WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE The first full account of how the Cold War arms race finally came to a close, this riveting narrative history sheds new light on the people who struggled to end this era of massive overkill, and examines the legacy of the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that remain a threat today. Drawing on memoirs, interviews in both Russia and the US, and classified documents from deep inside the Kremlin, David E. Hoffman examines the inner motives and secret decisions of each side and details the deadly stockpiles that remained unsecured as the Soviet Union collapsed. This is the fascinating story of how Reagan, Gorbachev, and a previously unheralded collection of scientists, soldiers, diplomats, and spies changed the course of history.

The Dead Hand Book is a memorial to mortality and the ancestral liaison with death through quiet and sweetly-macabre short stories. The Dead Hand Book is a memorial to mortality and the ancestral liaison with death through quiet and sweetly-macabre short stories. The collection of fables is inspired by the manner those long gone have had their memories engraved onto slate and marble stones with the cadence of an old Folk song or Murder Ballad. Tales of warning, the deepest loves honored by surviving paramours and the indifferent cruelty of life in the 17th-20th century are all recorded in the Stories From Gravesend Cemetery. The purpose of this book is to educate the casual cemetery wanderer about how to read the old stones they pass by and to excite the #deathpositivity movement enthusiast or morbidly curious. This book aims help honor those who have come before us by opening the door of understanding the strange records inscribed in old cemeteries; many of those interred below having only that record of their life existing on a crumbling stone. The stories are short and often open-ended to allow the reader to contemplate their interpretation of the endings, maybe even their own mortality. (Much like the way Edward Gorey crafted his short stories.) Modern attitudes towards death have become sodden with superstition, misinformation and fear; this book’s goal is to illuminate how those of the near past embraced, cared for, and honored death as an obvious part of life. Not long ago art was very much an integral part of funerary celebrations such as elaborate Memento Mori carvings on ancient gravestones and the hair jewelry of the Victorians. Those relics are celebrated in The Dead Hand Book.

The law of succession rests on a single brute fact: you can't take it with you. The stock of wealth that turns over as people die is staggeringly large. In the United States alone, some $41 trillion will pass from the dead to the living in the first half of the 21st century. But the social impact of inheritance is more than a matter of money; it is also a matter of what money buys and brings about. Law and custom allow people many ways to pass on their property. As Friedman's enlightening social history reveals, a decline in formal rules, the ascendancy of will substitutes over classic wills, social changes like the rise of the family of affection, changing ideas of acceptable heirs, and the potential disappearance of the estate tax all play a large role in the balance of wealth. Dead Hands uncovers the tremendous social and legal importance of this rite of passage, and how it reflects changing values and priorities in American families and society.

A travel writer is drawn into a strange criminal case, and an even stranger romantic affair, in a novel that brings India “brilliantly, blazingly to life” (The Washington Post). When Jerry Delfont, an aimless, blocked travel writer, receives a letter from an American philanthropist, Mrs. Merrill Unger, he is intrigued. She informs him about a scandal, involving an Indian friend of her son’s. Who is the dead boy, found on the floor of a cheap hotel room? How and why did he die? And what is Jerry to make of a patch of carpet, and a package containing a human hand? Jerry is swiftly captivated by the beautiful, mysterious Mrs. Unger—and revived by her tantric massages—but the circumstances surrounding the dead boy cause him increasingly to doubt the woman’s motives and the exact nature of her philanthropy. Without much to go on, Jerry pursues answers from the teeming streets of Calcutta to Uttar Pradesh. It is a dark and twisted trail of obsession and need. From the author of The Great Railway Bazaar, A Dead Hand is offers “an abundance of richly drawn characters . . . Theroux has used his travel writer’s eye and ear and his novelist’s imagination to craft a tense, disturbing, funny and horrifying book around all of them” (San Francisco Chronicle). “The real pleasure is Theroux’s talent for rendering place and his irreverent comments on everything from the British royals to pop culture, aging, and yes, the venerable Mother Teresa.” —Publishers Weekly

A refreshing, insightful look into the political and economicdynamics driving globalization today Globalization: it's earlier than you think. That's the provocativemessage of Against the Dead Hand, which traces the rise and fall ofthe century-long dream of central planning and top-down control andits impact on globalization-revealing the extent to which the "deadhand" of the old collectivist dream still shapes the contours oftoday's world economy. Mixing historical narrative,thought-provoking arguments, and on-the-scene reporting andinterviews, Brink Lindsey shows how the economy has grown up amidstthe wreckage of the old regime-detailing how that wreckageconstrains the present and obscures the future. He conveys aclearer picture of globalization's current state than the currentconventional wisdom, providing a framework for anticipating thefuture direction of the world economy.

When an unforeseen asteroid strikes Siberia with the force of a thousand Hiroshimas, it triggers Dead Hand, the ultimate defense mechanism developed by the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. The missiles are pointing at the United States and its European allies, and ultra-nationalist General Likatchev is willing to use them as blackmail to topple the government in Moscow and return Russia to her status as world power. When Russia responds to world queries with cold silence, a NATO special operations unit is dropped into Siberia. Trapped in a region ravaged by freezing snow and the hellish aftermath of the asteroid impact, the NATO forces are racing against time to track down Likatchev and dismantle Dead Hand before a global holocaust is unleashed. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

"The Woodend series has always been one of the best British police procedurals around. Now Spencer has taken up a new series with Paniatowski in the lead, and she proves again that she is in the league with Peter Turnbull and Lynda La Plante" - Library Journal The first book in the page-turning DCI Monika Paniatowski British police procedural series, set in the 1970s. It will be no easy task to fill the shoes of a local legend like DCI Charlie Woodend, the newly-promoted Monika Paniatowski tells herself, but given a little time, she thinks she can grow into them. Yet time is the one thing she does not have. On her first day in the new job, a severed female hand is discovered on the riverbank. The obvious suspect is Stan Szymborska, the victim’s war-hero husband, though Paniatowski refuses to arrest him. But is it the lack of evidence which is holding her back . . . or is it the fact that he is not only the most attractive man she has met in a long time, but also a fellow Pole? Woodend is preparing to leave for a new life in Spain, and Paniatowski is determined not to ask for his help. But when her colleagues prove untrustworthy, the urge to call him becomes almost irresistible . . .