Book Summaries

When businesses succeed, they do so by setting goals and achieving milestones, but, most importantly, by focusing on key results as a way to measure progress. However, many startups and organizations get distracted, and there are plenty of diversions even for the most disciplined ones. Christi...

Mary McGrory was the singular feminine voice from the highest perches of politics and she didn’t reach there by luck. John Norris, the executive director of the Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding Initiative at American Progress, offers the context in which Mary succeeded in the political w...

Mary McGrory was the singular feminine voice from the highest perches of politics and she didn’t reach there by luck. John Norris, the executive director of the Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding Initiative at American Progress, in an interview with Readara offers the context in which Mary...

Allen Welch Dulles, the distinguished Wall Street lawyer and son of a prominent family, rose to the helm of the Central Intelligence Agency at a very young age. With the help of John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State and Allen Dulles’ brother, the longest-serving chief of the CIA molded the se...

What was originally planned to be a single book on the Pacific War soon evolved into a series of well-researched books about the conflict. In ...

Russia’s involvement in World War I is often explained from the Western perspective, with very little, if any, consideration of the Russian viewpoint. The collapse of the Ottoman empire set the stage for a struggle for control over the Balkans and the adjoining sea routes between Russia and Ge...

The focal point of many aspiring artists and talented songwriters, the music industry sees just a tiny fraction of these creators reach financial success. In the pre-Internet world, recording labels and music studios would select the winners, but the structure of the industry is changing drama...

Despised and hailed, Julius Caesar emerges as a central figure of antiquity, attracting the interest of notable authors and numerous researchers.Yet, although there might be at least as many publications on Caesar’s violent death as on his lifetime achievements, the famous assassination is sti...

Faith-based conflicts in America have been going on for decades, but the idea that the U.S. government endorses God, and more specifically the Christian religion, is not as old as most of us might think. President Roosevelt set off a chain of events in motion after he launched the New Deal and...

What may have been a privileged life for others turned into an ever-ending struggle for Svetlana Alliluyeva. Behind the high Kremlin walls or on the streets of New Delhi, Joseph Stalin’s daughter had one mission – to shake off her father’s legacy and find her true self. Followed by the powerfu...

In With the help of sources never accessed before in Japan, Russia and China, Scott provides compelling insights into America’s first attack on Japan in World War II. ...

In the course of a century, U.S. foreign policy has repeatedly switched from overseas interventions to domestic issues only to swing again. Nine policymakers, or influencers, have managed to change the direction of the country’s foreign policy with mixed results. David Milne provides detailed ...

In the first days of U.S. involvement in World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt faced a severe lack of resources, as well as various branches of the military at odds with each other, as he prepared the nation to wage a “total war.” Putting aside any personal rivalries and ambitions, Secret...

It is always shocking to learn why people who are trained to protect their homeland end up hurting the nation. One such unlikely conspirator, Harold James “Jim” Nicholson, was extremely smart, highly skilled, and greatly respected at the CIA. Yet, Nicholson felt betrayed by the agency when his...

In this brief but nuanced history of his field, paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall describes the causes of many of the misconceptions of the exploration of our own origins. Often contrary and illuminating, Tattersall looks at how paleoanthropologists think and work and delves into several inte...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, was created by the U.S. Congress in 1958 to advance research in military technologies. A top secret organization, the agency has played a key role in the development of some of the biotechnological weapons, missile programs, coded communica...

The United States of America has led and often dominated the world when it comes to economic, military or technological progress in the course of at least seventy years. However, as other regions are picking up pace, the gap between the U.S. and the other developed nations has been steadily na...

From competitive markets to unnamed rivals, companies face various problems whenever they have a product to sell. What remains the same, however, is the inability of most of them to identify the reasons why consumers buy certain products and why some organizations manage to sell better than th...

Even though corporations are paying record fines for breaking the ever-growing maze of complex laws, prosecutors rarely punish individuals for their misdeeds. Under the pre-arranged deferred prosecution, tough talking federal prosecutors and state attorneys general hardly ever push corporation...

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