Books like Surrender or starve by Robert D. Kaplan

An accessible guide that shows how natural and built environments shape politics, power, and conflict around the world.

Peter Frankopan’s *The Silk Roads* traces how networks of trade and cultural contact between East and West shaped world history—from ancient Mesopotamia to the twentieth‑century world wars—re‑orienting our view toward the East.

Forecasting the Rise of the Rest: A Vision of the Post-American World

An engaging narrative of world history told from the perspective of the Islamic world, tracing its rise from the time of Muhammad to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

Robert D. Kaplan’s bestseller explores how the planet’s physical features shape nations, cultures, and politics—examining how oceans, mountains, climate, and geography influence power, security, and identity across the globe.

"An examination of the future role of the South China sea in international relations and a tour of the the nations surrounding the South China Sea and their interests in the region. In exploring each of these countries individually, Kaplan clearly shows where the conflicts may arise and why they will be challenging for the international community"--

In the tradition of John Hersey's Hiroshima, journalist Jasper Becker's penetrating account of China's four-year famine uncovers the truth behind one of the darkest chapters in history. Hungry Ghosts is the horrific story of the state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder during Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward," an attempt at utopian engineering gone wrong. This is the unforgettable story of the century's greatest human rights disaster, in which more people died than in Stalin's purges and the Holocaust put together. Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immersed in painstaking detective work to examine the unprecedented madness that plagued China between 1958 and 1962. For the first time since it was so ruthlessly and categorically erased from history, Becker unearths what really happened during these years, and how the famine and terror could have been kept a secret for so long.

John J. Mearsheimer explains his theory of offensive realism, outlining how great powers pursue military strength and regional dominance to secure national survival.