Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela
by Rory Carroll (March)
As Hugo Chávez appears to fade, most recently delegating power to his vice president, Rory Carroll, a former Latin America bureau chief for the Guardian, is set to publish a timely biography of the Venezuelan president. Promising an “intimate piece of reportage” based on interviews with Chávez’s ministers, aides and courtiers, as well as Venezuelan citizens, “Comandante” traces Chávez’s rise to, and increasing grip on, power over the years — from his seizure of the Venezuelan oil industry to his creation of a personality cult (including his longtime TV show ¡Alo Presidente!) to his growing suppression of political opponents.
Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government
by Joshua Kurlantzick (March)
Two years after a wave of democratic uprisings swept the Arab World, Council on Foreign Relations fellow Joshua Kurlantzick takes a far more sober view of global political progress, arguing that a “spate of retreating democracies” are not outliers but a trend — democracy is in decline. Countries once considered emerging democracies, like Brazil and India, “have not only failed to step up as global advocates of democratisation,” Kurlantzick says, “but have, in many cases, moved in the other direction, propping up some of the world’s most authoritarian governments — helping preserve the same kind of repressive regimes they themselves often had escaped, reinforcing divides, and often siding with autocrats against Western democracies.”
A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money, and an Epic Power Struggle in China
by Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang (April)
Nearly one year after the dismissal of Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai, two Chinese writers are looking back at how the story unfolded — from the murder of a British businessman in November 2011 to the conviction of Bo’s wife this past August. Pin Ho, a New York-based publisher of Chinese-language books and magazines who has been critical of the Chinese government’s handling of the scandal, and Wenguang Huang, a writer and translator who recently published the memoir The Little Red Guard, promise a narrative based on “high-level sources and inside information,” as well as analysis of how Bo’s downfall and its aftermath could shape Chinese politics and economics at a crucial time of transition for the country.
The Way of the Knife: The CIA, A Secret Army, and a War at the End of the Earth
by Mark Mazzetti (April)
As the Obama administration has wound down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in favour of precision warfare, vastly ratcheting up its reliance on drones, the CIA has taken on a new identity, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times national security correspondent Mark Mazzetti reports in his new book. Mazzetti draws on his reporting for the Times to chronicle the intelligence agency’s transformation into a “paramilitary organization” directly responsible for carrying out killings ordered by the White House, from Somalia to Pakistan to Yemen. The result is a kind of “military-intelligence complex,” Mazzetti says: “Where the soldiers can’t go, the United States sends drones, proxies, and guns for hire.”
Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed
by Ahdaf Soueif (April)
It was nearly two years ago that Egyptians first took to the streets to topple their longtime leader, and in her new book the writer Ahdaf Soueif looks back at the weeks she spent in Tahrir Square watching the city of her birth transform before her eyes. Soueif, whose novel The Map of Love was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1999 and who now regularly writes political commentary for the Guardian, is well-positioned to grapple with the complicated legacy of the Arab Spring in her still rapidly changing hometown, which today, for a variety of reasons, is a far cry from the peaceful city where she remembers growing up.
Russians: The People Behind the Power
by Gregory Feifer (April)
Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin
by Ben Judah (June)
How to explain Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which often hovers somewhere between the bizarre and the fearsome? Greogry Feifer, a former NPR correspondent in Moscow and author of a well-received account of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, draws on eight years of reporting in Russia to try to explain, from the inside, how Russians view their leader and their sometimes puzzling place in the world. In Fragile Empire, Ben Judah, a former Reuters reporter based in Moscow, considers Putin’s standing as Russia asserts itself economically, particularly as an energy power, while mass opposition protests that began in December 2011 threaten the two-time president at home.
Beyond War: Technology, Economic Growth, and American Influence in a New Middle East
by David Rohde (April)
Drawing on nearly a decade of reporting and analysis for The New York Times, Reuters and the Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize winner David Rohde takes a sweeping look at US foreign policy in the Middle East since 9/11. He lambastes the United States for wasting lives and money in Afghanistan and Iraq and for failing to use nonmilitary weapons — consumerism, investment and technology — to win over allies, namely moderate Muslims. Moderates in the Middle East long for American goods and education, Rohde says, arguing that they are also the only people ultimately capable of rooting out militancy in their midst.
Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century
by Christian Caryl (May)
Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in China. The Iranian Revolution. Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland. Margaret Thatcher’s election as British prime minister. It was by all accounts a historic year, and in his new book Christian Caryl, a Foreign Policy editor and writer, connects the dots between the major geopolitical events of 1979: They were linked, he argues, “by the impulse of counterrevolution, whether against Soviet communism, social democracy, modernizing authoritarianism, or Maoism run amok” — and by the influence they would have on the global events of the next century as well.
Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era
by Joseph S Nye (May)
In the thick of the 2012 presidential election, it was sometimes easy to forget a crucial question lurking behind the daily campaign spats: Just what can the US president do in the realm of foreign policy? Harvard University’s Joseph Nye takes a comparative, historical approach to this question, looking back at presidencies from Teddy Roosevelt to George H W Bush to examine how various commanders in chief have managed to shape America’s position on the world stage, for better or for worse.
The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village
by Anna Badkhen (May)
War correspondent and Foreign Policy contributor Anna Badkhen has been travelling to Afghanistan since 2001 to document the US war’s toll on the Afghan people, most recently in her ebook Afghanistan by Donkey, set in remote hamlets and villages in the country’s north. Her latest book, The World Is a Carpet, chooses as its backdrop the small village of Oqa, where Badkhen chronicles the community’s creation of a carpet that over the course of the four seasons comes to embody and reflect the broader changes and challenges the village faces.
Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Connection
by Ethan Zuckerman (June)
Come summer, media guru Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, has a new book about why technology falls short when it comes to bringing people around the world together. Despite vast improvements in connectivity made possible by the Internet and social media, Zuckerman argues we’ve failed to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by globalisation. But by “rewiring” tools already in place, he says, humans are fully capable of breaking down cultural, linguistic, and national boundaries.
My Isl@m: How Fundamentalism Stole My Mind — And Doubt Freed My Soul
by Amir Ahmad Nasr (June)
From Iran’s Green Revolution to the Arab Spring, the world has watched the Internet spark and fuel uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa in recent years. Raised as a devout Muslim, Amir Ahmad Nasr was among those young Muslims who took to the web, first blogging anonymously in 2006 before revealing his identity in 2011, amid the year’s wave of Arab uprisings. Now, the cheeky voice behind “Sudanese Thinker” describes in his first book a personal journey that reflects a widespread trend with important political and cultural implications — how the Internet “opened [his] eyes and heart to a world beyond the conspiracy theories and religious fundamentalism of his early youth.”WP-BLOOMBERG
