The author brings significant authority to this subject. Mikhail Zygar is a prominent opposition Russian political journalist who co-founded TV Rain, the country's only independent news channel, and wrote the acclaimed book All the Kremlin’s Men. His extensive experience includes reporting from Ukraine since 2004, providing firsthand knowledge of the country's political evolution. Following the 2022 invasion, Zygar wrote an open letter condemning the war—an act signed by tens of thousands of Russian citizens that ultimately forced him to flee his home country.
This report establishes the strategic framework for the pre-production of Professor Sven Biscop's This Is Not a New World Order. Our primary objective is to distill its complex analysis into a core value proposition that will drive all content, marketing, and positioning. The book’s central argument is that the world is not entering a new chaotic era but is operating within a multipolar system that many in Europe, long insulated from raw power politics, are only now beginning to understand. Using the Russian invasion of Ukraine as its primary case study, the book eschews the alarmism common in contemporary analysis, arguing that treating every crisis as an unprecedented "turning point" is the very antithesis of sound strategic thinking. It seeks to answer two fundamental questions: What would it actually mean for the EU to think geopolitically? and, at the core of any grand strategy, Which role is the EU playing on the world stage? The book delivers a pragmatic, accessible analysis targeting policymakers, diplomats, military officials, and students of international relations seeking a clear-eyed assessment of great power politics from a European perspective. Authored by the director of the Europe in the World programme at the Egmont – Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels, a professor at Ghent University, and a lecturer for senior EU diplomats and military officials, the work carries unimpeachable authority. Positioning this work effectively begins with defining the keywords and themes that serve as the foundation of its message and market presence.
Serhii Plokhy’s The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History presents the full-scale 2022 invasion not as an isolated event, but as the violent culmination of a conflict initiated in 2014. The book’s fundamental argument frames the war as an old-fashioned imperial conflict, driven by Russia's deep-seated historical ambitions, against which Ukraine is fighting a definitive war of independence.
Plokhy’s work is aimed at an audience seeking a longue durée historical perspective to understand the conflict's origins far beyond contemporary headlines. The author poses the book's central questions directly: "What made such a war of aggression possible? What made the Ukrainians resist as they did...? Finally, what will be the most important consequences of the war for Ukraine, Russia, Europe, and the world?"
As a Harvard historian of Ukrainian origin, Plokhy is a preeminent authority on the subject. His analysis provides an indispensable framework for policymakers, journalists, and strategists, dismantling the Kremlin's historical justifications and offering the definitive long-view needed to navigate the geopolitical fallout of this conflict, which he terms "the return of history" to Europe.
Jean-Pierre Filiu's The Middle East: A political history from 395 to the present offers a sweeping re-examination of the region's evolution. Its central premise is to provide a "secular history" that counters the dominant "sacred narratives," whether religious, colonial, or nationalist. This approach is not merely an alternative account but a necessary intellectual intervention. By challenging these frameworks, Filiu actively dismantles the ideological justifications that perpetuate conflict analysis based on immutable religious or cultural divides, arguing instead against the fatalistic view of the Middle East as a region "inevitably doomed to war."
The book is aimed at educated readers seeking a structured, nuanced understanding of the Middle East's political trajectory, free from deterministic frameworks. It addresses foundational questions, such as why this history begins in 395 and how power has historically shifted between the core poles of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Crucially, Filiu's secular method is the very tool used to strip away the "sacred" justifications (colonial, nationalist) that have historically legitimized the "persistent denial of the right to self-determination"—the central driver of modern crises. These are the fundamental questions addressed by Jean-Pierre Filiu, an established authority whose previous acclaimed works, including Apocalypse in Islam and Gaza, a history, lend significant weight to this ambitious project.
Gönül Tol’s Erdoğan's War presents a compelling and timely analysis of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, arguing that his political maneuvers are driven not by rigid ideological commitment but by a populist’s instinct for survival. The book’s core premise is that Erdoğan is a political chameleon with an uncanny sense for power, using ideologies like Islamism and nationalism as instruments to consolidate power. Using the catastrophic Syrian war as its primary lens, the book meticulously traces Erdoğan’s slide into authoritarianism.
It addresses critical questions: How did the conflict in Syria become a pivotal tool in Erdoğan's domestic power struggles? How did his calculated shifts—from a "conservative democrat" to an Islamist and, finally, a Turkish nationalist—redefine Turkey's foreign policy and its direct role in Syria?
