Urgent Fury: The Battle for Grenada, Mark Adkin. In short, self-contained chapters, we follow an unnamed older woman around her life in an unnamed Italian city as she explores the boundary between a solitary life and a lonely one. Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her first short-story collection and then evidently decided she needed to level up, so she moved to Rome, learned the language, and wrote her latest novel in Italian. His portrait of small-town America may seem too good to be true, but I think that’s a measure of Berry’s sadness at what was lost to highways, agricultural mechanization, and the pursuit of speed and profit - all of which Jayber observes from his perch as the town’s bachelor barber. This is one of many stories the Kentucky author and farmer has set in the fictional Port William, based on his own hometown of Port Royal.

A must-read for anyone interested in U.S.-Russian relations or the study of U.S. Sarotte’s broad yet detailed history explores how we went from one state of affairs to the other and suggests it will be near-impossible to rewind the clock. Today, U.S.-Russian relations are locked in a damaging, dead-end, and hostile stalemate. In 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union was greeted with a wave of optimism about the future trajectory of European security and Russian politics. Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, Mary Elise Sarotte. More importantly, they remind us of the ways in which even the best intentions in foreign policy can easily go awry. The characters and actions trip off the page in ways curiously reminiscent of today’s interconnected world. It combines large-scale historical trends with the minutiae of diplomatic history: what the key actors across the European continent were thinking, saying, and doing in the run-up to the Great War. This classic 2012 book is perhaps the best history book I’ve ever read. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark. Enrich your friends’ libraries, get a family book club going, or treat yourself to something new. Every year we kick off the holiday season with a roundup of books recommended by the War on the Rocks and Texas National Security Review team.

Every mans battle workbook included