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Objective Troy tells the gripping and unsettling story of Anwar al-Awlaki, the once-celebrated American imam who called for moderation after 9/11, a man who ultimately directed his outsized talents to the mass murder of his fellow citizens. It follows Barack Obama’s campaign against the excesses of the Bush counterterrorism programs and his eventual embrace of the targeted killing of suspected militants. And it recounts how the president directed the mammoth machinery of spy agencies to hunt Awlaki down in a frantic, multi-million-dollar pursuit that would end with the death of Awlaki by a bizarre, robotic technology that is changing warfare—the drone. Scott Shane, who has covered terrorism for The New York Times over the last decade, weaves the clash between president and terrorist into both a riveting narrative and a deeply human account of the defining conflict of our era. Awlaki, who directed a plot that almost derailed Obama’s presidency, and then taunted him from his desert hideouts, will go down in history as the first United States citizen deliberately hunted and assassinated by his own government without trial. But his eloquent calls to jihad, amplified by YouTube, continue to lure young Westerners into terrorism—resulting in tragedies from the Boston marathon bombing to the murder of cartoonists at a Paris weekly. Awlaki’s life and death show how profoundly America has been changed by the threat of terrorism and by its own fears.
Jason Burke, veteran correspondent and author of the bestselling Al-Qaeda, identifies the population explosion in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia as a major factor in the rise of Islamic militancy in his new book The New Threat From Islamic Militancy. Described as important and impressive by The Guardian newspaper, the book describes how millions in their 20s, unable to find work or a partner, are drawn by the promise of a purpose, a thrill and, yes, sex. Fight well, make money, get yourself a girl. Isis is not the first to offer this, but it has taken it to a new level. “Terrorism,” the self-proclaimed caliph of Isis has said, “is to worship Allah as He ordered you.” From Syria to Somalia, from Libya to Indonesia, from Yemen to the capitals of Europe, Islamic militancy appears stronger, more widespread and more threatening than ever.
A Sense of Place Publishing is proud to have helped bring this wonderful book to a broader audience. Travels with My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road is the story of how an Australian nurse switched careers to become an award-winning international travel writer and photographer.
The Arrow of Time, or Time’s Arrow, is a concept developed in 1927 by the by the British astronomer Arthur Eddington involving the “one-way direction” or “asymmetry” of time. This direction, which can be determined, according to Eddington, by the studying of the organisation of atoms, molecules and bodies. The latest cosmological theories explain why humans, trapped within the decay or entropy of their own forms, possess an illusory sense of time as running in only one direction. Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception — a foray into the idea that our experience of time is actively created by our own minds and how these sensations of what neuroscientists and psychologists call mind time are created is written by acclaimed BBC broadcaster and psychology writer Claudia Hammond. In a world of increasing polarisation, where the push to fundamentalism of thought and creed, as exemplified by Islamic State, is contrasted with an accelerating push towards a coming enlightenment of the human condition by some of the world’s greatest intellects, these debates are increasingly vital.
Now a motion picture starring three of the world’s great actors, Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, Emma Thompson, A Walk in the Woods is coming to a screen near you. Based on the book by the best selling and astonishingly, enduringly popular author Bill Bryson, tells the story of how he set off to hike the Appalachian Trail after some years overseas, rediscovering America in the process.
Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, a Republican who spent 10 years on the committee with oversight of America’s clandestine operations, dubs Mr. Obama and his top diplomat, Mrs. Clinton, the “Architects of Disaster” — the title of a new book he’s written accusing them of bungling the run-up to war, wrongly ousting leader Moammar Gadhafi, then leaving the country a mess that has already come back to bite with the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi. Pete Hoekstra, the former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, tells the real story behind the tragic events in Benghazi and the Obama Administration’s disastrous foreign policy catastrophe in Libya. Architects of Disaster: The Destruction of Libya documents the role played by an inexperienced president and a politicized US State Department under Hillary Clinton in turning a stable North African country into a failed jihadist state spreading terrorism throughout the Middle East and releasing a flood of fearful immigrants onto the Mediterranean and into Europe. Hoekstra, a Republican who spent 10 years on the committee with oversight of America’s clandestine operations, puts President Barack Obama and his top diplomat, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, squarely in the frame, claiming they left Libya as little more than a terrorist training camp.
