Traces the history of the Marshall Plan and the efforts to reconstruct western Europe as a bulwark against communist authoritarianism during a two-year period that saw the collapse of postwar U.S.-Soviet relations and the beginning of the Cold War.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich sounds the warning bell that communist-ruled China poses the biggest threat to the United States that we have seen in our lifetime. The United States is currently engaged in a competition with the Chinese government unlike any other that we have witnessed before. This is a competition between the American system-which is governed by freedom and the rule of law-and a totalitarian dictatorship that is controlled...

Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, zeroes in on hot spots around the world and, drawing on interviews with other hit men, jackals (CIA operatives), reporters, and activists, examines the current geopolitical crisis. Instability is

How did a single manhunt spark the modern era of multinational capitalism? Henry Avery was the seventeenth century's most notorious pirate. The press published wildly popular--and wildly inaccurate--reports of his nefarious adventures. The British government offered enormous bounties for his capture, alive or (preferably) dead. But Steven Johnson argues that Avery's most lasting legacy was his inadvertent triggering of a new model for the global economy....