A selection of books on politics, military, and diplomacy from Tarbiyah Books Plus, the leading Islamic Bookshop in Abuja, Nigeria.
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SAS Rogue Heroes By Ben Macintyre
₦20,000In the summer of 1941, at the height of the war in the Western Desert, a bored and eccentric young officer, David Stirling, has a vision for a new kind of war: attacking the enemy where they least expect it – from behind their own lines. Despite the intense opposition of many in British High Command, Winston Churchill personally gives Stirling permission to recruit the toughest, brightest and most ruthless soldiers he can find.
And so begins the most celebrated and mysterious military organization in the world: the SAS. With unprecedented access to the SAS secret files, unseen footage and exclusive interviews with its founder members, SAS: Rogue Heroes tells the remarkable story behind an extraordinary fighting force, and the immense cost of making it a reality.
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Dictatorland By Paul Kenyon
₦6,000The dictator who grew so rich on his country’s cocoa crop that he built a 35-storey-high basilica in the jungles of the Ivory Coast. The austere, incorruptible leader who has shut Eritrea off from the world in a permanent state of war and conscripted every adult into the armed forces. In Equatorial Guinea, the paranoid despot who thought Hitler was the savior of Africa and waged a relentless campaign of terror against his own people. The Libyan army officer who authored a new work of political philosophy, The Green Book, and lived in a tent with a harem of female soldiers, running his country like a mafia family business.
And behind these almost incredible stories of fantastic violence and excess lie the dark secrets of Western greed and complicity, the insatiable taste for chocolate, oil, diamonds and gold that has encouraged dictators to rule with an iron hand, siphoning off their share of the action into mansions in Paris and banks in Zurich and keeping their people in dire poverty.
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How Spies Think by David Omand
₦6,000From the former director of GCHQ, learn the methodology used by the British intelligence agencies to reach judgements, establish the right level of confidence and act decisively.
Intelligence officers discern the truth. They gather information – often contradictory or incomplete – and, with it, they build the most accurate possible image of the world. With the stakes at their absolute highest, they must then decide what to do.
In everyday life, you are faced with contradictory, incomplete information, too. Reading the news on social media, figuring out the next step in your career, or trying to discover if gossip about a friend is legitimate, you are building an image of the world and making decisions about it.
Looking through the eyes of one of Britain’s most senior ex-intelligence officers, Professor Sir David Omand, How Spies Think shows how the big decisions in your life will be easier to make when you apply the same frameworks used by British intelligence. Full of revealing examples from his storied career, including key briefings with Prime Ministers from Thatcher to Blair, and conflicts from the Falklands to Afghanistan.
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Never Split The Difference
₦5,000After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a kidnapping negotiator brought him face-to-face with bank robbers, gang leaders and terrorists. Never Split the Difference takes you inside his world of high-stakes negotiations, revealing the nine key principles that helped Voss and his colleagues succeed when it mattered the most – when people’s lives were at stake.
Rooted in the real-life experiences of an intelligence professional at the top of his game, Never Split the Difference will give you the competitive edge in any discussion.
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Kushner, Inc.
₦30,000Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are the self-styled Prince and Princess of America. Their swift, gilded rise to extraordinary power in Donald Trump’s White House is unprecedented and dangerous. In Kushner, Inc., investigative journalist Vicky Ward digs beneath the myth the couple has created, depicting themselves as the voices of reason in an otherwise crazy presidency, and reveals that Jared and Ivanka are not just the President’s chief enablers: they, like him, appear disdainful of rules, of laws, and of ethics. They are entitled inheritors of the worst kind; their combination of ignorance, arrogance, and an insatiable lust for power has caused havoc all over the world, and may threaten the democracy of the United States.
Ward follows their trajectory from New Jersey and New York City to the White House, where the couple’s many forays into policy-making and national security have mocked long-standing U.S. policy and protocol. They have pursued an agenda that could increase their wealth while their actions have mostly gone unchecked. In Kushner, Inc., Ward holds Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump accountable: she unveils the couple’s self-serving transactional motivations and how those have propelled them into the highest levels of the US government where no one, the President included, has been able to stop them.
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Proof Of Collusion By Seth Abramson
₦27,000For the first time, the full, explosive record of the unthinkable: how a US president compromised American foreign policy in exchange for the promise of future business and covert election assistance.