As Maria Popova observes in her masterful newsletter Brain Pickings, art is a Form of Active Prayer. Why do we humans create – why do artists make art, why do writers write? Pablo Neruda gave a beautiful answer in his metaphor of the hand through the fence. For Joan Didion, the impulse is a vital gateway to her own mind. David Foster Wallace saw it as a mode of fun-having and truth-telling. For Italo Calvino, it was a matter of belonging to “a collective enterprise.” William Faulkner simply believed it to be “the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet.” But even more important, perhaps, is the question of why – and how – artists continue to make art in the face of the rejection, ridicule, and indifference with which their society often meets them. That immutable inquiry is what novelist, short story writer, and journalist Melissa Pritchard explores with unparalleled luminosity in an essay titled “Spirit and Vision” from her altogether magnificent first nonfiction collection, A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write. The piece – a sort of open letter to writers and, by extension, all artists – bears that cynicism-disarming quality of a commencement address and enchants the psyche like an incantation.
He who controls cyber space controls the world. The Author of @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex, Shane Harris, is an American journalist and author at Foreign Policy magazine. He specializes in coverage of America’s intelligence agencies, notably writing the book The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State. In the prologue to his new book he writes: “The leaders of the intelligence agencies, top military officers, and the president himself say that the consequences of another major terrorist attack on American soil pale in comparison with the havoc and panic a determined and malicious group of hackers could cause. Instead of stealing information from a computer, they could destroy the computer itself, crashing communications networks or disabling systems that run air traffic control networks. They could hijack the Internetconnected devices that regulate the flow of electrical power and plunge cities into darkness. Or they could attack information itself, erasing or corrupting the data in financial accounts and igniting a national panic.”
With the publication of Ghost Wars, an explosive account of America’s secret history in Afghanistan, journalist Steve Coll became not only a Pulitzer Prize winner, but also the expert on the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of Bin Laden, and the efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill Bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998. Just as America’s hapless involvement in Iraq spawned the Islamic State, so its involvement in Afghanistan boosted the power of al-Qaeada.
Fulfilling, funny and utterly beguiling, A Fig at the Gate: The Joys of Friendship, Gardening, and the Gaining of Wisdom, her 19th book, takes us with Kate Llewellyn, now in her seventies, as she embraces a new phase in her life, establishing and nourishing an entirely new garden in which she finds not only delight but a focus for a meditation on aging.
Drovers lead lives governed by the pace of their herds, the rhythm of the seasons and by the travelling stock routes on which they move. These pathways are known to most Australians as The Long Paddock. Acclaimed documentary photographer Andrew Chapman and award-winning journalist and author Tim Lee have followed in the pathways of the drovers.
Banned in Thailand, A Kingdom in Crisis: Royal Succession and the Struggle for Democracy in 21st Century Thailand is essential reading for anybody wanting to know what is happening in 21st century Thailand, and what the future holds. With the Thai King in failing health, Thailand stands at a defining moment in its history, struggling to emerge from a despotic past, and convulsed by an intractable conflict that will determine its future. Scores have been killed on the streets of Bangkok. Freedom of speech is routinely denied. Democracy appears increasingly distant. Long dreaded by Thais, the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej is expected to unleash even greater instability. Yet in spite of the impact of the crisis, and the extraordinary importance of the royal succession, they have never been comprehensively analyzed, because Thailand’s draconian lese majeste law has silenced most discussion – until now. Veteran foreign correspondent Andrew MacGregor Marshall is the only journalist covering contemporary Thailand who has taken the decision to break Thai law and tell the whole story. In this book he provides a comprehensive explanation that makes sense of the crisis for the first time, revealing the unacknowledged succession conflict that has become entangled with the struggle for democracy in Thailand. Besides shedding light on Thailand’s divisions, Marshall provides the only detailed discussion of the looming succession available in the public domain.
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Pre-orders are now available for Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks new book The Secret Chord, about the life of King David, due out in October. 1000 BC. The Second Iron Age. Anointed as the chosen one when just a young shepherd boy, his journey is a tumultuous one and the consequences of his choices will resound for generations. In a life that arcs from obscurity to fame, he is by turns hero and traitor, glamorous young tyrant and beloved king, murderous despot and remorseful, diminished patriarch. His wives love and fear him, his sons will betray him. For her research Brooks traveled to Israel with her youngest son Bizu. Although the landscape of the country had changed over the centuries, Ms. Brooks was able to look out over the actual sites of former battlefields. “There are certain similarities to all battlefields,” she said. “The way they smell, what bodies look like. Unfortunately, I have 10 years of experience with that.”
Always, just around the corner, is a newer, better life. The chance to escape your past. The chance to be a new person. The opportunity to be happy. Finally. There has been no better known or more successful book or film on the deeply personal and transformational impacts of travel than Eat Pray Love by journalist Elizabeth Glibert.
