Here is a fascinating story of a young Harvard-educated varsity jockey star, who travels to Russia in the dying days of the Soviet Union to play elite league hockey.

In Red Line, Joby Warrick, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Black Flags, shares the thrilling unknown story of America’s mission in Syria: to find and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons and keep them out of the hands of the Islamic State. In August 2012, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was clinging to power in a vicious civil war. When secret intelligence revealed that the dictator might resort to using chemical weapons, President Obama warned that doing so would cross “a red line.” Assad did it anyway, bombing the Damascus suburb of Ghouta with sarin gas, killing hundreds of civilians, and forcing Obama to decide if he would mire America in another unpopular war in the Middle East. When Russia offered to broker the removal of Syria’s chemical weapons, Obama leapt at the out. So began an electrifying race to find, remove, and destroy 1,300 tons of chemical weapons in the midst of a raging civil war. The extraordinary little-known effort is a triumph for the Americans, but soon Russia’s long game becomes clear: it will do anything to preserve Assad’s rule. As America’s ability to control events in Syria shrinks, the White House learns that ISIS, building its caliphate in Syria’s war-tossed territory, is seeking chemical weapons for itself, with an eye to attack the West. Drawing on astonishing original reporting, Warrick crafts a character-driven narrative that reveals how the United States embarked on a bold adventure to prevent one catastrophe but could not avoid a tragic chain of events that led to another.

An OR nurse shares their experiences in the operating room that begin in nursing school and continue all the way into their current day-to-day work environment. The author gives a peak into a world many people even within healthcare aren't completely familiar with. The book contains chapters about the author's personal journey to become an OR nurse, which along the way give the reader deeper insights into the world of the OR. There are many personal stories throughout the book that the author shares which reveal the unique culture of the OR. Nursing students, nurses, and even patients themselves will get a better understanding of what work is like for nurses and other medical staff who work "behind the red line." The author is a current full-time OR nurse in a large urban hospital in the United States and has worked in multiple surgical settings involving direct patient care and clinical education related to the OR. Written anonymously, the author retells their experiences and gives their observations that will surely resonate with other OR nurses and allow others who have not worked in the OR to gain a better understanding of how different the OR is from other places in the hospital.

Arrest of Church Leaders

The journal of an American hockey player chronicles the year he spent playing for a Russian team and living as a Soviet citizen during a time of revolutionary political upheaval.

In the tradition of Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell, a beautiful book on what it's like to be a surgeon.

A longtime CNN columnist astutely combines history and global politics to help us better understanding the exploding number of military, political, and diplomatic crises around the globe. The riveting and illuminating behind-the-scenes stories of the world's most intense “red lines," from diplomatic and military challenges at particular turning points in history to the ones that set the tone of geopolitics today. Whether it was the red line in Munich that led to the start of the Second World War, to the red lines in the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula, Syria and the Middle East. As we traverse the globe, Andelman uses original documentary research, previously classified material, and interviews with key players, to help us understand the growth, the successes and frequent failures that have shaped our world today. Andelman provides not just vivid historical context, but a political anatomy of these red lines. How might their failures be prevented going forward? When and how can such lines in the sand help preserve peace rather than tempt conflict? A Red Line in the Sand is a vital examination of our present and the future—where does diplomacy end and war begin? It is an object lesson of tantamount importance to every leader, diplomat, citizen, and voter. As America establishes more red lines than it has pledged to defend, every American should understand the volatile atmosphere and the existential stakes of the red web that encompasses the globe.