As a leading scholar at the Middle East Institute's Center for Turkish Studies, Tol brings exceptional authority to the subject. Her work is endorsed by leading experts, with David Ignatius of The Washington Post affirming that "no one tells it better." Former U.S. Special Envoy Frederic C. Hof describes the book as an essential "must-read," making it an indispensable guide for understanding not only contemporary Turkey but also the broader dynamics of strongman politics on the world stage.
In Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, Columbia Law School’s Anu Bradford delivers an authoritative analysis of the global struggle for influence between three competing technology regulation models. Published by Oxford University Press, the book articulates the central premise that the digital economy is defined by these rival frameworks: the market-driven US approach, the state-driven Chinese model, and the rights-driven EU system. This work is essential for professionals, policymakers, academics, and business leaders operating at the intersection of technology, international law, and geopolitics. The book seeks to answer several key questions: How do these regulatory systems clash on the global stage? What are the mechanisms through which they expand their influence, such as the EU's "Brussels Effect" and China's "Digital Silk Road"? And how are global technology companies forced to navigate the conflicting geopolitical demands imposed by these powerful "digital empires"?
Camille Fournier’s The Manager's Path is an essential practical guide and reference manual for leaders navigating the unique intersection of "engineering" and "management." Crafted for everyone who works in or around software engineering, its primary focus is on engineering managers at all levels, from those just starting out to seasoned leaders. Rather than offering generic advice, it answers the fundamental questions managers face by structuring its guidance along the typical career path of an engineer.
The book’s authority is forged in the crucible of high-growth tech leadership. Fournier draws directly from her journey at Rent the Runway, where her role scaled from managing a small team to running all of engineering as CTO. The book is the direct result of her documenting everything she learned while succeeding and struggling in this environment, effectively creating a field manual for technical leadership. This crucible of hands-on experience forms the foundation of the book's core themes, providing a clear roadmap for leaders at every level.
Serhii Plokhy’s The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History presents the full-scale 2022 invasion not as an isolated event, but as the violent culmination of a conflict initiated in 2014. The book’s fundamental argument frames the war as an old-fashioned imperial conflict, driven by Russia's deep-seated historical ambitions, against which Ukraine is fighting a definitive war of independence.
Plokhy’s work is aimed at an audience seeking a longue durée historical perspective to understand the conflict's origins far beyond contemporary headlines. The author poses the book's central questions directly: "What made such a war of aggression possible? What made the Ukrainians resist as they did...? Finally, what will be the most important consequences of the war for Ukraine, Russia, Europe, and the world?"
As a Harvard historian of Ukrainian origin, Plokhy is a preeminent authority on the subject. His analysis provides an indispensable framework for policymakers, journalists, and strategists, dismantling the Kremlin's historical justifications and offering the definitive long-view needed to navigate the geopolitical fallout of this conflict, which he terms "the return of history" to Europe.
Its core value proposition is its function as an authoritative historical record, positioning it to capture the market of politically engaged audiences seeking an alternative to partisan memoirs and ephemeral journalism. The book’s central premise is a critical analysis that seeks to answer fundamental questions, chief among them: *“How did Johnson squander a great landslide election victory within little more than two years?”* Its target audience comprises educated readers with a keen interest in modern British political history and leadership analysis.The authority of authors Sir Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell is a primary marketing asset. Seldon, Chair of the National Archives Trust, has a prolific portfolio of over forty books, establishing him as a household name in contemporary history. Newell, a contemporary historian trained at Oxford, ensures the work’s scholarly rigour. Their previous collaboration on *May at 10* creates a pre-existing audience and critical benchmark for success. Understanding the book's core thematic pillars is the next step in crafting a targeted media strategy.
AI-Powered Developer presents the central argument that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot are transformative partners in the software development lifecycle, serving as a practical guide for integrating these tools to enhance productivity, creativity, and efficiency. The primary audience of professional developers and tech enthusiasts will find immense value in the book's structure, which is designed to answer the industry's most pressing questions that arise from this new AI partnership: How can developers use AI to accelerate development from design to deployment? What are the best practices for integrating tools like ChatGPT and Copilot into a professional workflow? And critically, when is it appropriate—and inappropriate—to use generative AI? Author Nathan B. Crocker grounds the book's insights in expert, real-world application, bringing significant authority as the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Checker, an API-first solution that connects the traditional capital markets infrastructure to the blockchain ecosystem.
