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The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China
by Michael Sheridan'Michael Sheridan is one of the best informed and wisest writers on China' - Chris Patten, last governor of Hong KongThe Red Emperor presents an eye-opening portrait of Xi Jinping, the man who presides over 1.4 billion people and the second largest economy on earth. Born a 'princeling' to one of Communist China's ruling families, the young Xi was exiled to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. He fought his way back to the top by stealth, privilege and guile. In 2012, following the spectacular fall of his rival Bo Xilai, Xi Jinping became the leader of China.In a compulsively readable narrative, veteran foreign correspondent Michael Sheridan takes the reader from the poor, isolated country of Xi's youth to the military and economic superpower of today. In Xi's new China, family mafias struggle for power amid murder, corruption and sex scandals as ministers and generals vanish in purges. No one is safe in his techno-security state. Xi is an absolute ruler whose word is law on everything from war and peace to the ruthless campaign against Covid-19. He aims to dominate world trade, to defeat Western democracy and to make China the supreme power in the East. A loner and a risk-taker, he is the most consequential leader of our time.Drawing on intimate stories from the closed world of China's leading families and two decades of first-hand reporting, Michael Sheridan sheds new light on the history and politics of China. The book reveals that behind the façade of the Chinese Communist Party there is a modern dynasty and a new emperor.
The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China
by Michael Sheridan'Michael Sheridan is one of the best informed and wisest writers on China' - Chris Patten, last governor of Hong KongThe Red Emperor presents an eye-opening portrait of Xi Jinping, the man who presides over 1.4 billion people and the second largest economy on earth. Born a 'princeling' to one of Communist China's ruling families, the young Xi was exiled to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. He fought his way back to the top by stealth, privilege and guile. In 2012, following the spectacular fall of his rival Bo Xilai, Xi Jinping became the leader of China.In a compulsively readable narrative, veteran foreign correspondent Michael Sheridan takes the reader from the poor, isolated country of Xi's youth to the military and economic superpower of today. In Xi's new China, family mafias struggle for power amid murder, corruption and sex scandals as ministers and generals vanish in purges. No one is safe in his techno-security state. Xi is an absolute ruler whose word is law on everything from war and peace to the ruthless campaign against Covid-19. He aims to dominate world trade, to defeat Western democracy and to make China the supreme power in the East. A loner and a risk-taker, he is the most consequential leader of our time.Drawing on intimate stories from the closed world of China's leading families and two decades of first-hand reporting, Michael Sheridan sheds new light on the history and politics of China. The book reveals that behind the façade of the Chinese Communist Party there is a modern dynasty and a new emperor.
The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China
by Michael Sheridan'Michael Sheridan is one of the best informed and wisest writers on China' - Chris Patten, last governor of Hong KongThe Red Emperor presents an eye-opening portrait of Xi Jinping, the man who presides over 1.4 billion people and the second largest economy on earth. Born a 'princeling' to one of Communist China's ruling families, the young Xi was exiled to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. He fought his way back to the top by stealth, privilege and guile. In 2012, following the spectacular fall of his rival Bo Xilai, Xi Jinping became the leader of China.In a compulsively readable narrative, veteran foreign correspondent Michael Sheridan takes the reader from the poor, isolated country of Xi's youth to the military and economic superpower of today. In Xi's new China, family mafias struggle for power amid murder, corruption and sex scandals as ministers and generals vanish in purges. No one is safe in his techno-security state. Xi is an absolute ruler whose word is law on everything from war and peace to the ruthless campaign against Covid-19. He aims to dominate world trade, to defeat Western democracy and to make China the supreme power in the East. A loner and a risk-taker, he is the most consequential leader of our time.Drawing on intimate stories from the closed world of China's leading families and two decades of first-hand reporting, Michael Sheridan sheds new light on the history and politics of China. The book reveals that behind the façade of the Chinese Communist Party there is a modern dynasty and a new emperor.
