Knowledge = Power

Julius Caesar wrote his exciting Commentaries during some of the most  grueling campaigns ever undertaken by a Roman army. The Gallic Wars and  The Civil Wars constitute the greatest series of military dispatches  ever written. As literature, they are representative of the finest  expressions of Latin prose in its "golden" age, a benchmark of elegant  style and masculine brevity imitated by young schoolboys for centuries.

One  of the most daring and brilliant generals of all time, Julius Caesar  combined the elements of tactical genius with the shrewdness of a master  politician. He was an astute judge of men's character - their strengths  and weaknesses. Whenever possible, he exercised restraint and mercy  even when his worst enemies were in his power. But he also knew when and  how to mete out stern punishment and his swift retaliations became a  hallmark of his career. With his charismatic leadership, his powerful  intellect and his magnetic personal charm, Julius Caesar became the idol  of men and women everywhere. The fanatic loyalty of his troops and the  adulation of the Roman public propelled him to the pinnacle of power.  Historian Will Durant called him "the most complete man that antiquity  produced."

Follow along in this recording as Julius Caesar in 50  B.C. undertakes the awesome enterprise of subduing savage Gaul, an area  roughly the size of Texas. That task was barely completed before his  enemies in Rome struck, igniting the bloody Civil War that engulfed most  of the Roman Empire and afterward left Caesar in supreme power.

Wilson is a sophisticated and marvelously humane writer. His vision is a  liberating one, and a reader of this splendid book comes away with a  sense of the kinship that exists among the people, animals, and insects  that share the planet. (New Yorker 20041219)

"It's hard to overestimate the impact that Robert Conquest's  extraordinary study had on the West's perceptions of Soviet history.  Using rare Soviet materials, some published during the Khrushchev thaw,  others in self-published samizdat format, the British historian put  together an authoritative chronicle of Stalin's murderous reign. Western  communists and fellow travelers dismissed the book as propaganda. But  when Soviet archives were partially opened in 1991, Conquest's estimates  of 700,000 "legal" executions during 1937-38 -- and of the total number  of other deaths thanks to the Soviet terror campaigns ("hardly lower  than some fifteen million") -- were proven chillingly accurate." -- Owen  Matthews, N/A, Wall Street Journal

"Anthony Powell  once wrote of Robert Conquest that he had a 'capacity for taking  enormous pains in relation to any enterprise in hand.' It is beyond  dispute that, forty years after the publication of The Great Terror, this judgment requires no reassessment."--Michael Weiss, The New Criterion

"The volume that tore the mask away from Stalinism before most people had even heard of Solzhenitsyn."--Christopher Hitchens, Wall Street Journal

by                 Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton

Featuring extensive revisions to  the text as well as a new introduction and epilogue - bringing the book  completely up to date on the tumultuous politics of the previous decade  and the long-term implications of the Soviet collapse - this compact,  original, and engaging book offers the definitive account of one of the  great historical events of the last 50 years.

Combining  historical and geopolitical analysis with an absorbing narrative, Kotkin  draws upon extensive research, including memoirs by dozens of insiders  and senior figures, to illuminate the factors that led to the demise of  Communism and the USSR. The new edition puts the collapse in the context  of the global economic and political changes from the 1970s to the  present day. Kotkin creates a compelling profile of post-Soviet Russia,  and he reminds us, with chilling immediacy, of what could not have been  predicted - that the world's largest police state, with several million  troops, a doomsday arsenal, and an appalling record of violence, would  liquidate itself with barely a whimper.

Throughout the book,  Kotkin also paints vivid portraits of key personalities. Using recently  released archive materials, for example, he offers a fascinating picture  of Gorbachev, describing this virtuoso tactician and resolutely  committed reformer as "flabbergasted by the fact that his socialist  renewal was leading to the system's liquidation" - and more or less  going along with it.

At once authoritative and provocative, Armageddon Averted illuminates the collapse of the Soviet Union, revealing how "principled  restraint and scheming self-interest brought a deadly system to meek  dissolution".

How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany

From the New York Times bestselling author Robert D. Kaplan, named one of the world’s Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, comes a riveting journey through one of Europe’s frontier  countries—and a potent examination of the forces that will determine  Europe’s fate in the postmodern age.

Tracing the extraordinary trajectory of Julius Caesar's life, Adrian  Goldsworthy covers not only the great Roman emperor's accomplishments as  charismatic orator, conquering general, and powerful dictator but also  lesser-known chapters. Ultimately, Goldsworthy realizes the full  complexity of Caesar's character and shows why his political and  military leadership continues to resonate some 2,000 years later. In  this landmark biography, Goldsworthy examines Caesar as a military  leader, as well as his other roles, and places his subject firmly within  the context of Roman society in the first century B.C.

“[The Rising Sun] is quite possibly the most readable, yet informative account of the Pacific war.”—Chicago Sun-Times

A blend of Manhunt, Killing Pablo, and Zero Dark Thirty,  Andrew Hogan and Douglas Century's sensational investigative high-tech  thriller - soon to be a major motion picture from Sony - chronicles a  riveting chapter in the 20th-century drug wars: the exclusive inside  story of the American lawman and his dangerous eight-year hunt that  captured El Chapo - the world's most wanted drug kingpin who evaded the  law for more than a decade.

Every generation has a  larger-than-life criminal: Jesse James, Billy the Kid, John Dillinger,  Al Capone, John Gotti, Pablo Escobar. But each of these notorious  lawbreakers had a "white hat" in pursuit: Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, Eliot  Ness, Steve Murphy. For notorious drug lord Joaquín Archivaldo  Guzmán-Loera - El Chapo - that lawman is former Drug Enforcement  Administration Special Agent Andrew Hogan.

In 2006, fresh out of  the DEA Academy, Hogan heads west to Arizona, where he immediately  plunges into a series of gripping undercover adventures, all unknowingly  placing him on the trail of Guzmán, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, a  Forbes billionaire, and public enemy number one in the United  States. Six years later, as head of the DEA's Sinaloa Cartel desk in  Mexico City, Hogan finds his life and Chapo's are, ironically, on  parallel paths: They're both obsessed with the details.

In a recasting of the classic American Western on the global stage, Hunting El Chapo takes us on Hogan's quest to achieve the seemingly impossible, from  infiltrating El Chapo's inner circle to leading a white-knuckle manhunt  with an elite brigade of trusted Mexican marines - racing door to door  through the cartel's stronghold and ultimately bringing the elusive and  murderous kingpin to justice.

This cinematic crime story  following the relentless investigative work of Hogan and his team  unfolds at breakneck speed, taking the listener behind the scenes of one  of the most sophisticated and dangerous counternarcotics operations in  the history of the United States and Mexico.