W. W. Norton & Company strana 5 z 11

In 2011, while the Muslim world was consumed with the Arab Spring, Osama bin Laden saw an opportunity: "the next stage," he declared, "will be the reinstating of the rule of the caliphate." Within weeks, he was shot by a US Navy SEAL. Now, the group's affiliates have swollen and Islamic State-al-Qaeda's most brutal spinoff to date-proclaims itself the reborn caliphate bin Laden foretold. Ali Soufan dissects bin Laden's brand of jihadi terrorism, revealing how these organisations were formed, how they operate, their strengths and their weaknesses. "Revealing and timely" (The New York Times), Anatomy of Terror lays bare the psychology and inner workings of al-Qaeda, IS and their spawn, and shows how the spread of terror can be stopped.

The Alps have seen the march of armies, the flow of pilgrims and Crusaders, the feats of mountaineers and the dreams of engineers-and some 14 million people live among their peaks today. In The Alps, Stephen O'Shea takes readers up and down these majestic mountains, journeying through their 500-mile arc across France, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria and Slovenia. He explores the reality behind Hannibal's crossing; he reveals how the Alps have influenced culture from Frankenstein to Heidi and The Sound of Music; and he visits the spot of Sherlock Holmes's death scene, the bloody site of the Italians' retreat in the First World War and Hitler's notorious Eagle's Nest. Throughout, O'Shea records his adventures with the watch makers, salt miners, cable-car operators and yodelers who define the Alps today.

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers?each summoned in different ways by trees?are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest. In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of?and paean to?the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours?vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity’s self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There’s something you need to hear."

Neil Gaiman, long inspired by ancient mythology in creating the fantastical realms of his fiction, presents a bravura rendition of the Norse gods and their world from their origin though their upheaval in Ragnarok. In Norse Mythology, Gaiman stays true to the myths in envisioning the major Norse pantheon: Odin, the highest of the high, wise, daring, and cunning; Thor, Odin's son, incredibly strong yet not the wisest of gods; and Loki-son of a giant-blood brother to Odin and a trickster and unsurpassable manipulator. Gaiman fashions these primeval stories into a novelistic arc that begins with the genesis of the legendary nine worlds and delves into the exploits of deities, dwarfs, and giants. Through Gaiman's deft and witty prose, these gods emerge with their fiercely competitive natures, their susceptibility to being duped and to duping others, and their tendency to let passion ignite their actions, making these long-ago myths breathe pungent life again.

In the years surrounding the Second World War, a serendipitous confluence of events created a healthy balance between the market and the polity-between the engine of capitalism and the egalitarian ideals of democracy. Yet, from the 1970s on, a power shift occurred in which financial regulations were rolled back, taxes were cut, inequality worsened and disheartened voters turned to far-right, faux populism. Robert Kuttner lays out the events that led to the post-war miracle and charts its dissolution all the way to Trump, Brexit and the tenuous state of the EU. He asks whether today's poisonous alliance of reckless finance and ultra-nationalism is inevitable, and whether democracy can find a way to survive.

US foreign policy is undergoing a dire transformation, forever changing America's place in the world. Institutions of diplomacy and development are bleeding out after deep budget cuts; the diplomats who make America's deals and protect its citizens around the world are walking out in droves. Offices across the State Department sit empty, while abroad the military-industrial complex has assumed the work once undertaken by peacemakers. We're becoming a nation that shoots first and asks questions later. In an astonishing journey from the corridors of power in Washington, DC, to some of the most remote and dangerous places on earth-Afghanistan, Somalia, and North Korea among them-acclaimed investigative journalist Ronan Farrow illuminates one of the most consequential and poorly understood changes in American history. His firsthand experience as a former State Department official affords a personal look at some of the last standard bearers of traditional statecraft, including Richard Holbrooke, who made peace in Bosnia and died while trying to do so in Afghanistan. Drawing on newly unearthed documents, and richly informed by rare interviews with warlords, whistle-blowers, and policymakers-including every living former secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton to Rex Tillerson-War on Peace makes a powerful case for an endangered profession. Diplomacy, Farrow argues, has declined after decades of political cowardice, shortsightedness, and outright malice-but it may just offer America a way out of a world at war.

Peter Hayes has been teaching Holocaust studies for decades and Why? grows out of the questions he's encountered from his students. Despite the outpouring of books, films, memorials, museums and courses devoted to the subject, a coherent explanation of why such carnage erupted still eludes people. Numerous myths have sprouted, many to console us that things could have gone differently if only some person or entity had acted more bravely or wisely; others cast new blame on favourite or surprising villains or even on historians. Why? dispels many legends and debunks the most prevalent ones, including the claim that the Holocaust never happened. Hayes brings scholarly wisdom to bear on popular views of the history, challenging some of the most prominent interpretations and arguing that the convergence of multiple forces at a particular moment resulted in this catastrophe.

"The election happened," remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. "And then there was radio silence." Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them. Michael Lewis's brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. Commerce may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it's not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do. Lewis finds the linchpins of the system-those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. And he asks them what keeps them up at night.

