Murphy is contemplating giving up PI work for something a little less complicated, less exciting. Molly has had quite enough excitement recently, thank you very much. Especially from the handsome but deceptive NYPD captain Daniel Sullivan, whom she'd like to avoid completely. But when Daniel is accused of accepting bribes and lands himself in the Tombs, the notorious city jail, he begs Molly to help prove he was framed, and after everything they've been through, she cannot turn him down.

As she finds herself drawn further and further into the case, she begins to fear that Daniel's trouble is related to one of his investigations---catching the Eastside Ripper, a serial killer who is targeting prostitutes.

Oh Danny Boy marks Edgar Award finalist Rhys Bowen's triumphant fifth installment in the award winning Molly Murphy mystery series.

The biggest stumbling block facing any prospective reader of "Finnegans Wake" is the book itself, with its thousands of words of Joyce's inventions, derived from nearly every foreign language imaginable and from a host of other sources. Now extensively revised, expanded, and corrected, Roland McHugh's "Annotations" is a unique one-volume guidebook designed to be read side by side with the "Wake" itself.

Follows a man's thoughts and dreams during a single night. It is also a book that participates in the re-reading of Irish history that was part of the revival of the early 20th century. The author also wrote "Ulysses", "Dubliners" and "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man".

An ex-minister, sometime gambler, and fugitive from justice, Hunter Bell comes to the aid of Quaye MacGandley, a beautiful young Irish woman, abused and abandoned by a brutal husband, and together these two lost and wounded people find a way to bring healing to each other.

Abandoned by both his Irish father and Congolese mother, Bruno Salvador has long looked for someone to guide his life. He has found it in Mr. Anderson of British Intelligence. Bruno's African upbringing, and fluency in numerous African languages, has made him a top interpreter in London, useful to businesses, hospitals, diplomats-and spies. Working for Anderson in a clandestine facility known as the "Chat Room," Salvo (as he's known) translates intercepted phone calls, bugged recordings, snatched voice mail messages. When Anderson sends him to a mysterious island to interpret during a secret conference between Central African warlords, Bruno thinks he is helping Britain bring peace to a bloody corner of the world. But then he hears something he should not have....Building upon the box office success of le Carre's The Constant Gardener (like The Mission Song, built around turmoil and conspiracy in Africa) and le Carre's laser eye for the complexity of the modern world (seen in Absolute Friends' prediction that the Iraq war would be based on phony and manipulated intelligence), this new novel is a crowning achievement, full of politics, heart, and the sort of suspense that nobody in the world does better.

Few institutions know the art of home-cooked delicious meals like the Irish pub, and this wonderful collection of warming, tasty recipes features the very best of Irish pub cooking. From light bites and soups to hearty fare such as shepherd's pie and the essential staple of corned beef and cabbage, this delightful collection will make you feel like you've traveled to the heart of Ireland. Each easy-to-follow recipe includes a full-color photo.

In the latest in Rhys Bowen's award-winning historical series, Molly Murphy is supposed to give up sleuthing now that she's married, but the murder of an alderman puts her on the trail of a killer.

Molly Murphy, now Molly Sullivan, and her husband Daniel, a captain in the New York Police department, have been invited to spend their honeymoon on the Newport, RI, estate of Alderman Brian Hannan in the spring of 1904. Molly doesn't entirely trust the offer. Hannan--an ambitious man--has his eye on a senate seat and intentions of taking Tammany Hall to get it. When Hannan is found dead at the base of the cliffs that overlook the Atlantic, Molly's suspicions are quickly justified, and as much as she wants to keep her promise to Daniel that she won't do any more sleuthing now, there isn't much she can do once the chase is on. Rhys Bowen's brilliant wit and charm are on full display in Hush Now, Don't You Cry, another outstanding addition to her Agatha and Anthony award-winning historical series.

About the Author

Mystery Author Rhys Bowen is a transplanted Brit who now divides her time between California and Arizona. She currently writes two mystery series, the Molly Murphy novels, about an Irish immigrant in 1900s New York City and the lighter Royal Spyness mysteries about a penniless minor royal in 1930s Britain. Her books made bestseller lists, garnered many awards, nominations, and starred reviews.

