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Fully updated chapters continue to address how technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Over the past several years, the rise of populism and conspiracy theories have taken this to new levels. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.

For decades, the Kennedy name has been synonymous with wealth, power, and—above all else—integrity. But this carefully constructed veneer hides a dark truth: the Kennedy men's legacy of physical and psychological abuse of women, part of a tradition of toxic masculinity that spans generations and has ruined untold lives. Through scandal after scandal, the family and their defenders have managed to keep this shameful story out of the spotlight.

Award-winning journalist and author Simon Winchester takes readers on a personal tour of the Balkans. Combining history and interviews with the people who live there, Winchester offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex issues at work in this chaotic region. Unrest in the Balkans has gone on for centuries. A seasoned reporter, Winchester visited the region twenty years ago. When Kosovo reached crisis level in 1997, Winchester thought a return visit to the beleaguered area would help to make sense out of the awful violence.

A final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers. Journeying alone, in what he feels will be his last African journey, Paul Theroux encounters a world increasingly removed from both the itineraries of tourists and the hopes of post-colonial independence movements. Having travelled down the right-hand side of Africa in Dark Star Safari, he sets out this time from Cape Town, heading northwards up the left-hand side, through South Africa and Namibia, to Botswana, heading for the Congo, in search of the end of the line.

Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse is a satirical poetry collection from award-winning actor and best-selling author John Lithgow. Chronicling the last few raucous years in American politics, Lithgow takes listeners verse by verse through the history of Donald Trump's presidency.

In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. Now, in The Audacity of Hope, he calls for a different brand of politics: a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the "endless clash of armies" we see in Congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of "our improbable experiment in democracy".

Make no mistake: modern information warfare is here and January 6th was just the first battle. That day, an unhinged mindset led to an attack on the Capitol, the most serious assault on American democracy since the end of the Civil War. And that thinking portends even darker days ahead. In The Breach, a former House Republican and the first member of Congress to sound the alarm about QAnon, Denver Riggleman, provides listeners with an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at the January 6th select committee’s investigation.

New from the number-one Sunday Times best-selling author of Prisoners of Geography. We feel more divided than ever. This riveting analysis tells you why. Walls are going up. Nationalism and identity politics are on the rise once more. Thousands of miles of fences and barriers have been erected in the past 10 years, and they are redefining our political landscape.

Russia and the West are like neighbors who never seem able to understand each other. A major reason, this book argues, is that Western leaders tend to think that Russia should act as a "rational" Western nation—even though Russian leaders for centuries have thought and acted based on their country's different history and traditions. Russia, through Western eyes, is unpredictable and irrational, when in fact its leaders almost always act in their own predictable and rational ways.

President Theodore Roosevelt forever transformed America, ushering the country into the arena of world supremacy. His brand of leadership was entirely American: confident, compassionate, energetic, diverse, visionary. But Roosevelt was not a born leader; his ascent to the apex of power was not a foregone conclusion.

It could have been so much worse: a deeply reported, insider story of how a handful of Washington officials staged a daring resistance to an unprecedented presidency and prevented chaos overwhelming the government and the nation.

Geoff Shepard had a ringside seat to the unfolding Watergate debacle. As the youngest lawyer on Richard Nixon’s staff, he personally transcribed the Oval Office tape in which Nixon appeared to authorize getting the CIA to interfere with the ongoing FBI investigation, and even coined the phrase “the smoking gun.” Like many others, the idealistic Shepard was deeply disappointed in the president. But as time went on, the meticulous lawyer was nagged by the persistent sense that something wasn’t right with the case against Nixon.

Al Qaeda is the most dangerous terrorist movement in history. Yet most people in the Americas and Europe know very little about it, or their view is clouded by misperceptions and half truths. If the first rule of war is to "know your enemy", then we have a long way to go. This important book fills this gap with a comprehensive analysis of al Qaeda - the origins, leadership, ideology, and strategy of the terrorist network that brought down the Twin Towers and continues to threaten us today.

In the past 30 years, more than 2,700 innocent American prisoners - their combined jail sentences adding up to almost 25,000 years - have been exonerated and freed. Terrifyingly, this number represents only a small fraction of the number of persons wrongfully convicted each year. As a result, US jails and prisons are packed with men and women who should not be there, but for crooked police, false testimony, shoddy investigators, vindictive judges, bogus expert witnesses or, far too often, the colour of their skin and their economic condition.

Using newly declassified information, Dick Russell builds on three decades of painstaking research in On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, offering one of the most comprehensive and authoritative examinations of the assassination of our 35th president. Included are new revelations, such as the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was subjected to “mind control,” Russell’s personal encounters inside the KGB headquarters, and new information gleaned from an interview with Oswald’s widow.

The Value of Everything argues that American companies have for too long been valued according to the amount of wealth they capture for themselves rather than for the value they create for the economy. In fact, Pfizer, Amazon, and other companies are actually dependent on public money, spend their resources on boosting share prices and executive pay, and reap ever-expanding rewards without offering the market value.

From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.

In the past five years, Israel has mounted three major assaults on the 1.8 million Palestinians trapped behind its blockade of the Gaza Strip. Taken together, Operation Cast Lead (2008-9), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), and Operation Protective Edge (2014) have resulted in the deaths of some 3,700 Palestinians. Meanwhile a total of 90 Israelis were killed in the invasions. On the face of it, this succession of vastly disproportionate attacks has often seemed frenzied and pathological.

In A Year at the Circus: Inside Trump's White House, BBC North America Editor Jon Sopel takes you inside Trump’s West Wing and explores the impact this presidency has had on the most iconic of American institutions. Each chapter starts inside a famous Washington room, uncovering its history and its new resonance in the Trump era.

An Australian millionaire's plan to mine the ocean floor. Nigerian garbage pickers risking their lives to salvage e-waste. A Bill Gates-backed entrepreneur harnessing AI to find metals in the Arctic. These people and millions more are part of the intensifying competition to find and extract the minerals essential for two crucial technologies: the internet and renewable energy. Beiser crisscrossed the world to talk to the people involved and report on the damage this race is inflicting, the ways it could get worse, and how we can minimize the damage.