An astonishing, never-before-told story of the Second World War, based on newly declassified documents and exclusive interviews. In 1944 the OSS set out to recover more than 500 airmen trapped behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia. Classified for over half a century for political reasons, the full account of this unforgettable story of loyalty, self-sacrifice, and bravery is now being told for the first time.

Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West’s classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country’s history as well as its daily life.

In the last decade of the 20th century, in a capital city in Europe, the unimaginable is happening.Take a walk down Sarajevo's Logavina Street with Barbara Demick, author of the prize-winning Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. Demick spent much  of 1993 through 1995 on one street in the Bosnian capital with a front-row seat as a country was torn apart by ethnic warfare and a modern city was held under siege. She watched and recorded as neighbors, Muslim, Serb and Croat, tried to keep their society intact against the forces of intolerance. In Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood, meet a teenager whose parents were killed by a mortar shell in front of her, a dentist debating whether to emigrate to America, a besotted husband separated from his wife by war, obsessing about her lipstick color. Demick's coverage of the Bosnian war won the Robert F. Kennedy award  for international reporting, the Polk award for international reporting and was a finalist for the Pulitzer.

Zlata Filipovic was given a diary shortly before her 11th birthday and began to write in it regularly. The preoccupations of an ordinary, if unusually intelligent and articulate little girl, include whether or not to join the Madonna fan club, the fate of the super-models, her piano lessons, her tennis lessons, her friends and her new skis. But the distant murmur of war draws closer. Her father starts to wear military uniform and her friends begin to leave the city. One day school is closed, and the next the bombardments begin. The pathos and power of this diary come from watching the destruction of a childhood which could be that of anybody's child. Zlata writes about her fears, her desires, her pet cat, her mother's fear of a mouse in the wainscotting, her mother dodging the bullets to cross the bridge to work, and her father's frostbite and hernia from dragging water to them since there is no more water on tap. To Zlata the availability of electricity means that perhaps she can watch MTV - to that extent she remains a very ordinary little girl. But her circle of friends is increasingly replaced by international journalists who come to hear of this little girl's courage and resilience so that she becomes a frequent stop in their search for news stories. But the reality is that, as they fly off with the latest story of Zlata, she remains behind, writing her deepest feelings to "Mimmy", her diary and last remaining friend.

The bestseller that reminded us what it means to be an American is more timely than ever in this updated and enlarged edition, including "Schlesinger's Syllabus," an annotated reading list of core books on the American experience.The classic image of the American nation — a melting pot in which differences of race, wealth, religion, and nationality are submerged in democracy — is being replaced by an orthodoxy that celebrates difference and abandons assimilation. While this upsurge in ethnic awareness has had many healthy consequences in a nation shamed by a history of prejudice, the cult of ethnicity, if pressed too far, threatens to fragment American society to a dangerous degree. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner in history and adviser to the Kennedy and other administrations, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., is uniquely positioned to wave the caution flag in the race to a politics of identity. Using a broader canvas in this updated and expanded edition, he examines the international dimension and the lessons of one polyglot country after another tearing itself apart or on the brink of doing so: among them the former Yugoslavia, Nigeria, even Canada. Closer to home, he finds troubling new evidence that multiculturalism gone awry here in the United States threatens to do the same. "One of the most devastating and articulate attacks on multiculturalism yet to appear."—Wall Street Journal "A brilliant book . . . we owe Arthur Schlesinger a great debt of gratitude."—C. Vann Woodward, New Republic

"The most authoritative account in English or any other language about how the war began."—The Washington Post Book World. "An essential resource for anyone of the conflict."—The New York Times Book Review.

In this penetrating book--now with a new chapter covering events through 1995, including U.S. involvement--Misha Glenny offers a sobering eyewitness chronicle of the countdown to war, exploring the human realities behind the headlines, and puts one of the most ferocious civil wars of our time into its true, historical context. Winner of the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Book on Foreign Affairs.

When President Clinton sent Richard Holbrooke to Bosnia as America's chief negotiator in late 1995, he took a gamble that would eventually redefine his presidency. But there was no saying then, at the height of the war, that Holbrooke's mission would succeed. The odds were strongly against it.        As passionate as he was controversial, Holbrooke believed that the only way to bring peace to the Balkans was through a complex blend of American leadership, aggressive and creative diplomacy, and a willingness to use force, if necessary, in the cause for peace. This was not a universally popular view. Resistance was fierce within the United Nations and the chronically divided Contact Group, and in Washington, where many argued that the United States should not get more deeply involved. This book is Holbrooke's gripping inside account of his mission, of the decisive months when, belatedly and reluctantly but ultimately decisively, the United States reasserted its moral authority and leadership and ended Europe's worst war in over half a century. To End a War reveals many important new details of how America made this historic decision.        What George F. Kennan has called Holbrooke's "heroic efforts" were shaped by the enormous tragedy with which the mission began, when three of his four team members were killed during their first attempt to reach Sarajevo. In Belgrade, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Paris, Athens, and Ankara, and throughout the dramatic roller-coaster ride at Dayton, he tirelessly imposed, cajoled, and threatened in the quest to stop the killing and forge a peace agreement. Holbrooke's portraits of the key actors, from officials in the White House and the Élysée Palace to the leaders in the Balkans, are sharp and unforgiving. His explanation of how the United States was finally forced to intervene breaks important new ground, as does his discussion of the near disaster in the early period of the implementation of the Dayton agreement.        To End a War is a brilliant portrayal of high-wire, high-stakes diplomacy in one of the toughest negotiations of modern times. A classic account of the uses and misuses of American power, its lessons go far beyond the boundaries of the Balkans and provide a powerful argument for continued American leadership in the modern world.

Engineering, for much of the twentieth century, was mainly about artifacts and inventions. Now, it's increasingly about complex systems. As the airplane taxis to the gate, you access the Internet and check email with your PDA, linking the communication and transportation systems. At home, you recharge your plug-in hybrid vehicle, linking transportation to the electricity grid. Today's large-scale, highly complex sociotechnical systems converge, interact, and depend on each other in ways engineers of old could barely have imagined. As scale, scope, and complexity increase, engineers consider technical and social issues together in a highly integrated way as they design flexible, adaptable, robust systems that can be easily modified and reconfigured to satisfy changing requirements and new technological opportunities.Engineering Systems offers a comprehensive examination of such systems and the associated emerging field of study. Through scholarly discussion, concrete examples, and history, the authors consider the engineer's changing role, new ways to model and analyze these systems, the impacts on engineering education, and the future challenges of meeting human needs through the technologically enabled systems of today and tomorrow.