Bøger udgivet af Free Press

Drawing on previously unknown personal documents, thousands of FBI files, interviews with former agents, and the presidential papers of nine administrations, Powers reveals a man of inalterable ideals and convictions who clung to a private vision of an orderly, traditional America, and who vowed to crush anyone who threatened it.

Revised and updated, this fifteenth anniversary edition reignites Shalit's claim that we have lost our respect for an essential virtue: modesty.

The prevailing view of China is that the country is an economic juggernaut sure to become the dominant power of the twenty-first century. In this provocative and stimulating book critically acclaimed author Will Hutton warns instead that China is running up against a set of daunting challenges from within its own political and economic system that could well derail its rise, leading to a massive shock to the global economy. The United States, he argues, must recognize that it has a vital stake in working to assure this doesn't happen, for if China's political liberalization and economic growth collapse, the United States will suffer crippling consequences. In today's highly globalized world economy, so much of the economic health of the United States -- our low inflation, high profits, and cheap credit -- rests upon China's economic growth and its massive investment in the United States. A great deal has been said about the economic and military threat China poses. But rather than provoking China with the military hawkishness of recent years and resisting Chinese economic supremacy with the saber rattling of protectionist antitrade policies -- twenty such bills have been introduced in Congress in just the last year -- the United States must build a strong relationship that will foster China's transition from an antiquated Communist state beset with profound problems to a fully modern, enlightened, and open society. Doing so will require understanding and engagement, not enmity and suspicion. China's current economic model, Hutton explains, is unsustainable, premised as it is on the myriad contradictions and dysfunctions of an authoritarian state attempting to control an economy in its transition to capitalism. If the twenty-first century is to be the China century, the Chinese will have to embrace the features of modern Western nations that have spurred the political stability and economic power of the United States and Europe: the rule of law, an independent judiciary, freedom of the press, and authentic representative government that is accountable to the people. Whether or not China does so rests in large part on how well the United States manages the relationship and persuades the Chinese of the virtues of an open, enlightened democratic system. The danger is that fearmongering will intensify animosities, leading both countries down a path of peril. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, this brilliantly argued book is vital reading at a crucial juncture in world affairs.

Now fully updated and totally revised, this highly regarded classic remains the most comprehensive study available of Americas military history.Called the preeminent survey of American military history by Russell F. Weigley, Americas foremost military historian, For the Common Defense is an essential contribution to the field of military history. This carefully researched third edition provides the most complete and current history of United States defense policy and military institutions and the conduct of Americas wars. Without diminishing the value of its earlier editions, authors Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis provide a fresh perspective on the continuing issues that characterize national security policy. They have updated the work with new material covering nearly twenty years of scholarship, including the history of the American military experience in the Balkans and Somalia, analyzing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2001 to 2012, and providing two new chapters on the Vietnam War. For the Common Defense examines the nations pluralistic military institutions in both peace and war, the tangled civil-military relations that created the countrys commitment to civilian control of the military, the armed forces increasing nationalization and professionalization, and Americas growing reliance on sophisticated technologies spawned by the Industrial Revolution and the Computer and Information Ages. This edition is also a timely reminder that vigilance is indeed the price of liberty but that vigilance has always beenand continues to bea costly, complex, and contentious undertaking in a world that continually tests Americas willingness and ability to provide for the common defense.