Red Enlightenment: On Socialism, Science and Spirituality
by Graham JonesWhy we need a materialist spirituality for the secular left, and how to build one.The left commonly rejects religion and spirituality as counter-revolutionary forces, citing Marx&’s famous dictum that "religion is the opium of the people." Yet forms of spirituality have motivated struggles throughout history, ranging from medieval peasant uprisings and colonial slave revolts, to South American liberation theology and the US civil rights movement. And in a world where religion is growing, and political movements are ridden with conflict, burnout, and failure, what can the left learn from religion? Red Enlightenment argues not only for a deepened understanding of religious matters, but calls for the secular left to develop its own spiritual perspectives. It proposes a materialist spirituality built from socialist and scientific sources, finding points of contact with the global history of philosophy and religion. From cybernetics to liberation theology, from ancient Indian and Chinese philosophy to Marxist dialectical materialism, from traditional religious practices to contemporary art, music, and film, Red Enlightenment sets out a plausible secular spirituality, a new socialist praxis, and a utopian vision.
A Red Family: Junius, Gladys, and Barbara Scales
by Mickey Friedman Barbara ScalesOne of the few publicly known communists in the South, Junius Scales organized textile workers, fought segregation, and was the only American to be imprisoned under the membership clause of the Smith Act during the McCarthy years. This compact collective memoir, built on three interconnected oral histories and including a historical essay by Gail O'Brien, covers Scales's organizing activities and work against racism in the South, his progressive disillusionment with Party bureaucracy and dogmatic rigidity, his persecution and imprisonment, as well as his family's radicalism and response to FBI hounding and blacklisting. Through the distinct perspectives of Junius, his wife Gladys, and his daughter Barbara, this book deepens and personalizes the story of American radicalism. Conversational, intimate, and exceptionally accessible, A Red Family offers a unique look at the American communist experience from the inside out.
Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation (Reconfiguring American Political History)
by Kate WeigandThe untold history of feminist activism in the American Communist Party from the 1930s–50s and its influence on the women&’s liberation movement (Publishers Weekly). Drawing on substantial new research, historian and archivist Kate Weigand disproved the conventional wisdom that the American Communist Party disregarded women&’s issues. Weigand argues that, despite the devastating effects of anti-Communism and Stalinism on the progressive Left of the 1950s, Communist feminists such as Susan B. Anthony II, Betty Millard, and Eleanor Flexner managed to sustain many important elements of their work into the 1960s, when a new generation took up their cause and built an effective movement for women&’s liberation. Red Feminism provides a more complex view of the history of the modern women&’s movement, showing how key Communist activists came to understand gender, sexism, and race as central components of culture, economics, and politics in American society.
Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics
by David A. HopkinsThe national electoral map has split into warring regional bastions of Republican red and Democratic blue, producing a deep and enduring partisan divide in American politics. In Red Fighting Blue, David A. Hopkins places the current partisan and electoral era in historical context, explains how the increased salience of social issues since the 1980s has redefined the parties' geographic bases of support, and reveals the critical role that American political institutions play in intermediating between the behavior of citizens and the outcome of public policy-making. The widening geographic gap in voters' partisan preferences, as magnified further by winner-take-all electoral rules, has rendered most of the nation safe territory for either Democratic or Republican candidates in both presidential and congressional elections - with significant consequences for party competition, candidate strategy, and the operation of government.
The Red Flag: A History of Communism
by David PriestlandIf you would like a more detailed description of the book, please see the "Table of Contents" section, where there is a short summary of each chapterCONVERSATIONAL DESCRIPTION:This is a book by an Oxford professor that’s been a long time in the making-it’s been under contract for ten years-and that we’re very excited about and have a deep investment in. It’s a big, sweeping, incredibly ambitious book of history that tells the whole story of communism from its origins in the French Revolution with Rousseau and Robespierre all the way up to today in China and Cuba and North Korea and everything in between. We’re going to publish it in November, which is the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, which should give us a good news peg in terms of publicity and reviews.This book has a lot of things going for it but the biggest are probably the way it has a totally epic sweep from the 1700s onward, and its incredible cast of characters, and the way that it gives you the intellectual history of the movement-the idealogical stuff-along with the narrative of what literally happened over hundreds of years-the power struggles, the back-room stuff, the infighting-and the way that Communism affected the big picture of world history.It is reminiscent of Niall Ferguson’s new book The Ascent of Money as well