Washoe County Library System

All leaders are constrained by geography. Their choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Yes, to understand world events you need to understand people, ideas and movements - but if you don't know geography, you'll never have the full picture. To understand Putin's actions, for example, it is essential to consider that, to be a world power, Russia must have a navy. And if its ports freeze for six months each year then it must have...

A field guide to the twenty-first century shares strategies for surviving today's hectic technological, environmental, and economic challenges, contrasting present-day environments with the working model of an earlier generation.

"A wide-ranging journey through the history of borders and an exploration of their role in shaping our world today. Since the earliest known marker denoting the edge of one land and the beginning of the next―a stone column inscribed with Sumerian cuneiform―borders have been imagined, mapped, moved, and fought over. In The Edge of the Plain, James Crawford skillfully blends history, travel writing, and reportage to trace these borderlines throughout...

"In this ambitious and far-ranging work, Alexander Mikaberidze argues that the Napoleonic Wars can only be fully understood in an international perspective. France struggled for dominance not only on the plains of Europe but also in the Americas, West and South Africa, Ottoman Empire, Iran, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Taking specific regions in turn, Mikaberidze discusses major political-military...

In Connectography, visionary strategist Parag Khanna travels from Ukraine to Iran, Mongolia to North Korea, Pakistan to Nigeria, and across the Arctic Circle and the South China Sea to explain the rapid and unprecedented changes affecting every part of the planet. He shows how militaries are deployed to protect supply chains as much as borders, and how nations are less at war over territory than engaged in tugs-of-war over pipelines, railways, shipping...

"Tropic of Chaos is a survey of a world in peril and an urgent call to action by one of our most intrepid and respected international journalists: those living in the privileged Global North must recognize that our own future security is inextricably linked to the fate of the struggling nations of the Global South."--P. [3] of dust jacket.

"America will remain the world's only superpower for the foreseeable future. But what sort of superpower? What role should America play in the world? What role do you want America to play? Ian Bremmer argues that Washington's directionless foreign policy has become prohibitively expensive and increasingly dangerous. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers have stumbled from crisis to crisis in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine...

A political scientist describes the shifting global balance of power between China and the United States and offers a wake-up call to American leaders and policymakers to take action to counter the growing geopolitical strength in Asia.