Legacy of Ashes is the record of the first sixty years of the Central Intelligence Agency. It describes how the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create a first-rate spy service. That failure constitutes a danger to the national security of the United States. Intelligence is secret action aimed at understanding or changing what goes on abroad. President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it "a distasteful but vital necessity." A nation that wants to project its power beyond its borders needs to see over the horizon, to know what is coming, to prevent attacks against its people. It must anticipate surprise. Without a strong, smart, sharp intelligence service, presidents and generals alike can become blind and crippled. But throughout its history as a superpower, the United States has not had such a service.

After September 11, 2001, the FBI started collecting small, easily concealed knives and other potentially lethal objects, and compiled a catalog that has been distributed to airport screeners and law enforcement agencies across the country. In The FBI Guide to Concealable Weapons, this information is available to every citizen who wants to be prepared to face future terrorist attacks. In this exclusive reprint, you will see metal, plastic and ceramic knives hidden in pens, keys, belt buckles, jewelry, canes and cigarette lighters, as well as impact weapons disguised as keychains, and items hollowed out for the possible concealment of explosives. As citizens responsible for our own safety, we must know everything possible about the dangers that face us, and awareness is the first, vital step in this direction.

Blue Blood is an work of nonfiction about what it means to protect, to serve, and to defend among the ranks of New York's finest. Edward Conlon is fourth generation NYPD - and the story he tells is an anecdotal history of New York through its police force, and depicts a portrait of the teeming street life of the city in all its horror and splendor. It is a story about fathers and sons, partners who become brothers, old ghosts and undying legacies. Here you will see terms like loyalty, commitment, and honor come to life, in action, on a daily basis. Conlon depicts his life on the force - from his first days walking a beat in the South Bronx, to his ascent to detective." The book opens with Conlon's first day on patrol, but in fact his story begins in the time of his great-grandfather, an officer of dubious integrity who participated in the corruption that marked the Tammany-era NYPD as a corps in need of reform; it continues through the experience of Conlon's father, a World War II officer who left the ranks of the NYPD to become an FBI agent, and the years of his uncle, an old-fashioned, easygoing career cop, who stayed in uniform throughout the political upheavals and corrections of the 1960s and 1970s. Conlon joined the NYPD during the Giuliani administration, when New York City saw its crime rate plummet but also witnessed events that would alter the city and its inhabitants, and its police force, forever: polarizing racial cases, the proliferation of the drug trade, and the events of September 11, 2001, and its aftermath. Conlon captures the detail of the landscape, the ironies and rhythms of natural speech, the tragic and the marvelous, firsthand, day after day.