Philip Kotler's name is synonymous with marketing. His textbooks have sold more than 3 million copies in 20 languages and are read as the marketing gospel in 58 countries. Now Kotler on Marketing offers his long-awaited, essential guide to marketing for managers, freshly written based on his phenomenally successful worldwide lectures on marketing for the new millennium. Through Kotler's profound insights you will quickly update your skills and knowledge of the new challenges and opportunities posed by hypercompetition, globalization, and the Internet. Here you will discover the latest thinking, concisely captured in eminently readable prose, on such hot new fields as database marketing, relationship marketing, high-tech marketing, global marketing, and marketing on the Internet. Here, too, you will find Kotler's savvy advice, which has so well served such corporate clients as AT&T, General Electric, Ford, IBM, Michelin, Merck, DuPont, and Bank of America. Perhaps most important, Kotler on Marketing can be read as a penetrating book-length discourse on the 14 questions asked most frequently by managers during the 20-year history of Kotler's worldwide lectures. You will gain a new understanding of such age-old conundrums as how to select the right market segments or how to compete against lower-price competitors. You will find a wealth of cutting-edge strategies and tactics that can be applied immediately to such 21st-century challenges as reducing the enormous cost of customer acquisition and keeping current customers loyal. If your marketing strategy isn't working, Kotler's treasury of revelations offers hundreds of ideas for revitalizing it. Spend a few hours today with the world's bestknown marketer and improve your marketing performance tomorrow.

In his groundbreaking new book, Dr. Jim Loehr, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Power of Full Engagement, examines the way we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves -- and, most important, the way we can change those stories to transform our business and personal lives. "e;Your story is your life,"e; says Loehr. As human beings, we continually tell ourselves stories -- of success or failure; of power or victimhood; stories that endure for an hour, or a day, or an entire lifetime. We have stories about our work, our families and relationships, our health; about what we want and what we're capable of achieving. Yet, while our stories profoundly affect how others see us and we see ourselves, too few of us even recognize that we're telling stories, or what they are, or that we can change them -- and, in turn, transform our very destinies. Telling ourselves stories provides structure and direction as we navigate life's challenges and opportunities, and helps us interpret our goals and skills. Stories make sense of chaos; they organize our many divergent experiences into a coherent thread; they shape our entire reality. And far too many of our stories, says Loehr, are dysfunctional, in need of serious editing. First, he asks you to answer the question, "e;In which areas of my life is it clear that I cannot achieve my goals with the story I've got?"e; He then shows you how to create new, reality-based stories that inspire you to action, and take you where you want to go both in your work and personal life. For decades, at the Human Performance Institute, Loehr has been examining the power of story to increase engagement and productivity, and Fortune 500 companies have paid millions to send employees to his program, in which he applies the principles and methods that he now offers in this book. Global business leaders, world-class athletes, military special forces, and thousands of individuals from every walk of life have sought out and benefited from his life-altering insight and expertise. Our capacity to tell stories is one of our profoundest gifts. Loehr's approach to creating deeply engaging stories will give you the tools to wield the power of storytelling and forever change your business and personal life.

From biology to culture to the new new economy, the buzzword on everyone's lips is "meme." How do animals learn things? How does human culture evolve? How does viral marketing work? The answer to these disparate questions and even to what is the nature of thought itself is, simply, the meme. For decades researchers have been convinced that memes were The Next Big Thing for the understanding of society and ourselves. But no one has so far been able to define what they are. Until now.Here, for the first time, Robert Aunger outlines what a meme physically is, how memes originated, how they developed, and how they have made our brains into their survival systems. They are thoughts. They are parasites. They are in control. A meme is a distinct pattern of electrical charges in a node in our brains that reproduces a thousand times faster than a bacterium. Memes have found ways to leap from one brain to another. A number of them are being replicated in your brain as you read this paragraph.In 1976 the biologist Richard Dawkins suggested that all animals -- including humans -- are puppets and that genes hold the strings. That is, we are robots serving as life support for the genes that control us. And all they want to do is replicate themselves. But then, we do lots of things that don't seem to help genes replicate. We decide not to have children, we waste our time doing dangerous things like mountain climbing, or boring things like reading, or stupid things like smoking that don't seem to help genes get copied into the next generation. We do all sorts of cultural things for reasons that don't seem to have anything to do with genes. Fashions in sports, books, clothes, ideas, politics, lifestyles come and go and give our lives meaning, so how can we be gene robots? Dawkins recognized that something else was going on. We communicate with one another and we get ideas, and these ideas seem to have a life of their own. Maybe there was something called memes that were like thought genes. Maybe our bodies were gene robots and our minds were meme robots. That would mean that what we think is not the result of our own creativity, but rather the result of the evolutionary flow of memes as they wash through us. What is the biological reality of an idea with a life of its own? What is a thought gene? It's a meme. And no one before Robert Aunger has established what it physically must be. This elegant, paradigm-shifting analysis identifies how memes replicate in our brains, how they evolved, and how they use artifacts like books and photographs and advertisements to get from one brain to another. Destined to inflame arguments about free will, open doors to new ways of sharing our thoughts, and provide a revolutionary explanation of consciousness, The Electric Meme will change the way each of us thinks about our minds, our cultures, and our daily choices.