In this exquisitely written book, which folds together natural history, cartography, geology, and literature, Robert Macfarlane sets off to follow the ancient routes that crisscross both the landscape of the British Isles and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the voices that haunt old paths and the stories our tracks tell. Macfarlane’s journeys take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. He matches strides with the footprints made by a man five thousand years ago near Liverpool, sails an open boat far out into the Atlantic at night, and commingles with walkers of many kinds, discovering that paths offer a means not just of traversing space but also of feeling, knowing, and thinking.
Thailand: Deadly Destination exposes one of the worst scandals in the annals of modern tourism, the high number of deaths of foreigners in the so-called Land of Smiles.
ISIS are planning a “nuclear holocaust” which will kill hundreds of millions of innocent people, claims veteran German war reporter Jürgen Todenhöfer, 75, in his new book Ten Days in the Islamic State. He spent ten harrowing days living on the ISIS frontline. He is the only journalist given permission to operate as an “embed” with ISIS and live to tell the tale. Todenhöfer has made the stark warning that the West are dramatically underestimating the military might, power and reach of ISIS, and that their plans to launch a “nuclear tsunami” is not just simply scaremongering and hysterical hyperbole. “They are the most brutal and most dangerous enemy I have ever seen in my life,” he says. “I don’t see anyone who has a real chance to stop them. Only Arabs can stop ISIS. I came back very pessimistic.”
ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam, by host of CBN’s The Watchman Erick Stakelbeck, unveils how the propaganda masters of Islamic State are determined to get the West’s attention. They’ve humiliated the Iraqi Army trained by America and seized territory in Iraq that had been secured at the cost of so much American blood and treasure. They’ve beheaded American journalists on camera in a direct challenge to the power and resolve of the United States. And now ISIS is calling for “city wolves” across the United States, Europe and Australia to act on their dedication to the Islamic State’s blood-drenched ideology and murder random Americans going about our daily business.
ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror is a revelatory look at the world’s most dangerous terrorist group. Initially dismissed by US President Barack Obama, along with other fledgling terrorist groups, as a “jayvee squad” compared to al-Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has shocked the world by conquering massive territories in both countries and promising to create a vast new Muslim caliphate that observes the strict dictates of Sharia law.
Bali 9: The Untold Story, written by two of Australia’s most respected journalists, tells a harrowing story. Earlier this year convicted Bali 9 drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran sang Amazing Grace as they faced a firing squad after being denied presidential pardons and having lost their final appeals in the notorious Indonesian justice system. Relations between Australia and Indonesia plummeted to new lows as a result of the murderous Widoto regimes embrace of the death sentence.
When Kate Grenville’s mother died she left behind many fragments of memoir. These were the starting point for One Life, the story of a woman whose life spanned a century of tumult. For many years, Nance recorded her memories in ordinary exercise books. The neatly handwritten stories start confidently, peter out after a few pages, and give way to Italian language exercises and other scribbled notes. One Life is an act of great imaginative sympathy, a daughter’s intimate account of the patterns in her mother’s life. It is a deeply moving homage by one of Australia’s finest writers.
Blackwater USA was the private army that the US government quietly hired to operate in international war zones and on American soil. Its contacts ran from miltiary and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House; it had a military base, a fleet of aircraft and 20,000 troops, but since September 2007 the firm has been hit by a series of scandals that, far from damaging the company, have led to an unprecedented period of expansion. This revised and updated edition includes Scahill’s continued investigative work into one of the greatest outrages of our time: the privatisation of war. While Barack Obama pledged to rein in mercenary forces when he was a senator, once he became president he continued to employ a massive shadow army of private contractors. Blackwater — despite numerous scandals, congressional investigations, FBI probes and documented killings of civilians in both Iraq and Afghanistan — remained a central part of the Obama administration’s global war machine throughout his first term in office.
From the mystique of the glamorous Kennedys to the tumult that surrounded Bill and Hillary Clinton during the president’s impeachment to the historic yet polarizing residency of Barack and Michelle Obama, each new administration brings a unique set of personalities to the White House; and a new set of challenges to the fiercely loyal and hardworking people who serve them: the White House residence staff. No one understands the president of the United States, and his family, like the men and women who make the White House run every day. Now, for the first time, their stories of fifty years, ten administrations, and countless crises, large and small, are told in The Residence. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with butlers, maids, chefs, florists, doormen, and other staffers–as well as former first ladies and first family members–Kate Andersen Brower offers a group portrait of the dedicated professionals who orchestrate lavish state dinners; stand ready during meetings with foreign dignitaries; care for the president and first lady’s young children; and cater to every need the first couple may have, however sublime or, on occasion, ridiculous.
