Robert Kagan created headlines of his own before the US election, by resigning from the Washington Post when its owner, Jeff Bezos, declined to offer an endorsement. Kagan should make headlines after the election for his prescience in Rebellion, which was published in February 2024 and outlined precisely the forces that then promised to push Donald Trump back towards the White House. Spoiler alert: Trump won. Read Kagan to understand why.
A chilling and clear-eyed warning about the threats to our democracy posed by the increasing radicalization of the Republican Party, from a leading historian and intellectual
The 2024 election could be the last free election held in a unified America. So warns Robert Kagan in this brilliant and terrifying analysis of the perilous state of democracy in the United States today. If Donald Trump loses the upcoming election, as he did in 2020, but refuses to accept the result, as he also did in the last election, he is likely to call on his millions of followers to repudiate the…
As Kagan offers a diagnosis for America's ills, so O'Brien anatomises what 14 years of Tory rule has done to Britain. Scathing, comprehensive broadside journalism of the old school. Remains to be seen if he needs to update it with a chapter on Keir Starmer's battles with the rightwing press.
***THE RUNAWAY BESTSELLER, WITH NEW MATERIAL FOR THE PAPERBACK***
THE REVEALING, DEFINING ACCOUNT OF THE DARK NETWORK THAT BROKE OUR COUNTRY.
Something has gone really wrong in Britain.
Our economy has tanked, our freedoms are shrinking, and social divisions are growing. Our politicians seem most interested in their own careers, and much of the media only make things worse. We are living in a country almost unrecognisable from the one that existed a decade ago. But whose fault is it really? Who broke Britain and how did they do it?
Bold and incisive as ever, James O'Brien reveals the shady…
A re-read – and a masterpiece. Roth's depiction of the life and world of Seymour 'The Swede' Levov is all-consuming, the Swede's troubles and fall (and rise) shattering. I re-read this after 20 years, now a father myself, and took a whole world more from it than first time out at 25. Sabbath's Theater may be a better or more extraordinary book but American Pastoral has its attack and pitch-black humor too and much more besides. In the “indigenous American berserk”, Roth named something at the heart of America – ever so but rarely more so than now. I don't read fiction, in general – but Philip Roth will always be the exception.
Philip Roth's fiction has often explored the human need to demolish, to challenge, to oppose, to pull apart. Now, writing with deep understanding, with enormous power and scope and great storytelling energy, he focuses on the counterforce: the longing for an ordinary life. Seymour 'Swede' Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant, postwar America. He has a beautiful wife - Miss New Jersey 1949 - and a lively, precocious daughter, Merry. She is the apple of his eye…
Before 9/11, the rugby team at West Point learned to bond on a sports field. This is what happened when those 15 young men became leaders in war.
Filled with drama, tragedy, and personal transformations, this is the story of a unique brotherhood. It is a story of American rugby and a story of the U. S. Army created through intimate portraits of men shaped by West Point’s motto: “Duty, Honor, Country.”
Some of the players deployed to Afganistan and Iraq, some to Europe. Some became infantry, others became fliers. Some saw action, some did not. One gave his life on a street in Baghdad when his convoy was hit with an IED. Two died away from the battlefield but no less tragically.
Journalist Martin Pengelly, a former rugby player himself, was given extraordinary access to tell this story, a story of a brutal sport and even more brutal warfare.
“Weaves together multiple in-depth biographies to form a highly readable account of who these men were, where they came from, how they played the game and how they fought the longest war in U.S. military history….We’re better off for having these men among us.” —Wall Street Journal
“A mammoth of a journalistic, sporting, historical and emotional work … the product of a writer with a tangible respect for the privilege of the story he is telling” —The Rugby Journal
“Brotherhood is a mad, perfect book. Pengelly’s audacious act combining biography, war reportage and sports writing is like nothing I’ve read before. The ’02 West Point ruggers are painted in beautiful relief and their combat episodes are brilliantly rendered. Sports book? War book? I’m not sure, but I’m certain you must read it.” —Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