as our book A Splendid Exchange because like those books this is history on a very large canvas that weaves together a lot of different threads-the ideas, the politics, the economics, the military stuff, the cultural stuff-into a compelling narrative. It's also similar to Laurence Wright’s recent book The Looming Tower, which gave you the intellectual roots of Al Qaeda at the same time as it was giving you this amazing human story of what actually happened.The author has done staggering research over the course of a decade and just puts the story together brilliantly. He brings to life Marx and Engels, who are working the intellectual angle with The Communist Manifesto and laying the foundation for Lenin and Stalin who come along to put the ideas into practice. But one thing to emphasize here is that this is not just the story of Soviet Communism. This is the whole story. You get Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam, you get Mao and Deng Xiaoping in China, you get Castro and Che in Cuba, Tito in Yugoslavia, and dozens of others around the world. Obviously you also get Khrushchev and Kennedy and Gorbachev and Reagan and all that, but it’s important to realize that it isn’t just the Soviets.What you come away with is this complete understanding of a new piece of the puzzle of humanity's ongoing struggle to govern itself and organize society and figure out how to live in the best way possible. You get the sense that Communism as it was envisioned in the early days-as a pure idea-probably wasn’t any worse than Capitalism, it’s just the old story of people getting involved and screwing things up with their egos and greed and hubris and insecurities-that’s another similarity with The Looming Tower, where you saw how humiliation at the hands of the West drove so much of Al Qaeda's ideology. In the case of Communism, there was insecurity in these countries that the West saw them as "backward" and a lot of the terrible stuff that happened came out of a desire to prove that they weren’t.The author is a very highly regarded Oxford professor and we’re going to deliver some big blurbs on this. We don’t have them yet because the author just delivered but if you look at what we’ve done lately in terms of blurbage with these big history books, it will be similar. In terms of reviews, there’s never any guarantee that we’ll get them but I think we have a much better shot than we did with Old World New World, where we didnt have any kind of news peg, but with this book we will in the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down.MORE FORMAL DESCRIPTIVE COPY:Communism was one of the most powerful political and intellectual movements the world has ever seen. At the height of their influence, Communists controlled more than a third of the earth’s...
Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution
by Ronald SunyReconsidering the Russian Revolution a century laterReflecting on the fate of the Russian Revolution one hundred years after October, Ronald Grigor Suny—one of the world’s leading historians of the period—explores the historiographical controversies over 1917, Stalinism, and the end of “Communism” and provides an assessment of the achievements, costs, losses and legacies of the choices made by Soviet leaders. While a quarter century after the disintegration of the USSR, the story usually told is one of failure and inevitable collapse, Suny reevaluates the promises, missed opportunities, achievements, and colossal costs of trying to build a kind of “socialism” in the inhospitable environment of peasant Russia. He ponders what lessons 1917 provides for Marxism and the alternatives to capitalism and bourgeois democracy.
Red Flag Wounded: Stalinism and the Fate of the Soviet Experiment
by Ronald SunyTracking the degeneration of the Russian RevolutionRed Flag Wounded brings together essays covering the controversies and debates over the fraught history of the Soviet Union from the revolution to its disintegration. Those monumental years were marked not only by violence, mass killing, and the brutal overturning of a peasant society but also by the modernisation and industrialisation of the largest country in the world, the victory over fascism, and the slow recovery of society after the nightmare of Stalinism.Ronald Grigor Suny is one of the most prominent experts on the revolution, the fate of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet empire, and the twists and turns of Western historiography of the Soviet experience. As a biographer of Stalin and a long-time commentator on Russian and Soviet affairs, he brings novel insights to a history that has been misunderstood and deliberately distorted in the public sphere. For a fresh look at a story that affects our world today, this is the place to begin.
Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy
by George MagnusA trusted economic commentator provides a penetrating account of the threats to China's continued economic rise Under President Xi Jinping, China has become a large and confident power both at home and abroad, but the country also faces serious challenges. In this critical take on China’s future, economist George Magnus explores four key traps that China must confront and overcome in order to thrive: debt, middle income, the Renminbi, and an aging population. Looking at the political direction President Xi Jinping is taking, Magnus argues that Xi’s authoritarian and repressive philosophy is ultimately not compatible with the country’s economic aspirations. Thorough and well researched, the book also investigates the potential for conflicts over trade, China’s evolving relationship with Trump, and the country’s attempt to win influence and control in Eurasia through the Belt and Road initiative.