From its birth in the late 1990s as the jihadist dream of terrorist leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the Islamic State has grown into a massive enterprise, redrawing national borders across the Middle East and subjecting an area larger than the United Kingdom to its own vicious brand of Sharia law. This is not another terrorist network but a formidable enemy in tune with the new modernity of the current world disorder. One of the world’s leading experts on terror financing Loretta Napoleoni argues that Ignoring these facts is more than misleading and superficial, it is dangerous. ‘Know your enemy’ remains the most important adage in the fight against terrorism. Here is a book extract.
The Archipelago of Souls is a novel set on two islands. The experiences on one become an antidote for the dark experiences of the other. The exposed place is King Island, in Bass Strait, where Australian soldier Wesley Cress comes to live after World War II. Wesley grew up in the Western Districts of Victoria, joined the Australian army from Manly in NSW and ended up fighting a solo war on Crete after he managed to get left behind by his unit and thus became its only survivor. On Crete, the second island in the novel, Cress fought an idiosyncratic war both with himself and with a largely unseen enemy. Day’s account of Cress’ grinding struggle on Crete is remarkable in every way. It is based on exhaustive research into the combat on Crete, a less familiar chapter than some other battles, a theatre in which geography played no small part.
A Sense of Place Publishing is proud to announce the forthcoming book Terror in Australia: Workers’ Paradise Lost.
Prepubication drafts are now available for interested reviewers.
Please request a copy at: [email protected]
This book is a sidewinding missile into the heart of Australian hypocrisy.
Terror in Australia: Workers’ Paradise Lost, by veteran journalist John Stapleton, is a beautifully written snapshot of a pivotal turning point in the history of the so-called Lucky Country.
Will Hillary Clinton be the next US President? A showdown between her and Donald Trump could turn out to be one of the most colourful presidential campaigns in the nation’s history. Don’t you want to see a woman in the White House? Clinton asks. Well yes, but whether or not it is her, on that question Americans are deeply divided. Critics believe her election would be a disaster for the nation’s security and foreign policy. In an attempt to humanise herself, in Hard Choices: A Memoir the 67-year-old pitches herself as a mother and a grandmother as much as a politician and a diplomat.
Kerry Packer was instrumental in shaping Australia’s media landscape and culture. For 30 years he controlled television’s perennial ratings leader Channel Nine, and a large percentage of the nation’s most influential magazines. So much of what Australians watched, read and believed came through the prism of this larger-than-life man. Beneath all the billionaire clutter, Kerry Packer had plenty in common with the average Joe: a cheeky humour, a competitive drive, deep love for his kids, a passion for sports and movies. In business, Kerry Packer would fight to the last dollar in a deal. Yet the same man would take his private jet to Las Vegas and lose more than $20 million in a week – then leave a $1 million tip. In his Park Street, Sydney office, where the visitors’ chairs were clustered in front of his giant desk, Packer would verbally dissect a hapless executive, but no less often, the very same man would step in silently and invisibly when hardship or tragedy struck a loyal staffer or their family.
The Australian Moment: How We Were Made For These Times is the book on which the 2015 television series Making Australia Great is based. Journalist George Megalogenis won the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the 2012 Walkley Book Award for his bestselling political book. This newly published additions includes a new afterward and appendix. Megalogenis argues that there is no better place to be during economic turbulence than Australia: “Brilliant in a bust, we’ve learnt to use our brains in a boom. Despite a lingering inability to acknowledge our achievements at home, the rest of the world asks: how did we get it right?”
Rolling Stone dismissed the movie American Sniper as being “too dumb to comment”. Thankfully the public saw it differently; it was nominated for an Oscar and rapidly took its place as one of the most commercially successful films of all time. Clint Eastwood was born to direct this powerful movie, starring Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller. This special edition of the book on which it was based, the #1 New York Times bestseller American Sniper, the autobiography of Chris Kyle, is packed with brand new material to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film.
Malcolm Fraser, Australia’s 22nd Prime Minister, has passed away, remembered as a “a giant of Australian politics” and a “great moral compass”. Malcolm Fraser: A Political Memoir, was written as part authorised biography, part personal testament with journalist Margaret Simons. It was published in 2010 and much praised by the reading public. Scion of a wealthy country family, educated at Oxford, he became one of the towering figures of Australian politics, championing multiculturalism, Aboriginal rights and a greater role for the country internationally.
Washington insider Michael O’Brien’s new book, America’s Destruction of Iraq, details the origins of the Islamic State’s rise to power now being witnessed on the world’s televisions.