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest single work of the twentieth century. Since the original prewar translation there has been no completely new rendering of the original French. Now Viking makes Proust's masterpiece accessible to a whole new generation, beginning with Lydia Davis's new translation of the first volume, Swann's Way. 

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust : A New Translation by Lydia Davis - Hardcover FIRST EDITION/First Printing

Swann's Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood-a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by the famous taste of a madeleine. It also enfolds the short novel Swann's Love, an incomparable study of sexual jealousy, which becomes a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. The first volume of the book that established Proust as one of the finest voices of the modern age-satirical, skeptical, confiding, and endlessly varied in his response to the human condition-Swann's Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering of a life in art, of the past re-created through memory.

From Publishers Weekly

Relax: it's fantastic. There's no question that Davis's American English is thinner and more literal than C.K. Scott Montcrieff's archaically inflected turns of phrase and idioms, at least as revised by Terence Kilmartin and later by D.J. Enright. The removal of some of the familiar layers of the past in this all-new translation gives one a feeling similar to that of encountering an old master painting that has just been cleaned: the colors seem sharper and momentarily disorienting. Yet many readers will find it exhilarating, allowing the text to shed slight airs that were not quite Proust's and making many of the jokes much more immediate (as when he implies that sense-organ atrophy in the bourgeois is a defense mechanism and the result of hardening unarticulated feelings). As accomplished translator and novelist Davis (The End of the Story) notes in her foreword, she has followed Proust's sentence structure as closely as possible "in its every aspect," including punctuation, word order and word choice. To take just one case, where Montcrieff/Kilmartin describe Mlle. Vinteuil finding it pleasant to metaphorically "sojourn" in sadism, Davis has the much more definitive "emigrate." Proust's psychological inquiry generally feels much sharper, giving a much more palpable sense of Freud and Bergson-and of the young Marcel's willful (if not malefic) manipulations of those around him. For first-timers who don't have French and are allergic to the slightest whiff of euphemism, this is the best means for traveling the way by Swann's.--Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust : A New Translation by James Grieve - Hardcover FIRST EDITION/First Printing

A definitive new translation of the second volume of In Search of Lost Time captures the intricacies and challenges of male and female adolescence and awakening love, based on the narrator's reminiscences about Paris and the Normandy coast. 17,500 first printing.

"A triumph . . . will bring this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking world." -- Malcolm Bowie, Sunday Telegraph (London)

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust : A New Translation by Mark Treharne - Hardcover FIRST EDITION/First Printing

A new translation of the esteemed twentieth-century French writer's work on fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century takes readers into the vivid and shallow sides of the period's literary and aristocratic salons, where a young man is initiated into the insidious ways of the world. 17,500 first printing.

Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust : A New Translation by John Sturrock - Hardcover FIRST EDITION/First Printing

Set against the backdrop of decadent Parisian high society and the rise of a conservative bourgeoisie that will supplant it, an all-new translation of the fourth volume in In Search of Lost Time explores the theme of homosexual love and the destructive influence of sexual jealousy.

"Poetic, even transcendant . . . John Sturrock is pitch-perfect… equally at home with its intimacies and its bitter comedy."--Frank Wynne, The Irish Times

Colm Tóibín’s New York Times bestselling novel—now an acclaimed film starring Saoirse Ronan and Jim Broadbent nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture—is “a moving, deeply satisfying read” (Entertainment Weekly) about a young Irish immigrant in Brooklyn in the early 1950s.

“Tóibín … [is] his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power.”--Floyd Skoot, Los Angeles Times

“One of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary literature” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, who loves the Dodgers and his big Italian family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.