A secular regime is toppled by Western intervention, but an Islamic backlash turns the liberators into occupiers. Caught between interventionists at home and fundamentalists abroad, a prime minister flounders as his ministers betray him, alliances fall apart, and a runaway general makes policy in the field. As the media accuse Western soldiers of barbarity and a region slides into chaos, the armies of God clash on an ancient river and an accidental empire arises. This is not the Middle East of the early twenty-first century. It is Africa in the late nineteenth century, when the river Nile became the setting for an extraordinary collision between Europeans, Arabs, and Africans. A human and religious drama, the conflict defined the modern relationship between the West and the Islamic world. The story is not only essential for understanding the modern clash of civilizations but is also a gripping, epic, tragic adventure. Three Empires on the Nile tells of the rise of the first modern Islamic state and its fateful encounter with the British Empire of Queen Victoria. Ever since the self-proclaimed Islamic messiah known as the Mahdi gathered an army in the Sudan and besieged and captured Khartoum under its British overlord Charles Gordon, the dream of a new caliphate has haunted modern Islamists. Today, Shiite insurgents call themselves the Mahdi Army, and Sudan remains one of the great fault lines of battle between Muslims and Christians, blacks and Arabs. The nineteenth-century origins of it all were even more dramatic and strange than today's headlines. In the hands of Dominic Green, the story of the Nile's three empires is an epic in the tradition of Kipling, the bard of empire, and Winston Churchill, who fought in the final destruction of the Mahdi's army. It is a sweeping and very modern tale of God and globalization, slavers and strategists, missionaries and messianists. A pro-Western regime collapses from its own corruption, a jihad threatens the global economy, a liberation movement degenerates into a tyrannical cult, military intervention goes wrong, and a temporary occupation lasts for decades. In the rise and fall of empires, we see a parable for our own times and a reminder that, while American military involvement in the Islamic world is the beginning of a new era for America, it is only the latest chapter in an older story for the people of the region.

In 1958, mankind's centuries-long flirtation with space flight became a torrid love affair. For a decade, tens of millions of people were enraptured -- first, by the U.S.-Soviet race to the moon, and finally, as America outstripped its rival, by Project Apollo alone. It is now more than three decades since the last man walked on the moon...more time than between the first moonwalk and the beginning of World War II. Apollo did not, as had been promised by a generation of visionaries, herald the beginning of the Space Age, but its end. Or did it? Project Apollo, like a cannonball, reached its apogee and returned to earth, but the trajectory of that return was complex. America's atmosphere -- its economic, scientific, and cultural atmosphere -- made for a very complicated reentry that produced many solutions to the trajectory problem. Rocket Dreams is about those solutions...about the places where the space program landed. In Rocket Dreams, an extraordinarily talented young writer named Marina Benjamin will take you on a journey to those landing sites. A visit with retired astronauts at a celebrity autograph show is a starting point down the divergent paths taken by the pioneers, including Edgar Mitchell, founder of the "e;church"e; of Notic Sciences. Roswell, New Mexico is a landing site of a different order, the "e;magnetic north"e; of UFO belief in the United States -- a belief that began its most dramatic growth precisely at the time that the path of the space program began its descent. In the vernacular, the third law of motion states that what goes up, must come down. Thus the tremendous motive force that energized the space program didn't just vanish; it was conserved and transformed, making bestsellers out of fantasy literature, spawning Gaia, and giving symbolism to the environmental movement. Everything from the pop cultural boom in ufology to the worldwide Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) feeds on the energy given off by America's leap toward space. Rocket Dreams is an eloquent tour of this Apollo-scarred landscape. It is also an introduction to some of the most fascinating characters imaginable: Some long dead, like the crackpot visionary Alfred Lawson, who saw in space flight a new stage of human evolution ("e;Alti-Man"e;), or Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry, whose workshop in Roswell stands only half a mile from shops selling posters of alien visitors. Others are very much alive -- like Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and partner with Gerard O'Neill in the drive to build free-floating space colonies, and SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, who has spent decades listening to the skies, hoping for the first contact with another intelligent species. Perceptive, original, and wonderfully written, informed by history, science, and an acute knowledge of popular culture, Rocket Dreams is a brilliant book by a remarkable talent.