We have created the ultimate hive-mind robot: an Internet of interconnected devices that senses, thinks and acts. Bruce Schneier calls it the "World-Sized Web". It includes everything from driverless cars to smart thermostats, from billboards that respond to specific people to drones equipped with their own behavioural algorithms. While the World-Sized Web carries enormous potential, Schneier argues that we are unprepared for the vulnerabilities it brings. Cutting-edge digital attackers can now crash your car, pacemaker and home security system and everyone else's. Click Here to Kill Everybody explores the risks and security implications of the World-Sized Web and lays out common-sense policies that will allow us to enjoy the benefits of this new omnipotent age without surrendering ourselves entirely to our creation.

Begging comparisons to Tolstoy and Joyce, this "magnificent, sprawling cosmic epic" (Guardian) by Alan Moore-the genre-defying, "groundbreaking, hairy genius of our generation" (NPR)-takes its place among the most notable works of contemporary English literature. In decaying Northampton, eternity loiters between housing projects. Among saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts, a timeline unravels: second-century fiends wait in urine-scented stairwells, delinquent specters undermine a century with tunnels, and in upstairs parlors, laborers with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament. Through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts singing hymns of wealth and poverty. They celebrate the English language, challenge mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon their slum as Blake's eternal holy city in "Moore's apotheosis, a fourth-dimensional symphony" (Entertainment Weekly). This "brilliant . . . monumentally ambitious" tale from the gutter is "a massive literary achievement for our time-and maybe for all times simultaneously" (Washington Post).

Today's stock market is not for the faint hearted. At a time of frightening volatility, the answer is to turn to Burton G. Malkiel's advice in his reassuring, authoritative, gimmick-free and perennially best-selling guide to investing. Long established as the first book to purchase before starting a portfolio, A Random Walk Down Wall Street now features new material on "tax-loss harvesting"; the current bitcoin bubble and automated investment advisers; as well as a brand-new chapter on factor investing and risk parity. And as always, Malkiel's core insights-on stocks and bonds, as well as investment trusts, home ownership and tangible assets like gold and collectibles-along with the book's classic life-cycle guide to investing, will help restore confidence and composure to anyone seeking a calm route through today's financial markets.

Celebrated Los Angeles bartender Christiaan Roellich approaches a drink the way a master chef approaches a dish: he draws on high-quality seasonal ingredients to create cocktails for every occasion. In Bar Chef, Roellich shares 100 original recipes for drinks that are as beautiful as they are delicious, including the Quixote (gin and grapefruit); a Kentucky Sour (bourbon and homemade cola syrup); Eggnog for the holidays; and Roellich's signature drink, the Green Goddess (green tea vodka and cucumber with arugula, jalapeno, and absinthe), which has become a part of the language of LA. Featuring easy-to-follow recipes for syrups, tinctures, liqueurs, and bitters with herbs, spices, and seasonal fruit, Roellich guides you through his creative process, demystifying the craft of cocktail making. With stunning color photography and the suave storytelling of your favorite bartender, Bar Chef will become a go-to bar book for home cooks and cocktail enthusiasts, inspiring and pleasing readers with every drink.

In this fascinating foray into the millennia-long relationship between science and military power, acclaimed astrophysicist and "the world's best science communicator" (Times Literary Supplement) Neil deGrasse Tyson and writer-researcher Avis Lang examine how the methods and tools of astrophysics have been enlisted in the service of war. "The overlap is strong, and the knowledge flows in both directions", say the authors, because astrophysicists and military planners care about many of the same things: multi-spectral detection, ranging, tracking, imaging, high ground, nuclear fusion and access to space. Tyson and Lang call it a "curiously complicit" alliance. "The universe is both the ultimate frontier and the highest of high grounds", they write. "Shared by both space scientists and space warriors, it's a laboratory for one and a battlefield for the other. The explorer wants to understand it; the soldier wants to dominate it. But without the right technology-which is more or less the same technology for both parties-nobody can get to it, operate in it, scrutinise it, dominate it or use it to their advantage and someone else's disadvantage." Spanning early celestial navigation to satellite-enabled warfare, Accessory to War is a richly researched and provocative examination of the intersection of science, technology, industry and power that will introduce Tyson's millions of fans to yet another dimension of how the universe has shaped our lives and our world.

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s #1 New York Times best-selling guide to the cosmos, adapted for young readers. From the basics of physics to big questions about the nature of space and time, celebrated astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson breaks down the mysteries of the cosmos into bite-sized pieces. Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry describes the fundamental rules and unknowns of our universe clearly?and with Tyson’s characteristic wit, there’s a lot of fun thrown in, too. This adaptation by Gregory Mone includes full-color photos, infographics, and extra explanations to make even the trickiest concepts accessible. Building on the wonder inspired by outer space, Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry introduces an exciting field and the principles of scientific inquiry to young readers. 40 color illustrations

This is a new edition of the best-selling economics book that won't put you to sleep. In our challenging economic climate, this perennial favourite of students and general readers includes commentary on hot topics such as automation, trade and income inequality. Ten years after the financial crisis, Naked Economics examines how policymakers managed the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

We live in strange times. A machine plays the strategy game Go better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; ideas from the crowd are repeatedly more innovative than those from corporate research laboratories. Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson know what it takes to master this digital-powered shift: we must rethink the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd. The balance now favours the second element of the pair, with massive implications for how we run our companies and live our lives. McAfee and Brynjolfsson deliver a penetrating analysis of a new world and a toolkit for thriving in it. For start-ups and established businesses or for anyone interested in the future, Machine, Platform, Crowd is essential reading.