Author “Colm Tóibín…is his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” (Los Angeles Times). “Written with mesmerizing power and skill” (The Boston Globe), Brooklyn is a “triumph…One of those magically quiet novels that sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations”--USA TODAY

Jimmy Rabbitte of The Commitments returns in the triumphant new novel from the Booker Prize–winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

"Doyle's Jimmy Rabbitte reappears, dealing with cancer, mortality, and love. . . . I was undone by the emotional clarity of the writing itself, and by the calm, but never static, way Doyle has of presenting a scene."--The New York Times Book Review  

Full of the great joy in storytelling that characterizes Roddy Doyle’s novels, The Guts catches up with Jimmy Rabbitte—the man who in the 1980s formed the Commitments, a band composed of working-class Irish youths whose mission was to bring soul music to Dublin. Jimmy is now forty-seven, with a loving wife, four kids . . . and colon cancer. The news leaves him shattered and frightened—he isn’t dying, he thinks, but he might be. As he battles his illness while running a small music business, he runs into former bandmates, reunites with his brother, and decides to live more in the moment. The Guts is a warm, funny novel about friendship and family, about facing death and opting for life.

"Quintessential Doyle. . . . both laugh-out-loud funny and disarmingly moving . . . [It] contains some of the snappiest, wittiest, most believable, and exhilarating dialogue in fiction. . . . To make a story about middle-aged men battling cancer a largely effervescent lark without a trace of sentimentality is a notable achievement."--The Boston Globe 

A thoroughly revised and updated edition of Thomas C. Foster’s classic guide—a lively and entertaining introduction to literature and literary basics, including symbols, themes and contexts, that shows you how to make your everyday reading experience more rewarding and enjoyable.

While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings interwoven in these texts. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the eyes—and the literary codes-of the ultimate professional reader, the college professor.

What does it mean when a literary hero is traveling along a dusty road? When he hands a drink to his companion? When he’s drenched in a sudden rain shower?

Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices and form, Thomas C. Foster provides us with a broad overview of literature—a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower-and shows us how to make our reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.

This revised edition includes new chapters, a new preface and epilogue, and incorporates updated teaching points that Foster has developed over the past decade.

Boston Jacky : Being an Account of the Further Adventures of Jacky Faber, Taking Care of Business (Bloody Jack Adventures Book 11) by L. A. Meyer

Jacky Faber makes waves, even when docked in her adopted city of Boston to attend to the business of Faber Shipping Worldwide. With big dreams and perhaps too much exuberance for the Puritan populace, she quickly finds herself at odds with the Women’s Temperance Union and a town roiling over the arrival of hundreds of Irish laborers, brought in on Jacky’s Lorelei Lee. Thwarted at every turn by her enemies, Jacky is forced to acknowledge her shortcomings—and possibly lose her beloved Jaimy Fletcher. Will the impulsive Jacky Faber finally get her comeuppance?

101 Things You Didn't Know About Irish History : The People, Places, Culture, and Tradition of the Emerald Isle by Ryan Hackney,‎ Amy Hackney Blackwell,‎ and Garland Kimmer

Discover the truth behind the myths of the Emerald Isle

Forget about shamrocks, leprechans, and all that blarney; 101 Things You Didn't Know about Irish History dispels the myths and tells the true story of the Irish.

Inside, you'll learn about:

• Lives of the ancient Celts before the British invasions
• Famous Irish including Michael Collins, Charles Parnell—and Bono!
• The potato famine and emigration (were there really gangs of New York?)
• Irish music and dance

Complete with an Irish language primer and pronunciation guide, 101 Things You Didn't Know about Irish History is an informative reference for anyone who loves the Irish.

Anita Shreve's hauntingly beautiful #1 bestseller and Oprah's Book Club selection about tragedy, grief, betrayal, and the 'impossibility of knowing another person.'

As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to expect both intense exhilaration and long periods alone, but nothing has prepared her for a late-night knock that lets her know her husband has died in a crash.

Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary: a satisfying job teaching high school in the New England mill town of her childhood; a picture-perfect home by the ocean; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-year-old daughter; and a happy marriage whose occasional dull passages she attributes to the unavoidable deadening of time. 

As Kathryn struggles with her grief, she descends into a maelstrom of publicity stirred up by the modern hunger for the details of tragedy. Even before the plane is located in waters off the Irish coast, the relentless scrutiny of her husband's life begins to bring a bizarre personal mystery into focus. Could there be any truth to the increasingly disturbing rumors that he had a secret life?