Horses have a shared history with man going back millennia to their domestication around 4000 B.C. Yet only in very recent years have scientists begun to turn the tools of modem science on this remarkable animal that has been so wrapped up in human dreams and legends. Now modern scientific research is beginning to explain long-standing mysteries about the true nature of the horse. How well can horses really see? What causes breakdowns in racehorses? How intelligent are they compared to other animals, and are some breeds smarter than others? Does nature or nurture matter more in creating a great sport horse? What causes cribbing and other vices? In this beautifully illustrated, compelling narrative, Budiansky tells the story of the origins, behavior, intelligence and language of the horse. For the first time, horse lovers will have access to cutting-edge research on topics of interest including new information on horse vision, horse biology and movement. Introducing the latest archeological findings, Budiansky presents a fascinating discussion of how the horse evolved as well as a dramatic and provocative history of man's use and abuse of the horse from prehistoric times to today. In a revealing chapter on horse intelligence, he debunks the commonly held belief that horses are stupid and also presents compelling new scientific information on horse language which will greatly benefit the horse rider and trainer. Finally, drawing together the latest research on horse physiology, genetics and biomechanics, Budiansky asks the million dollar question -- what makes for a winning racehorse? Anyone who loves horses will find this an invaluable resource as well as a fascinating read.

A nation defines itself by the kind of army it creates for its protection. By that standard, America at the close of the twentieth century is large, powerful, and technologically sophisticated. But it is also muscle-bound, confused, wasteful, and desperately in search of a mission. In The Minuteman, former Senator Gary Hart proposes a provocative and radical restructuring of America's armed forces, asking the questions that have gone unanswered for too long: Why do we have 1.5 million men and women under arms with no major threat to our security? Why is our military budget at the same level as during the Cold War? Why are we spending more money for fewer weapons? Why are the best service personnel taking early retirement? Why is it taboo even to question the structure of our bloated military establishment?Drawing on his long experience as a leader in the field of military reform (including twelve years on the Senate Armed Services Committee), Hart proposes a return to the oldest principles of the republic, making an impassioned case for replacing the present Cold War military with a smaller standing army and a much larger, well-trained citizen reserve -- an "army of the people." The professional nucleus would be a rapid-response force responsible for dealing with immediate crises and low-intensity conflicts, while the larger army of citizen-soldiers would be called up when national interests required a larger, sustained military presence.From ancient times to the present, the heroes of democracy have consistently upheld two principles: that it is dangerous to maintain a large standing army in peacetime; and that free people have a civic duty to participate in their own defense. Contemporary America, by contrast, has sunk into "Eisenhower's Nightmare," beholden to a powerful military-industrial complex embracing the armed forces, military contractors, unions, Congress, and military communities economically dependent on military spending. The only way to break this cycle of dependence, Hart argues, is to restore a citizen military -- a true militia, like the one that defended Lexington and Concord. If we reject this path, he warns, we risk being truly ill-prepared for the challenges facing our nation in the century about to dawn.