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by Philip Zelikow (Author), Condoleezza Rice (Author)
A deeply researched international history and exemplary study (New York Times Book Review) of how a divided world ended and our present world was fashioned, as the world drifts toward another great time of choosing.
Two of America's leading scholar-diplomats, Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, have combed sources in several languages, interviewed leading figures, and drawn on their own firsthand experience to bring to life the choices that molded the contemporary world. Zeroing in on the key moments of decision, the might-have-beens, and the human beings working through them, they explore both what happened and what could have happened, to show how one world ended and another took form. Beginning in the late 1970s and carrying into the present, they focus on the momentous period between 1988 and 1992, when an entire world system changed, states broke apart, and societies were transformed. Such periods have always been accompanied by terrible wars -- but not this time.
Author Biography
Philip Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History and J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, both at the University of Virginia. His books and essays focus on critical episodes in American and world history. A former civil rights attorney and career diplomat, he has also served at all levels of American government. He was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and, before that, directed the Carter-Ford commission on federal election reform. He has worked on international policy in each of the five administrations from Reagan through Obama.
Condoleezza Rice was the sixty-sixth US secretary of state and the first black woman to hold that office. Prior to that, she was the first woman to serve as national security adviser. She is a professor at Stanford University and cofounder of RiceHadleyGates LLC. Rice is the New York Times bestselling author of No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (2011), Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family (2010), Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (2017), and Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity (2018).