Looking back at this moment in history, historians will ask if Americans knew they were living through the first case of criminal conspiracy between an American presidential candidate turned commander in chief and a geopolitical enemy. The answer might be: it was hard to see the whole picture. The stories coming in from around the globe have often seemed fantastical: clandestine meetings in foreign capitals, secret recordings in a Moscow hotel, Kremlin agents infiltrating the Trump inner circle
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The Assault On Intelligence By Michael V. Hayden
₦30,000A blistering critique of the forces threatening the American intelligence community, beginning with the President of the United States himself, in a time when that community’s work has never been harder or more importantIn the face of a President who lobs accusations without facts, evidence, or logic, truth tellers are under attack. Meanwhile, the world order is teetering on the brink. North Korea is on the verge of having a nuclear weapon that could reach all of the United States, Russians have mastered a new form of information warfare that undercuts democracy, and the role of China in the global community remains unclear. There will always be value to experience and expertise, devotion to facts, humility in the face of complexity, and a respect for ideas, but in this moment they seem more important, and more endangered, than they’ve ever been. American Intelligence–the ultimate truth teller–has a responsibility in a post-truth world beyond merely warning of external dangers, and in The Assault on Intelligence, General Michael Hayden takes up that urgent work with profound passion, insight and authority. It is a sobering vision. The American intelligence community is more at risk than is commonly understood, for every good reason. Civil war or societal collapse is not necessarily imminent or inevitable, but our democracy’s core structures, processes, and attitudes are under great stress. Many of the premises on which we have based our understanding of governance are now challenged, eroded, or simply gone. And we have a President in office who responds to overwhelming evidence from the intelligence community that the Russians are, by all acceptable standards of cyber conflict, in a state of outright war against us, not by leading a strong response, but by shooting the messenger. There are fundamental changes afoot in the world and in this country. The Assault on Intelligence shows us what they are, reveals how crippled we’ve become in our capacity to address them, and points toward a series of effective responses. Because when we lose our intelligence, literally and figuratively, democracy dies.
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Turn Around By Peter Blair Henry
₦30,000In Turnaround, economist Peter Blair Henry argues that the secret to emerging countries’ success (and ours) is discipline — sustained commitment to a pragmatic growth strategy. With the global economy teetering on the brink, the stakes are higher than ever. And because stakes are so high for all nations, we need less polarization and more focus on facts to answer the fundamental question: which policy reforms, implemented under what circumstances, actually increase economic efficiency? Pushing past the tired debates, Henry shows that the stock market’s forecasts of policy impact provide an important complement to traditional measures.
Through examples ranging from the drastic income disparity between Barbados and his native Jamaica to the “catch up” economics of China and the taming of inflation in Latin America, Henry shows that in much of the emerging world the policy pendulum now swings toward prudence and self-control. With similar discipline and a dash of humility, he concludes, the First World may yet recover and create long-term prosperity for all its citizens.
Bold, rational, and forward-looking, Turnaround offers vital lessons for developed and developing nations in search of stability and growth.
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The Art of War: Seven Military Classics from Ancient China 8 Books Collection – Ages 18+ – Paperback
₦20,000The Art of War
Taken from the experiences of Ancient China’s most brilliant warriors more than 2000 years ago, Sun Tzu’s famed The Art of War contains valuable lessons on strategic warfare that continue to be relevant today. -
Introducing Game Theory: A Graphic Guide -by Ivan Pastine, Tuvana Pastine and Tom Humberstone
₦5,500Game theory is the study of how we make a decision when the outcome of our moves depends on the decisions of someone else. But it’s not just about predicting your opponent’s next play in a game of chess; conflict and cooperation lie at the heart of game theory, which is useful for understanding behaviour in everything from our social lives to business, global politics to evolutionary theory.
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Confessions of an Economic Hit Man Paperback -by John Perkins
₦6,000From the author of the phenomenal New York Times bestseller, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, comes an exposé of international corruption, and an inspired plan to turn the tide for future generations
With a presidential election around the corner, questions of America’s military buildup, environmental impact, and foreign policy are on everyone’s mind. Former Economic Hit Man John Perkins goes behind the scenes of the current geopolitical crisis and offers bold solutions to our most pressing problems.
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I Am Because We Are: An African Mother’s Fight for the Soul of a Nation- by Chidiogo Akunyili-Parr
₦6,500I Am Because We Are illuminates the role of kinship, family, and the individual’s place in society, while revealing a life of courage, how community shaped it, and the web of humanity that binds us.
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DAUGHTERS OF EVE: Islam and Female Emancipation- by M. Jamal Haider
₦9,000This book succinctly establishes how female conditions changed from ancient past to the modern times—it narrates what were the issues women have faced in the past, and what they are still facing in modernity. It discusses topics like why the Prophet married a number of times, the contributions of Muslim female scholars, and towards the end of the book, it clarifies some of the common misconceptions about Islamic injunctions regarding women.
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This House Has Fallen: Nigeria In Crisis – by Karl Maier
₦2,500To understand Africa, one must understand Nigeria, and few Americans understand Nigeria better than Karl Maier. This House Has Fallen is a bracing and disturbing report on the state of Africa’s most populous, potentially richest, and most dangerously dysfunctional nation. Each year, with depressing consistency, Nigeria has been declared the most corrupt state in the entire world. Though Nigeria is a nation into which billions of dollars of oil money flow, its per capita income has fallen dramatically in the past two decades. Military coup follows military coup.
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The Art of War – Denma Translation Group- by Sun Tzu
₦3,500Previous translations of The Art of War have presented Sun Tzu’s classic from the point of view of military strategy, Chinese history, or Taoist philosophy. This translation—accompanied by the translators’ in-depth essays and illuminating line-by-line commentary—offers a fresh perspective on this ancient Chinese text.