New Books Of Interest, October 2017.

AuthorPearson, Margaret
PositionBooks of Interest - Recommended readings

Fall 2017

Gorbachev: His Life and Times By William Taubman W.W.Norton & Company, Copyright 2017

852 Pages

ISBN: 978-0-393-647-013

Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan and the Fate of US Power in the Pacific Century

By Richard McGregor Viking Books, Copyright 2017

416 Pages

ISBN: 978-03-995-626-79

Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed

By Misagh Parsa Harvard University Press

November 2016

ISBN 9780674545045

416 pages

How Statesmen Think: he Psychology of International Politics

By Robert Jervis

Princeton University Press, 2017

ISBN: 9780691176444

304 Pages

Foreign Service: Five Decades on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy

By James Dobbins with a forward by Robert Zoellick Brookings Institution Press, 2017

ASIN: B01N6VFU0O

341 Pages.

A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World's Most Intractable Conflict

By Gershon Shafir

University of California Press, 2017

ISBN: 97800520293502

283 Pages

Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry During The Cold War

By Gregg A Brazinsky

University of North Carolina Press, The New Cold War Series, 2017

IBSN: 9781469631707

448 Pages

Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-America World

By Suzy Hansen

Farrar, Straus & Giroux.2017.

ISBN # 0374280045

276 Pages

Gorbachev: His Life and Times

By William Taubman

W.W.Norton & Company, Copyright 2017

852 Pages

ISBN: 978-0-393-647-013

When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system's gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America's arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev's unique character that, by Gorbachev's own admission, make him "difficult to understand." Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced?

NYT Magazine: William Taubman's grapples with this dichotomy in his masterly new biography, "Gorbachev: His Life and Times," which will surely stand as the definitive English-language chronicle of this most intriguing figure for many years to come. That this book should come out now is fortuitous as Americans debate Russia's role in the world--and in our own political system. To understand today's Russia, it is necessary to understand what happened during Gorbachev's time, how he opened up a hermetically sealed society after 70 years of stifling Communist rule but was unable to solve its deeper problems and was ultimately pushed aside.

About the Author: William Taubman is the Pulitzer Prizea[euro]"winning author of Khrushchev and a professor emeritus at Amherst College.

Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan and the Fate of US

Power in the Pacific Century

By Richard McGregor

Viking Books, Copyright 2017

416 Pages

ISBN: 978-03-995-626-79

A history of the combative military, diplomatic, and economic relations among China, Japan, and the United States since the 1970sa[euro]"and the potential crisis that awaits...

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