Frank Carlson Library

"Every catastrophe begins with a little problem that doesn't get fixed." So says Pauline Green, president of the United States, in Ken Follett's nerve-racking drams of international tension. A shrinking oasis in the Sahara Desert; a stolen US Army drone; an uninhabited Japanese island; and one country's secret stash of deadly chemical poisons: all these play roles in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Struggling to prevent the outbreak of world war...

Seven years ago, Mia Briscoe was at a college frat rave with her best friend, Serena, when a fire broke out. Everyone was accounted for except Serena, who was never seen nor heard from again. Now an investigative journalist covering the political scene in New York City, Mia discovers old photos taken the night of Serena's disappearance and begins to uncover a sinister string of events going all the way back to that disastrous party. Working with Sherlock,...

In the spring of 2017, the U.S. economy is rebounding under President Stacy Anne Barbeau, the country's first female president. But her leadership is about to be severely tested: Russian president Gennadiy Gryzlov has sent Special Troops, disguised as pro-Russian activists, into Ukraine and Moldova. Though NATO is outraged, its response is tepid. Refusing to let Russian aggression go unpunished, former U.S. president Kevin Martindale approaches Polish...

This sequel to The Prize provides a narrative of global energy, the principal engine of geopolitical and economic change. Energy authority Yergin tells the inside stories of the oil market, the rise of the "petrostate," the race to control the resources of the former Soviet empire, and the massive corporate mergers that transformed the oil landscape. He shows how the drama of oil will continue to shape our world, and takes on the tough questions:...

What we remember, what we've forgotten, and what we never knew about America's least understood war, revealed in a riveting, richly illustrated volume based on the major ten-part PBS documentary series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Historian Geoffrey C. Ward and filmmaker Ken Burns, the authors of the acclaimed and best-selling The Civil War, Jazz, The War, and Baseball, present an intimate history of the Vietnam War. All the major milestones...

After an airliner crashes into the Capitol, killing the president, Jack Ryan, the vice-president takes over. The novel describes Ryan's campaign to impose a right-wing morality on the U.S. and a new order on the world, the latter accomplished with the aid of high-tech warfare. A sequel to Debt of Honor. Jack Ryan becomes president by sheer accident when the former president, most of Congress, the Cabinet and the Supreme Court are bombed out of existence....

"The author of Easternization, an award-winning journalist, offers an intimate look at the rise of strongman leaders around the globe, charting the most urgent political story of our era. We are in a new era: authoritarian leaders have become a central feature of global politics. Since 2000, self-styled strongmen have risen to power in capitals as diverse as Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, Brasilia, Budapest, Ankara, Riyadh and Washington. These leaders are...

"Confronting Nazi evil is the subject of the latest installment in the mega-bestselling Killing series. As the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went on the run. A few were swiftly caught, including the notorious SS leader, Heinrich Himmler. Others, however, evaded capture through a sophisticated Nazi organization designed to hide them. Among those war...

A Fascist, observes Madeleine Albright, 'is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.' The twentieth century was defined by the clash between democracy and Fascism, a struggle that created uncertainty about the survival of human freedom and left millions of innocent people...