GRANTA 85: HIDDEN HISTORIES

Repressed personal experiences, neglected battles, forgotten civilizations: an issue of Granta that excavates the unfairly buried event, the secret life, the overlooked war. With: Diana Athill on her lost baby, Giles Foden on Africa's naval war, Jennie Erdal on her career as a ghost, Brian Cathcart on the very different life of another Brian Cathcart, Donovan Wylie's photographs of a northern Irish past, Geoffrey Beattie on his Protestant childhood, Jackie Kay on finding her father, plus new fiction by Anne Enright.

"Most of the servants who came to the New World with the Pilgrims and Puritans were Irish and Scots-Irish, yet their names were not recorded for posterity. The Irish snuck into Boston by the hundreds in the 1600s and by the thousands in the early 1700s. The famed Boston Massacre was really an Irish Massacre, since most who participated on both sides were Irish. The greatest American privateersman was Irish, and many of Washington's generals were Irish, as were a high percentage of his troops. If you're of Irish blood, this is the book for you!"

Ireland, 1917. Darcy is a light gray Connemara pony with silver dapples. She's fast and tough, whether she's pulling a load of peat from the bog or riding around the rugged countryside with Shannon McKenna, her human family's eldest daughter. But when Mrs. McKenna needs a doctor, Darcy discovers a skill that will change her and her family's life forever. Like Black Beauty, this moving novel is told in first person from the horse's point of view and includes an appendix full of photos and facts about Connemara ponies and Irish history.

About the Author

WHITNEY SANDERSON is the daughter of Horse Diaries illustrator Ruth Sanderson. Her family has owned horses since she was a child, and her bookshelves were always filled with horse stories. When she isn't writing, she volunteers at a horse rescue and therapeutic riding center. She has an Appaloosa named Thor, who loves to go for trail rides in the New England woods.

RUTH SANDERSON has illustrated books for children of all ages, includingSummer Pony, Winter Pony, and Hush, Little Horsie. She lives with her family in Ware, Massachusetts, and her favorite hobby is horseback riding.

Age Range: 8 - 12 years

Grade Level: 3 - 7

Lexile Measure: 960L

From Booklist

In the second story arc of Sleeper, a spy comic in which the colorfully code-named operatives possess superpowers, the already ambiguous morality of its milieu grows murkier. The emphasis is on the dichotomized life of government agent Holden Carver, who infiltrates a shadowy, all-powerful criminal cartel. The suspense and the series' overarching paranoia are ratcheted up as Carver becomes more uncomfortable with his undercover role and grows more emotionally attached to his beautiful colleague, the amoral Miss Misery. Meanwhile, the mysterious mastermind of the crime cartel learns of his operation's infiltration and comes dangerously close to unmasking Carver. Writer Brubaker's intelligent plotting and gritty dialogue make the story work even when it skirts outrageousness, and Phillips' noirish art and skillful storytelling portray brutal action and talking-heads sequences equally effectively. As in Out in the Cold [BKL Mr 1 04], the protagonists' superpowers, even downplayed as they are, constitute Sleeper's least impressive element. But if couching intelligent espionage yarns in genre trappings makes them viable for today's mainstream comics readers . . . Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

In a town of speaking statues and amusement arcades, a town with a conscious hunger for material success and an unconscious thirst for miracles, one morning a man leaves his good job and house and goes to live in the nearby Sorcy Wood.  There he might have remained for years, an object of bafflement and ridicule to his former neighbours, had his presence not obstructed the plans of the town's two most powerful men and deadliest enemies, the priest and the local businessman.   After years of bitter resignation to his lowly position in the church, the priest discovers that God has given him a mission, to fell Sorcy Wood and erect an airport to bring pilgrims to that isolated shrine from all over the world.  After years of building up his empire of gambling and snooker emporiums, the businessman discovers a way to truly immortalise his own name, to fell Sorcy Wood and erect the largest holiday camp ever imagined to bring tourists from all over the world.  All that stand in the way of their schemes, apart from each other, is the lone figure of the man who refuses to leave Sorcy Wood.

Brendan McNamee was born in County Donegal in 1955 and now lives in London.  His first book, The Man Who Lived in Sorcy Wood, is a remarkable adult fable exploring the psyche of modern rural Ireland, and must rank as among the most original and striking debuts in recent Irish fiction.