Red Friends: Internationalists in China's Struggle for Liberation
by John SextonThe story of the friends and allies of the Chinese RevolutionChina&’s resistance to Imperial Japan was the other great internationalist cause of the &‘red 1930s&’, along with the Spanish Civil War. These desperate and bloody struggles were personified in the lives of Norman Bethune and others who volunteered in both conflicts. The story of Red Friends starts in the 1920s when, encouraged by the newly formed Communist International, Chinese nationalists and leftists united to fight warlords and foreign domination.John Sexton has unearthearthed the histories of foreigners who joined the Chinese revolution. He follows Comintern militants, journalists, spies, adventurers, Trotskyists, and mission kids whose involvement helped, and sometimes hindered, China&’s revolutionaries. Most were internationalists who, while strongly identifying with China&’s struggle, saw it as just one theatre in a world revolution.The present rulers in Beijing, however, buoyed by China&’s powerhouse economy, commemorate them as &‘foreign friends&’ who aided China&’s &‘peaceful rise&’ to great power status.Founded on original research, it is a stirring story of idealists struggling against the odds to found a better future. The author&’s interviews with survivors and descendants add colour and humanity to lives both heroic and tragic.
Red Gas: Russia and the Origins of European Energy Dependence (Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series)
by Per HögseliusThis book applies a systems and risk perspective on international energy relations, author Per Högselius investigates how and why governments, businesses, engineers and other actors sought to promote – and oppose– the establishment of an extensive East-West natural gas regime that seemed to overthrow the fundamental logic of the Cold War.
Red Globalization
by Oscar Sanchez-SibonyWas the Soviet Union a superpower? Red Globalization is a significant rereading of the Cold War as an economic struggle shaped by the global economy. Oscar Sanchez-Sibony challenges the idea that the Soviet Union represented a parallel socio-economic construct to the liberal world economy. Instead he shows that the USSR, a middle-income country more often than not at the mercy of global economic forces, tracked the same path as other countries in the world, moving from 1930s autarky to the globalizing processes of the postwar period. In examining the constraints and opportunities afforded the Soviets in their engagement of the capitalist world, he questions the very foundations of the Cold War narrative as a contest between superpowers in a bipolar world. Far from an economic force in the world, the Soviets managed only to become dependent providers of energy to the rich world, and second-best partners to the global South.
Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna
by Jennifer E. TelescaIlluminating the conditions for global governance to have precipitated the devastating decline of one of the ocean&’s most majestic creatures The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) is the world&’s foremost organization for managing and conserving tunas, seabirds, turtles, and sharks traversing international waters. Founded by treaty in 1969, ICCAT stewards what has become under its tenure one of the planet&’s most prominent endangered fish: the Atlantic bluefin tuna. Called &“red gold&” by industry insiders for the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands in the sushi economy, the giant bluefin tuna has crashed in size and number under ICCAT&’s custodianship.With regulations to conserve these sea creatures in place for half a century, why have so many big bluefin tuna vanished from the Atlantic? In Red Gold, Jennifer E. Telesca offers unparalleled access to ICCAT to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. ICCAT manages the bluefin not to protect them but to secure export markets for commodity empires—and, as a result, has become complicit in their extermination.The decades of regulating fish as commodities have had disastrous consequences. Amid the mass extinction of all kinds of life today, Red Gold reacquaints the reader with the splendors of the giant bluefin tuna through vignettes that defy technoscientific and market rationales. Ultimately, this book shows, changing the way people value marine life must come not only from reforming ICCAT but from transforming the dominant culture that consents to this slaughter.
Red, Green, and Blue: The Partisan Divide on Environmental Issues (Elements in American Politics)
by David KarolThis Element explores the growing party divisions on the environment in the United States. It draws upon quantitative and qualitative data from several decades of national and state politics. The study contributes theory to the party position change literature, showing that interest groups change parties, but in turn are changed by them. In the 1970s the characteristics that predicted voters' attitudes on the environment also predicted legislators' votes. Yet as environmentalists and their opponents aligned with parties, officials had incentives to set their own views aside to represent new party constituencies. Influence flowed in both directions, however. Environmentalists were drawn to the Democrats as they confronted GOP-linked business lobbies. Environmentalists' resulting need to cooperate with other groups close to Democrats led them to change their positions. Although environmentalists were long unwelcoming to minorities, they embraced immigration reform, allied with unions on trade, and worked with civil rights lobbies and labor in battles over judicial nominations. The Element concludes with discussion of how the current party alignment on the environment might change.
