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Recommended books
Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
Author:
George Packer
*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography* *Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography* *Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize* "Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it."--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself."--David M.
*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography* *Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography* *Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize* "Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it."--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself."--David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.
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The Overstory: A Novel
Author:
Richard Powers
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post , Time , Oprah Magazine , Newsweek , Chicago Tribune , and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018 "The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period."―Ann Patchett 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.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post , Time , Oprah Magazine , Newsweek , Chicago Tribune , and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018 "The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period."―Ann Patchett 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."
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Collected Poems: 1974–2004
Author:
Rita Dove
Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award Finalist for the 2017 NAACP Image Award Three decades of powerful lyric poetry from a virtuoso of the English language in one unabridged volume. Rita Dove’s Collected Poems 1974–2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S.
Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award Finalist for the 2017 NAACP Image Award Three decades of powerful lyric poetry from a virtuoso of the English language in one unabridged volume. Rita Dove’s Collected Poems 1974–2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s fresh reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum . She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes , the exquisite reinvention of Greek myth in the sonnets of Mother Love , the troubling rapids of recent history in On the Bus with Rosa Parks , and the homage to America’s kaleidoscopic cultural heritage in American Smooth all celebrate Dove’s mastery of narrative context with lyrical finesse. With the “precise, singing lines” for which the Washington Post praised her, Dove “has created fresh configurations of the traditional and the experimental” ( Poetry magazine).
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Episode overview
On Oct. 6 of last year, the Biden administration was hammering out a grand Middle East bargain in which Saudi Arabia would normalize relations with Israel in exchange for a Palestinian state. And even after Hamas’s attack the following day, the U.S. hoped to keep that deal alive to preserve the conditions for some kind of durable peace.
But that deal is now basically unviable. The war is expanding. Israel may be on the verge of occupying Gaza indefinitely and possibly southern Lebanon, too. So why was President Biden ineffective at achieving his goals? In the past year, has the U.S. been able to shape this conflict at all?
Franklin Foer recently wrote a piece in The Atlantic trying to answer these questions. And he starts with the Biden administration’s attempts to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East — an effort that began well before Oct. 7. In this conversation, Foer walks through his reporting inside the diplomatic bubble of the conflict and the administrations of other Middle Eastern states that have serious stakes in Israel’s war in Gaza.