Telex : Iran is an extraordinarily personal document of a public event. The photographs Gilles Peress took over a five-week period during the 1979/80 seizure of the American embassy in Tehran form neither a study nor an analysis. Peress didn't plan to go to Iran: the instant imagery, the caricatures of "fanatics" on his TV got to him. He felt the need to understand for himself the apparent madness about which the Western media could only generalize
From Warsaw with Love is the epic story of how Polish intelligence officers forged an alliance with the CIA in the twilight of the Cold War, told by the award-winning author John Pomfret. Spanning decades and continents, from the battlefields of the Balkans to secret nuclear research labs in Iran and embassy grounds in North Korea, this saga begins in 1990. As the United States cobbles together a coalition to undo Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, six US officers are trapped in Iraq with intelligence that could ruin Operation Desert Storm if it is obtained by the brutal Iraqi dictator. Desperate, the CIA asks Poland, a longtime Cold War foe famed for its excellent spies, for help. Just months after the Polish people voted in their first democratic election since the 1930s, the young Solidarity government in Warsaw sends a veteran ex-Communist spy who’d battled the West for decades to rescue the six Americans. John Pomfret’s gripping account of the 1990 cliffhanger in Iraq is just the beginning of the tale about intelligence cooperation between Poland and the United States, cooperation that one CIA director would later describe as “one of the two foremost intelligence relationships that the United States has ever had.” Pomfret uncovers new details about the CIA’s black site program that held suspected terrorists in Poland after 9/11 as well as the role of Polish spies in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In the tradition of the most memorable works on espionage, Pomfret’s book tells a distressing and disquieting tale of moral ambiguity in which right and wrong, black and white, are not conveniently distinguishable. As the United States teeters on the edge of a new cold war with Russia and China, Pomfret explores how these little-known events serve as a reminder of the importance of alliances in a dangerous world.
The Iran-United States Claims Tribunal is arguably the most significant arbitral institution of the twentieth century. Although the completion of its last few cases could take a long time, the Tribunal's impressive work must be made available now as a guide to the resolution of ongoing disputes and for future tribunals. The Tribunal has, by this point, disposed of well over 98 percent of its caseload. Little more remains for its participants to learn, but the Tribunal shows no signs of fading away. Both of the two States Parties, for different reasons, see greater advantage in the Tribunal's prolongation than in its elimination. The authors have succeeded in dealing with all of the most deserving Tribunal subjects. Moreover, their intimate involvement in and knowledge of the Tribunal ensure that their book is a fascinating, important, and indispensable contribution to the literature of International Law. This is a definitive book on a monumental event in the law and in history at the close of a century. "The Iran-United States Claims Tribunal" was awarded the ASIL Certificate of Merit.
Moises Saman, born in Lima, Peru, in 1974, was a Los Angeles college student when he traveled Chiapas to photograph the aftermath of the 1995 Zapatista uprising. After graduation he traveled to Kosovo, and he's been working as a photojournalist ever since. Saman was one of only a few American photographers to remain in Baghdad during the 2003 Coalition bombing campaign, when he was arrested and accused of espionage by the Iraqi secret police. He spent eight days in prison before being deported to Jordan, after which he returned to continue his coverage. In this book, he returns to Afghanistan. The dramatic photographs collected in Afghanistan Broken Promises track five years of conflict in that country, and observe the apparent failure of the reconstruction effort: due to violence and government corruption, all of the large-scale reconstruction projects outside Kabul are at a standstill, while high-rise luxury hotels and late-model BMWs can be seen all over the capital. As before and during Taliban rule, warlords and militias control whole provinces without regard for human rights. And now the Taliban itself has been embarking on major offensives again. Broken Promise observes the lives of Afghan civilians beginning with the 2001 U.S. invasion and up through the resurgence of violence in 2006-07. Saman is a full-time photographer for Newsday.
An almanac to the world of Gilles Peress' Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, delineating the decades of conflict in Northern Ireland In Annals of the North, New York-based photographer Gilles Peress (born 1946) and writer and lawyer Chris Klatell combine essays, stories, photographs, documents and testimonies to open up for the reader the complicated and contradictory storylines that emerged from the conflict in the North of Ireland. Weighed down by 800 years of colonization but only the size of Connecticut (with half its population), Northern Ireland provides a remarkably intimate stage set. Interweaving text and image, Annals of the Northexamines the multifaceted struggle between Irish Republicans and Nationalists, Protestant Unionists and Loyalists, and the imperial British, to explore broader themes of empire, retribution and betrayal, as well as the tense dialectic between the ordinary demands of everyday life and periodic explosions of violence. The book is at once wide-ranging yet deeply personal and political, alternately dense and humorous, legal and literary.
**THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER** 'Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful,' Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal What makes life worth living in the face of death? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally into a patient and a new father. Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both. 'A vital book about dying. Awe-inspiring and exquisite. Obligatory reading for the living' Nigella Lawson
