The Vietnam war era, in many ways, mirrored and was the beginning of the racial and political turbulence and divisiveness we are experiencing today. By tracing the lives of a group of Black men and women—soldiers, doctors, nurses, journalists—who experienced the battles in Vietnam as well as the socio-political war raging at home in America, Wil Haygood brilliantly contextualizes the racial strife that dominated so much of life in those years and still dominates it today. The most important book to deal with this subject since the bestselling Bloods.DR. ELBERT A Black doctor who came to Vietnam after watching TV footage of the Watts racial riot in Los Angeles, but soon found himself in the midst of Black Soldier protests; FRED Air Force pilot who became the first Black military officer captured by the North Vietnamese, becoming a hero to twenty million Black Americans; JOE The first Black cinematic star of the war after his exploits in Vietnam inspired the academy award winning film The Anderson Platoon; DOROTHY A nurse stationed at Cu Chi, thirty miles from Saigon, where one particular death would haunt her forever...; WALLACE An Ivy League grad who became the most visible Black reporter in Vietnam, determined, more than anyone, to investigate the racial dynamics of the decade-long conflict; GEORGE The gauntlet he ran through enemy territory during the 1965 Battle of Ia Drang to get back to his men became the stuff of legend; HENRY A marine officer feared by the North Vietnamese, and who came to stand up against the racism in the Marine Corps; PHILIPPA A biracial concert pianist who went to Vietnam to rescue mixed-race orphans, many fathered by Black soldiers, and who died fleeing Vietnam with some of those orphans.These are the central characters Haygood uses to examine the role of Blacks in Vietnam and at home during and immediately after the war. Through the prism of their lives as well as many other crucial figures of that era—Marvin Gaye and Berry Gordy, Dwight Johnson (a war hero, who is shattered and ultimately destroyed by his experiences), Maude deVictor (who took up the cause of Agent Orange on behalf of veterans), Lyndon Johnson, William J. Fulbright, Martin Luther King, and still many others, Haygood reveals the tragedies and triumphs, the honor and hypocrisies, the courage and the cowardice that shaped an era and whose repercussions resonate today.

Often likened to Kafka's The Castle, The Tartar Steppe is both a scathing critique of military life and a meditation on the human thirst for glory. It tells of young Giovanni Drogo, who is posted to a distant fort overlooking the vast Tartar steppe. Although not intending to stay, Giovanni suddenly finds that years have passed, as, almost without his noticing, he has come to share the others' wait for a foreign invasion that never happens. Over time the fort is downgraded and Giovanni's ambitions fade until the day the enemy begins massing on the desolate steppe...

The book that revealed Iran to the West, now with a new Afterword. Elaine Sciolino updates Persian Mirrors to include coverage of the 2005 presidential election in Iran. As a correspondent for Newsweek and The New York Times, Sciolino has had more experience covering revolutionary Iran than any other American reporter. She was aboard the airplane that took Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Tehran in 1979 and was there for the revolution, the hostage crisis, the Iran-Iraq war, the rise of President Khatami, the riots of 1999, and the crisis over Iran's nuclear program. In Persian Mirrors, Sciolino takes us into the public and private spaces of Iran, uncovering an alluring and seductive nation where a great battle is raging -- not for control over territory, but for the soul of its people.

We live in the Information Age, with billions of bytes of data just two swipes away. Yet how much of this is mis- or even disinformation? A lot of it is, and your search engine can't tell the difference. As a result, an avalanche of misinformation threatens to overwhelm the discourse we so desperately need to address complex social problems such as climate change, the food and water crises, biodiversity collapse, and emerging threats to public health. This book provides an inoculation against the misinformation epidemic by cultivating scientific habits of mind. Anyone can do it―indeed, everyone must do it if our species is to survive on this crowded and finite planet. This survival guide supplies an essential set of apps for the prefrontal cortex while making science both accessible and entertaining. It will dissolve your fear of numbers, demystify graphs, and elucidate the key concepts of probability, all while celebrating the precise use of language and logic. David Helfand, one of our nation's leading astronomers and science educators, has taught scientific habits of mind to generations in the classroom, where he continues to wage a provocative battle against sloppy thinking and the encroachment of misinformation.

The Vietnam war era, in many ways, mirrored and was the beginning of the racial and political turbulence and divisiveness we are experiencing today. By tracing the lives of a group of Black men and women—soldiers, doctors, nurses, journalists—who experienced the battles in Vietnam as well as the socio-political war raging at home in America, Wil Haygood brilliantly contextualizes the racial strife that dominated so much of life in those years and still dominates it today. The most important book to deal with this subject since the bestselling Bloods.DR. ELBERT A Black doctor who came to Vietnam after watching TV footage of the Watts racial riot in Los Angeles, but soon found himself in the midst of Black Soldier protests; FRED Air Force pilot who became the first Black military officer captured by the North Vietnamese, becoming a hero to twenty million Black Americans; JOE The first Black cinematic star of the war after his exploits in Vietnam inspired the academy award winning film The Anderson Platoon; DOROTHY A nurse stationed at Cu Chi, thirty miles from Saigon, where one particular death would haunt her forever...; WALLACE An Ivy League grad who became the most visible Black reporter in Vietnam, determined, more than anyone, to investigate the racial dynamics of the decade-long conflict; GEORGE The gauntlet he ran through enemy territory during the 1965 Battle of Ia Drang to get back to his men became the stuff of legend; HENRY A marine officer feared by the North Vietnamese, and who came to stand up against the racism in the Marine Corps; PHILIPPA A biracial concert pianist who went to Vietnam to rescue mixed-race orphans, many fathered by Black soldiers, and who died fleeing Vietnam with some of those orphans.These are the central characters Haygood uses to examine the role of Blacks in Vietnam and at home during and immediately after the war. Through the prism of their lives as well as many other crucial figures of that era—Marvin Gaye and Berry Gordy, Dwight Johnson (a war hero, who is shattered and ultimately destroyed by his experiences), Maude deVictor (who took up the cause of Agent Orange on behalf of veterans), Lyndon Johnson, William J. Fulbright, Martin Luther King, and still many others, Haygood reveals the tragedies and triumphs, the honor and hypocrisies, the courage and the cowardice that shaped an era and whose repercussions resonate today.

