Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis (Verso)
The author of City of Quartz examines the increasingly visible consequences of a world in which more than a billion people exist almost invisibly in urban poverty.

Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq
by Ahmed S. Hashim (Cornell)
A professor at the Naval War College anatomizes the Iraqi insurgency and assesses the long road still ahead.

The Parliament of Man
by Paul Kennedy (Random House)
The prominent Yale historian assesses the past lives and future prospects of the United Nations.

The Peace of Illusions
by Christopher Layne (Cornell)
Expansionist post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy represents not a break with the past but, rather, continuity with it—which is precisely the problem, the author argues.

The Looming Tower
by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)
A history of al-Qaeda in the years leading up to 9/11—and the intelligence community’s dawning (but incomplete) awareness of the threat.

American Taxation, American Slavery
by Robin L. Einhorn (Chicago)
The long tradition of American anti- government rhetoric finds its roots not in virtuous yeomanry, the author argues, but rather in the short-term efforts of slave owners looking to protect their interests.

James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights
by Richard Labunski (Oxford)
Watch the wig powder fly as James Madison and Patrick Henry slug it out over the constitutional freedoms we take for granted today.

Growing Up Jim Crow
by Jennifer Ritterhouse (North Carolina)
A study of how both black and white children in the pre-civil-rights South learned the “etiquette” of segregation.

Financial Founding Fathers
by Robert E. Wright and David J. Cowen (Chicago)
Portraits of Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, and the seven other men most responsible for building the monolith of American finance.

Mayflower
by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking)
The Pilgrims’ turbulent first fifty years in the New World, and how they set the stage for subsequent American history, from the author of In the Heart of the Sea.

For Prophet and Tsar
by Robert D. Crews (Harvard)
A historical look at Russia’s engagement with Islam from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth.

Mao’s Last Revolution
by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals (Harvard)
An exhaustive history of China’s Cultural Revolution.

In Tasmania
by Nicholas Shakespeare (Overlook)
A novelist’s history of the former penal colony made good.

Australia
by Frank Welsh (Overlook)
A single-volume history in which the author, an Englishman, concludes, “Australia is probably the most successful society in the world and the most agreeable to live in.”

The Wehrmacht
by Wolfram Wette (Harvard)
A German historian dismantles the myth that the Wehrmacht fought World War II with relatively clean hands.