The ABC News correspondent’s riveting chronicle of his journey through the Middle East—and being held hostage by pro-Iranian terrorists in Beirut. A New York Times Notable Book—with an introduction by the author. On June 18, 1987, Charles Glass was kidnapped by pro-Iranian terrorists in a Shiite Muslim suburb of Beirut and held for sixty-two days. His daring escape on August 18, 1987, made headlines worldwide. But Glass never forgot the reason he was in Lebanon or abandoned the idea of a book capturing the splendid vitality and diversity of life in the Middle East. Tribes with Flags is the book Glass always meant it to be: A chronicle of his journey from the southern Turkish coast, around the bay of Alexandretta, and through Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. Glass visited farms, slums, and refugee camps as well as royal friends in feudal palaces, capturing the entire spectrum of Levantine life. The journey ends with a gripping account of Glass’s kidnapping in Beirut—an intimate portrayal of life as a hostage—and his successful flight to freedom. “A literary and spiritual ramble through the countries of the Levant . . . Glass’s account of two months’ captivity and his escape bring to an exciting conclusion this engrossing, informative, unusual travel book.” —Publishers Weekly

The Great Game in West Asia examines the strategic competition between Iran and Turkey for power and influence in the South Caucasus. As much of the world's attention has been diverted to conflicts and flashpoints near and far, a new great game has been unravelling between Iran and Turkey in the South Caucasus.

This volume explores East Asian intellectual traditions and their influence on contemporary discussions of the ethics of war and peace. Through cross-cultural comparison and dialogue between East and West, this work charts a new trajectory in the development of applied ethics. A sequel to the volume Chinese Just War Ethics, it expands the range of the earlier work and includes attention to Japan and other Eastern and Western traditions for contrastive reflection and engages with the full range of Chinese intellectual traditions for comparative analysis. The book scrutinizes pioneering works such as the Mengzi, the Han Feizi, and the Seven Military Classics, investigating their influence in subsequent times. It also engages with new texts and thinkers such as the Four Books of the Yellow Emperor, Zeng Guofan, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong, along with examining recent writings of the scholars of the People’s Liberation Army. The final section of the book identifies and discusses some emerging issues in the comparative study of military ethics, just war and peace that derive from the preceding sections. The volume editors then offer some concluding remarks at the end of the book. This book will be of much interest to students of the ethics of war and peace, just war theory, military ethics, Asian studies and International Relations in general.

This illuminating portrait of the people of the Levant by former ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent Charles Glass provides much-needed insight into a land so frequently in the news. Tribes With Flags is a chronicle of Glass' journey from the southern Turkish coast to Lebanon, and includes the 62 days he was held captive by pro-Iranian terrorists in Beirut.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

A renowned expert answers the question many are asking: How dangerous is Syria?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A riveting, adrenaline-fueled tour of a vast, lawless, and rampantly criminal world that few have ever seen: the high seas. There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world's oceans: too big to police, and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to rampant criminality and exploitation. Traffickers and smugglers, pirates and mercenaries, wreck thieves and repo men, vigilante conservationists and elusive poachers, seabound abortion providers, clandestine oil-dumpers, shackled slaves and cast-adrift stowaways—drawing on five years of perilous and intrepid reporting, often hundreds of miles from shore, Ian Urbina introduces us to the inhabitants of this hidden world. Through their stories of astonishing courage and brutality, survival and tragedy, he uncovers a globe-spanning network of crime and exploitation that emanates from the fishing, oil, and shipping industries, and on which the world's economies rely. Both a gripping adventure story and a stunning exposé, this unique work of reportage brings fully into view for the first time the disturbing reality of a floating world that connects us all, a place where anyone can do anything because no one is watching.

“Powerful and often startling…The Deserters offers a provokingly fresh angle on this most studied of conflicts.” --The Boston Globe A groundbreaking history of ordinary soldiers struggling on the front lines, The Deserters offers a completely new perspective on the Second World War. Charles Glass—renowned journalist and author of the critically acclaimed Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation—delves deep into army archives, personal diaries, court-martial records, and self-published memoirs to produce this dramatic and heartbreaking portrait of men overlooked by their commanders and ignored by history. Surveying the 150,000 American and British soldiers known to have deserted in the European Theater, The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II tells the life stories of three soldiers who abandoned their posts in France, Italy, and Africa. Their deeds form the backbone of Glass’s arresting portrait of soldiers pushed to the breaking point, a sweeping reexamination of the conditions for ordinary soldiers. With the grace and pace of a novel, The Deserters moves beyond the false extremes of courage and cowardice to reveal the true experience of the frontline soldier. Glass shares the story of men like Private Alfred Whitehead, a Tennessee farm boy who earned Silver and Bronze Stars for bravery in Normandy—yet became a gangster in liberated Paris, robbing Allied supply depots along with ordinary citizens. Here also is the story of British men like Private John Bain, who deserted three times but never fled from combat—and who endured battles in North Africa and northern France before German machine guns cut his legs from under him. The heart of The Deserters resides with men like Private Steve Weiss, an idealistic teenage volunteer from Brooklyn who forced his father—a disillusioned First World War veteran—to sign his enlistment papers because he was not yet eighteen. On the Anzio beachhead and in the Ardennes forest, as an infantryman with the 36th Division and as an accidental partisan in the French Resistance, Weiss lost his illusions about the nobility of conflict and the infallibility of American commanders. Far from the bright picture found in propaganda and nostalgia, the Second World War was a grim and brutal affair, a long and lonely effort that has never been fully reported—to the detriment of those who served and the danger of those nurtured on false tales today. Revealing the true costs of conflict on those forced to fight, The Deserters is an elegant and unforgettable story of ordinary men desperately struggling in extraordinary times.

Profiles the personalities and strategic cultures of some of the United States' most dangerous international rivals.