Knowledge = Power

A portrait of one of the ancient world’s first political celebrities, who veered from failure to success and back again

In his signature larger-than-life style, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall is a revealing self-portrait of his illustrious, controversial, and truly unique life.

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (Part 2)

 Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin has written the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror to the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history

In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world’s largest peasant economy into “socialist modernity,” otherwise known as collectivization, regardless of the cost.

What it cost, and what Stalin ruthlessly enacted, transformed the country and its ruler in profound and enduring ways. Building and running a dictatorship, with life and death power over hundreds of millions, made Stalin into the uncanny figure he became. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is the story of how a political system forged an unparalleled personality and vice versa.

The wholesale collectivization of some 120 million peasants necessitated levels of coercion that were extreme even for Russia, and the resulting mass starvation elicited criticism inside the party even from those Communists committed to the eradication of capitalism. But Stalin did not flinch. By 1934, when the Soviet Union had stabilized and socialism had been implanted in the countryside, praise for his stunning anti-capitalist success came from all quarters. Stalin, however, never forgave and never forgot, with shocking consequences as he strove to consolidate the state with a brand new elite of young strivers like himself. Stalin’s obsessions drove him to execute nearly a million people, including the military leadership, diplomatic and intelligence officials, and innumerable leading lights in culture.

While Stalin revived a great power, building a formidable industrialized military, the Soviet Union was effectively alone and surrounded by perceived enemies. The quest for security would bring Soviet Communism to a shocking and improbable pact with Nazi Germany. But that bargain would not unfold as envisioned. The lives of Stalin and Hitler, and the fates of their respective dictatorships, drew ever closer to collision, as the world hung in the balance.

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is a history of the world during the build-up to its most fateful hour, from the vantage point of Stalin’s seat of power. It is a landmark achievement in the annals of historical scholarship, and in the art of biography. 

 [Fixed] The climax and conclusion of one of the best-selling biographies of our time. The New Yorker declared the first volume of Ian Kershaw's two-volume masterpiece "as  close to definitive as anything we are likely to see," and that promise  is fulfilled in this stunning second volume.

As Nemesis opens, Adolf Hitler has achieved absolute power within Germany and  triumphed in his first challenge to the European powers. Idolized by  large segments of the population and firmly supported by the Nazi  regime, Hitler is poised to subjugate Europe. Nine years later, his  vaunted war machine destroyed, Allied forces sweeping across Germany,  Hitler will end his life with a pistol shot to his head.

About  national and international power in the "modern" or Post Renaissance  period. Explains how the various powers have risen and fallen over the 5  centuries since the formation of the "new monarchies" in W. Europe.

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail - Ray Dalio

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece, in an expanded P.S. edition

Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote  of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel  through sixteenth-century Spain. You haven't experienced Don Quixote in English until you've read this masterful translation.

This  P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book,  including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery  novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the  novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will  Kaufman. Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female  Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle  Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other  characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery  while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as  destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings. Uncle Tom's Cabin was  the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling  book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping  fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was  published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States;  one million copies in Great Britain. In 1855, three years after it was  published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day." The impact  attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when  Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln  declared, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." The  quote is apocryphal; it did not appear in print until 1896, and it has  been argued that "The long-term durability of Lincoln's greeting as an  anecdote in literary studies and Stowe scholarship can perhaps be  explained in part by the desire among many contemporary intellectuals  ... to affirm the role of literature as an agent of social change."

The awesome conclusion to The Lord of the Rings—the greatest fantasy epic of all time—which began in The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.