Red Guard Factionalism And The Cultural Revolution In Guangzhou (canton)
by Stanley RosenWhen the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) of the middle and late 1960s burst forth, the initial response both in China and the West seemed primarily to be one of mystification. The spectacle of severe splits among leaders long thought to be compatible, of armed struggles between factional units whose uniform pledges to Chairman Mao and the Party Center appeared to make their similarities greater than their differences, and of destructive Red Guards who were bent on "tearing down the old world to build a new one" was at first difficult to explain.
The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)
by Guobin YangRaised to be "flowers of the nation," the first generation born after the founding of the People's Republic of China was united in its political outlook and at first embraced the Cultural Revolution of 1966, but then split into warring factions. Investigating the causes of this fracture, Guobin Yang argues that Chinese youth engaged in an imaginary revolution from 1966 to 1968, enacting a political mythology that encouraged violence as a way to prove one's revolutionary credentials. This same competitive dynamic would later turn the Red Guard against the communist government.Throughout the 1970s, the majority of Red Guard youth were sent to work in rural villages, where they developed an appreciation for the values of ordinary life. From this experience, an underground cultural movement was born. Rejecting idolatry, these relocated revolutionaries developed a new form of resistance that signaled a new era of enlightenment, culminating in the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s and the Tiananmen protest of 1989. Yang's final chapter on the politics of history and memory argues that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are factionalized along these lines of political division, formed fifty years before.
Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win
by Peter SchweizerPeter Schweizer says that, in a quarter-century as an investigative journalist, this is the scariest investigation he has ever conducted. That the Chinese government seeks to infiltrate American institutions is hardly surprising. What is wholly new, however, are the number of American elites who are eager to help the Chinese dictatorship in its quest for global hegemony. <p><p> Presidential families, Silicon Valley gurus, Wall Street high rollers, Ivy League universities, even professional athletes—all willing to sacrifice American strength and security on the altar of personal enrichment. In Red-Handed, six-time New York Times bestselling investigator Peter Schweizer presents his most alarming findings to date by revealing the secret deals wealthy Americans have cut to help China build its military, technological, and economic might. Equally as astonishing, many of these elites quietly believe the Chinese dictatorial regime is superior to American democracy. <p><p> Schweizer and his team of forensic investigators spent over a year scouring a massive trove of global corporate records and legal filings to expose the hidden transactions China’s enablers hoped would never see the light of day. And as Schweizer’s past bombshells like Profiles in Corruption, Secret Empires, and Clinton Cash all made clear, there are bad actors on both ends of the political spectrum. Exhaustively researched, crisply told, and chilling, Red-Handed will expose the nexus of power between the Chinese government and the American elites who do its bidding. <p> <b>New York Times Bestseller</b>
Red Highways: A Liberal's Journey into the Heartland
by Rose AguilarA San Francisco radio host grown tired of media stereotypes, Rose Aguilar packed up her van, picked up her boyfriend, and set out on a six-month road trip through the red-state West to find out what voters there really care about.
The Red Horseman (Jake Grafton #4)
by Stephen CoontsAs the USSR collapses, thousands of nuclear warheads may end up in the wrong hands in this thriller from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Art of War. Jake Grafton has been promoted to deputy director of a new US intelligence agency—and the stakes of his commission are higher than ever before. With the Soviet Union on the brink of dissolution, a vast nuclear arsenal is suddenly ripe for the taking by mercenaries, rogue nations, and insane Russian nationalists. Grafton must stop them, and he may have to do it alone—because not everyone supposedly on his side wants him to succeed. From the &“masterful storyteller&” whose blockbuster tales of international suspense include Flight of the Intruder and Liars & Thieves, The Red Horseman is a startling vision of the apocalyptic danger that emerged at the end of the Cold War, a threat that still exists wherever weapons of mass destruction remain poorly secured.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Stephen Coonts, including rare photos from the author&’s personal collection.
Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, And Deception To Keep You Misinformed
by Christopher C. HornerLiars--Al Gore, the United Nations, the New York Times. The global warming lobby, relentless in its push for bigger government, more spending, and more regulation, will use any means necessary to scare you out of your wits--as well as your tax dollars and your liberties--with threats of rising oceans, deadly droughts, and unspeakable future consequences of "climate change." In pursuing their anti-energy, anti-capitalist, and pro-government agenda, the global warming alarmists--and unscrupulous scientists who see this scare as their gravy train to federal grants and foundation money--resort to dirty tricks, smear campaigns, and outright lies, abandoning scientific standards, journalistic integrity, and the old-fashioned notions of free speech and open debate. In Red Hot Lies, bestselling author Christopher Horner--himself the target of Greenpeace dirty tricks and alarmist smears--exposes the dark underbelly of the environmental movement. Power-hungry politicians blacklist scientists who reject global warming alarmism. U.S. senators threaten companies that fund climate change dissenters. Mainstream media outlets openly reject the notion of "balance." The occasional unguarded scientist candidly admits the need to twist the facts to paint an uglier picture in order to keep the faucet of government money flowing. In the name of "saving the planet," anything goes. But why the nasty tactics? Why the cover ups, lies, and intimidation? Because Al Gore and his ilk want to use big government at the local, state, federal, and global level to run your life, and they can brook no opposition. But the actual facts, as Red Hot Lies makes clear, aren't nearly as scary as their fiction.
Red Inc.: Dictatorship and the Development of Capitalism in China, 1949-2009
by Robert K. SchaefferRed Inc. takes issue with the view that economic development will eventually promote democracy. It outlines in detail the enormous social costs of the rapid rise of China's economy. Although many observers argue that Deng Xiaoping introduced capitalism to China in the late 1970s, Schaeffer believes that capitalist development really began during the 1950s under Mao Zedong. But although Mao made relentless efforts to generate the capital needed to finance economic development, his regime failed to promote any real growth. Schaeffer shows that the remarkable rise of its economy in recent years has provided China with new and often corrupt sources of wealth and power that have enabled it to resist democracy. He brings into sharp focus the consequence of the regime's uncompromising approach to capital accumulation.
Red Ink
by Greg DinalloWhen onetime dissident journalist Nikolai Katkov is tipped off to the murder of a highly placed government official, he doesn&’t count on the trail twisting into the lurid world of Moscow mafia casino-owner Arkady Barkhin. After Katkov&’s relentless digging almost gets him gunned down, he receives an unexpected appeal for help from the striking Gabby Scotto, a US Treasury special agent. She has been tracking laundered money flowing out of the US—an investigation that has led to Barkhin&’s casino and a similar dead end. But then Katkov obtains a sensitive government document that could shatter Russia&’s fragile and newly free economy—and join Scotto in Washington to pick up the trail. Katkov&’s tenaciousness in pursuit of a story has been honed by decades of KGB harassment, and his survival instincts—notwithstanding a penchant for vodka and American cigarettes—by a few hard years in the Gulag. He senses a kindred spirit in the vivacious Broolynite whose bravado is matched by her investigative savvy—and who leaps at the chance to lead some down-and-dirty field work. Scotto has doubts about sharing privileged information with a journalist, but they are squelched when Katkov makes a critical discovery about a shipping container heading south on I-95—one that they suspect is filled with $2 billion badly in need of laundering. As Katkov and Scotto&’s pursuit races from freeways to freight cars, from Baltimore to Miami, they are shadowed by American entrepreneur Michael Rubineau, a man intent upon seeing the container safely to its ultimate destination. A frequent VIP guest at Arkady Barkhin&’s Moscow nightclub, Rubineau has devised a scheme of stunning brilliance and unprecedented greed and venality. But as Scotto prepares to take him down, and Katkov composes his front-page headlines, they&’re forced into a gambit of extreme peril. Heading into the last outpost of communism, Katkov is about to discover that love of country and lust for money can crumble even the fiercest loyalties . . .
Red Ink: Inside the High-stakes Politics of the Federal Budget
by David WesselDavid Wessel, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter, columnist, and bestselling author of In Fed We Trust, dissects a topic--the federal budget--that is fiercely debated today in the halls of Congress and the media, and yet is misunderstood by the American public. In a sweeping narrative about the people and the politics behind the budget, Wessel looks at the 2011 fiscal year (which ended September 30) to see where all the money was actually spent, and why the budget process has grown wildly out of control. Through the eyes of key people--Jacob Lew, White House director of the Office of Management and Budget; Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office; Blackstone founder and former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson; and more--Wessel gives readers an inside look at the making of our unsustainable budget.