New Books Of Interest, October 2017.
Author | Pearson, Margaret |
Position | Books 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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