In The Struggle for Taiwan, Sulmaan Wasif Khan delivers a trenchant historical corrective to the dangerous narratives shaping the U.S.-China-Taiwan standoff. Drawing on his authority as an Associate Professor of International History and Chinese Foreign Relations at Tufts University’s Fletcher School and author of Haunted by Chaos, Khan systematically dismantles the "bizarre mix of lies, amnesia, and half-truths" employed by both Beijing and Washington. He argues this distorted history fosters a perilous faith in deterrence, demonstrating across 80 years of history that past standoffs were averted less by strategy than by sheer luck—a crucial lesson lost on today’s policymakers. The book challenges readers to confront the crisis beyond the headlines: Why are common historical justifications so misleading? What pivotal “roads not taken” might have secured a different fate for the island? And most urgently, how is a deep understanding of this past essential to averting a catastrophic future?
In Waste Land, Robert D. Kaplan—the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics and author of seminal works like The Revenge of Geography and The Coming Anarchy—delivers a stark diagnosis of our global condition. His harrowing analogy is that the world has become "one big Weimar": a system "connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent." This structural fragility, Kaplan argues, has plunged the globe into a state of "permanent crisis."
This predicament compels an urgent inquiry into the defining questions of our era: Why does our technologically advanced world fragment under the pressure of cascading instability? What lessons can historical parallels, from the fall of empires to the Russian Revolution, offer about the perils ahead? Kaplan provides a vital guide for navigating the treacherous geopolitical landscape of the 21st century—a global "Waste Land" where anything is possible.
For the millions who read Get Out of Your Head, bestselling author and IF:Gathering founder Jennie Allen delivers the necessary next step in Untangle Your Emotions. Drawing from her journey away from being a self-described "fixer," Allen reveals that many of us are emotionally tangled up in knots, experiencing disproportionate reactions to daily life due to unaddressed pain. The book invites readers to finally ask: Why do I have such overwhelming reactions to small triggers? What are my buried emotions trying to tell me? At its core is a liberating truth and paradigm shift: "feelings were never meant to be fixed; feelings are meant to be felt." Writing for everyone on the emotional spectrum—from the numb to the overwhelmed—Allen provides a biblically-grounded path to embrace feelings as God-given tools. This is a journey to untangle the knots that hold us back, unlocking the abundant, whole life found through deeper connection with God, others, and ourselves.
From globally recognized Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, the bestselling author of The Universal Christ, comes a profound reinterpretation of the Hebrew prophets for our modern “age of outrage.” In The Tears of Things, Rohr argues that the prophets are not angry predictors of doom but mystical guides who model a transformative spiritual path. This journey moves from righteous anger at injustice to a deep, empathetic sadness—what Rohr calls the prophetic “way of tears.” He reveals how true spiritual evolution requires embracing “holy disorder,” a necessary disruption of a failing status quo that ultimately leads to a “reorder” of higher consciousness, grace, and compassion. This book is essential for spiritual seekers, including those disillusioned with institutional religion, who are grappling with contemporary polarization and searching for a way to effect change from within. It powerfully answers the urgent question of how we can move beyond a religion of rules and scapegoating toward one of unconditional love and universal sympathy.
In The Eurasian Century, Hal Brands mounts a powerful case that the struggle for control over the Eurasian landmass and its surrounding waters has been the defining feature of modern global politics. As the planet’s “strategic center of the world”—home to 70% of the population and the bulk of its industrial and military potential—Eurasia has been the stage for a recurring conflict. This conflict pits ambitious continental autocracies seeking hegemony against offshore democracies like the United Kingdom and United States, which, in concert with continental allies, have fought to keep the supercontinent divided to preserve a world where freedom can flourish. Brands explores why Eurasia became the “engine of history” for the 20th century’s greatest hot wars, cold wars, and proxy wars, resolving the core paradox of how an era of “unmatched carnage” produced a system “more peaceful, prosperous, and democratic than anything humanity had known before.” Positioning America’s rivalries with China and Russia as the “next round in this geopolitical game,” the book asks what lessons the past offers for the upheaval ahead. A Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, Brands grounds this sweeping narrative in extensive research from the “papers and archives of many countries.”