Turn yourself into a Data Head. You'll become a more valuable employee and make your organization more successful.Thomas H. Davenport, Research Fellow, Author of Competing on Analytics, Big Data @ Work, and The AI Advantage You've heard the hype around data--now get the facts. In Becoming a Data Head: How to Think, Speak, and Understand Data Science, Statistics, and Machine Learning, award-winning data scientists Alex Gutman and Jordan Goldmeier pull back the curtain on data science and give you the language and tools necessary to talk and think critically about it. You'll learn how to: Think statistically and understand the role variation plays in your life and decision making Speak intelligently and ask the right questions about the statistics and results you encounter in the workplace Understand what's really going on with machine learning, text analytics, deep learning, and artificial intelligence Avoid common pitfalls when working with and interpreting data Becoming a Data Head is a complete guide for data science in the workplace: covering everything from the personalities you'll work with to the math behind the algorithms. The authors have spent years in data trenches and sought to create a fun, approachable, and eminently readable book. Anyone can become a Data Head--an active participant in data science, statistics, and machine learning. Whether you're a business professional, engineer, executive, or aspiring data scientist, this book is for you.

In 1935 Peter Fleming, an editor for the London Times and, interestingly, Ian Fleming's older brother, set out from Peking for Kashmir. It was a 3500 mile journey across the roof of the world. He chose as his traveling companion Ella Maillart, a beautiful Swiss journalist. Fleming is one to underemphasize difficulties. He describes events and places in brilliant color and detail, also with great wit and humor. His story of the journey, a seven month odyssey through desert and upland, virtually uncharted, has become a classic of travel literature since its publication in 1936. "No writer has given a keener picture of unchanging Tartary than has Fleming, and his description of Sinkiang reveals the last home of international intrigue, politics, violence and melodrama, where all foreigners are suspects and none welcome."

An investigative journalist uncovers a hidden custom that will transform your understanding of what it means to grow up as a girl. In Afghanistan, a culture ruled almost entirely by men, the birth of a son is cause for celebration and the arrival of a daughter is often mourned as misfortune. A bacha posh (literally translated from Dari as "dressed up like a boy") is a third kind of child – a girl temporarily raised as a boy and presented as such to the outside world. Jenny Nordberg, the reporter who broke the story of this phenomenon for the New York Times, constructs a powerful and moving account of those secretly living on the other side of a deeply segregated society where women have almost no rights and little freedom. The Underground Girls of Kabul is anchored by vivid characters who bring this remarkable story to life: Azita, a female parliamentarian who sees no other choice but to turn her fourth daughter Mehran into a boy; Zahra, the tomboy teenager who struggles with puberty and refuses her parents' attempts to turn her back into a girl; Shukria, now a married mother of three after living for twenty years as a man; and Nader, who prays with Shahed, the undercover female police officer, as they both remain in male disguise as adults. At the heart of this emotional narrative is a new perspective on the extreme sacrifices of Afghan women and girls against the violent backdrop of America's longest war. Divided into four parts, the book follows those born as the unwanted sex in Afghanistan, but who live as the socially favored gender through childhood and puberty, only to later be forced into marriage and childbirth. The Underground Girls of Kabul charts their dramatic life cycles, while examining our own history and the parallels to subversive actions of people who live under oppression everywhere.

Part travelogue, part historical evocation, part personal quest and part reflection on the joys and perils of passage, An Unexpected Light is the account of Jason Elliot's journey to a country considered off-limits to travellers for twenty years. Setting off from the capital, Kabul, under daily missile attack from its beseigers, Elliot ignores numerous warnings and heads on horseback into the snowbound mountains of the North and the former battlefields of the Soviet army's 'hidden war'. Here the forbidding beauty of the Afghan landscape kindles a moving recollection of the author's life as a clandestine young guest of the mujaheddin, ten years earlier, during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Jason Elliot has created a narrative mosaic of startling prose which captures perfectly the emotional allure of a seldom-glimpsed world. In it the reader will encounter traditional wisdom, contemporary anecdotes and insights into matters ranging from antipersonnel mines to Sufism.

Often likened to Kafka's The Castle, The Tartar Steppe is both a scathing critique of military life and a meditation on the human thirst for glory. It tells of young Giovanni Drogo, who is posted to a distant fort overlooking the vast Tartar steppe. Although not intending to stay, Giovanni suddenly finds that years have passed, as, almost without his noticing, he has come to share the others' wait for a foreign invasion that never happens. Over time the fort is downgraded and Giovanni's ambitions fade until the day the enemy begins massing on the desolate steppe...