In a post-Christian West grappling with a profound crisis of discipleship—where 63 percent of Americans identify as Christian yet only 4 percent live as active apprentices—John Mark Comer offers a timely and necessary intervention. Drawing from decades spent working out what it means to follow Jesus, the New York Times bestselling author of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry issues a compelling call to re-evaluate the very essence of faith. Comer’s central thesis is a provocative re-centering of the faith: Jesus’s primary invitation was not to a belief system called "Christianity," but to a life of apprenticeship. The book’s central challenge is its sharp distinction between the modern, often passive identity of a "Christian" and the active, intentional life of an "apprentice," arguing that genuine transformation is possible when we arrange our lives around the same practices and rhythms that Jesus himself followed.
The path Comer outlines is the core curriculum of this apprenticeship, structured around the three driving goals of a first-century disciple: to be with Jesus, become like him, and do as he did. This framework is designed to resonate with a broad readership, from those new to faith and counting the cost, to existing Christians seeking greater intentionality, and even to longtime followers who feel spiritually stagnant, offering each a tangible pathway beyond passive belief toward intentional formation. Practicing the Way ultimately addresses the perennial questions of discipleship: How does one bridge the gap between intellectual belief and embodied practice? And in a culture of relentless hurry, what does it truly mean to be intentionally formed by Jesus rather than unintentionally manipulated by the liturgies of digital distraction?
In Lighter, Yung Pueblo (Diego Perez) offers not a theoretical treatise, but a guide to healing forged in the crucible of profound personal experience. His credibility stems from a transformative journey that began at a "rock bottom" of drug abuse—a painful deviation from his past as a youth activist and the selfless sacrifices of his immigrant parents. Through radical honesty and meditation, Perez navigated his way back to his purpose. The book's central thesis is the inextricable link between personal and global transformation. Pueblo argues this path is a deliberate shedding of conditioned human habit—reactive patterns rooted in fear—to reclaim our authentic human nature, a state of innate clarity and love.
Lighter demystifies this process for seekers weighed down by suffering, compellingly exploring how to make healing an actionable practice, the link between self-love and emotional maturity, and how individual change ripples outward to create a more compassionate world. It is a hopeful and practical manual for becoming not just lighter, but freer.
In How Tyrants Fall And How Nations Survive, Dr. Marcel Dirsus explores the profound paradox that the world’s most powerful tyrants are condemned to live in constant fear. Drawing on his expertise in regime instability and political violence—credentials honed advising organizations like NATO—Dirsus dissects the core vulnerabilities of authoritarian rule. To explain this vulnerability, Dirsus introduces two core concepts: the "Golden Gun paradox," which analyzes why a despot's power is often useless when needed most, and the "Dictator's Treadmill," the perilous trade-off that makes relinquishing power more hazardous than clinging to it. This relentless struggle for survival raises the book's critical questions: Why are the seemingly insane actions of dictators often rational strategies for survival? What are a regime’s key weaknesses? And, ultimately, how can they be brought down? Dirsus provides an essential guide for anyone, from diplomats to citizens, seeking to understand the mechanics of modern authoritarianism, framing it as a crucial resource for those who wish to "constrain them at home or limit their threat abroad."
Few authors are as uniquely equipped to navigate life's beautiful, terrible contradictions as Kate Bowler. A Duke University professor with a PhD and the New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason, her academic authority is sharpened by a Stage IV cancer diagnosis. In this collection of blessings and reflections, Bowler confronts the easy promises of the self-help industry—the relentless calls to “Try harder!” or “Change your mindset.” Instead, she offers a theology of “precarity,” a term whose Latin root signifies a state “obtained by entreaty or prayer,” revealing our necessary reliance on God and neighbor. For anyone feeling overwhelmed or in pain, the book provides language for wrestling with how to be both faithful and afraid. It offers solace not through platitudes, but through the profound comfort of acknowledging our shared fragility and interdependence.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum dismantles the 20th-century image of the lone dictator to unmask a far more menacing 21st-century reality: a transnational network she terms ‘Autocracy, Inc.’ She reveals a global alliance of strongmen from Russia, China, Venezuela, and Iran operating not as an ideological bloc but as an agglomeration of companies. Bound by a brutally pragmatic goal—preserving the opulent personal wealth their 20th-century predecessors hid while depriving their citizens of any public voice—they collaborate to survive. Exchanging financial support, the tools of repression like surveillance technology, and propaganda, they ensure mutual regime survival and grant one another impunity on the world stage. This chilling success prompts the book’s pivotal investigation: where did the autocrats’ belief that they are winning originate, how did the democratic world inadvertently consolidate it, and how can democracies now unite to defeat this challenge? Dedicated ‘For the optimists,’ the book is a call to action for those unwilling to concede the future of global freedom.