New Releases by Nicholas Reynolds

One of The New Yorker's "Best Books of the Year" * A Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize Finalist "Authoritative. . . . [Reynolds's] contribution to our understanding of the rise of American intelligence is unparalleled." —Journal of Intelligence History “The most thorough and detailed history available on the origins of U.S. intelligence.” —Michael Morell, former Deputy Director and Acting Director, CIA Historian and former CIA officer Nicholas Reynolds, the New York Times bestselling author of Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy, uncovers the definitive history of American intelligence during World War II, illuminating its key role in securing victory and its astonishing growth from practically nothing at the start of the war. The entire vast, modern American intelligence system—the amalgam of three-letter spy services of many stripes—can be traced back to the dire straits the world faced at the dawn of World War II. Prior to 1940, the United States had no organization to recruit spies and steal secrets or launch covert campaigns against enemies overseas and just a few codebreakers, isolated in windowless vaults. It was only through Winston Churchill’s determination to mobilize the US in the fight against Hitler that the first American spy service was born, built from scratch against the background of the Second World War. In Need to Know, Nicholas Reynolds explores the birth, infancy, and adolescence of modern American intelligence. In this first-ever look across the entirety of the war effort, Reynolds combines little-known history and gripping spy stories to analyze the origins of American codebreakers and spies as well as their contributions to Allied victory, revealing how they laid the foundation for the Cold War—and beyond.

I show evidence that recent increases in the mortality of white Americans are rooted in a sharp decline in the health of cohorts born after World War II, relative to the trend for earlier-born cohorts. These cohort health differences are evident by the 1980s, suggesting recent mortality increases have deep roots which predate the opioid epidemic and recent economic distress. I identify the role of cohort health by imposing the impact of age on mortality to follow the log-linear, Gompertz form. This imposition yields the sharp, falsifiable prediction -- strongly borne out in the data -- that a decline in cohort health will result in changes in the slope of the age profile of log mortality at the same cohort in each year. That is, log mortality rates in every year between 1985 and 2015 exhibit slope changes centered at the 1946 cohort for white men and the 1949 cohort for white women, consistent with a health decline beginning precisely with those cohorts. The size of these slope changes imply that the average mortality rate of the 1960 cohort of white women has been 22 percent higher and that of men 37 percent higher, than they would have had health followed the trend for earlier-born cohorts. I close with suggestive evidence that the health decline likely originated in early life and a preliminary investigation into its root cause.

A principle of laissez-faire has long dominated the doctrinal development of contract and tort as they apply to commerce. By contrast, opposition to laissez-faire developed in piecemeal fashion, which has precluded this opposition from amounting to a comprehensive critique of laissez-faire. This has proven problematic in light of research indicating that humans are prone to biases that inhibit their ability to maximize self-interest. In other words, laissez-faire fails to prevent humans from indulging in self-destructive tendencies. As a solution, this thesis posits that parts of contract, tort and fiduciary law already implicitly recognize an underlying principle of other-regard. This principle functions at the same level as laissez-faire, offering a safeguard against human irrationality that protects self-interest in a way that would be impossible under pure laissez-faire. Ultimately, commercial private law might more effectively achieve its objectives by recognizing a system of competing principles rather than a hegemony of one. Un principe de laissez-faire a longtemps dominé le développement doctrinal du contrat et de la responsabilité délictuelle dans la mesure où ils s'appliquent au commerce. En revanche, l'opposition au laissez-faire s'est développée au coup par coup, ce qui a empêché cette opposition de constituer une critique complète du laisser-faire. Ce problème s'est avéré inhiber leur capacité à maximiser leur intérêt personnel. En d'autres termes, ne pas empêcher les humains de se laisser aller à des tendances autodestructrices. En tant que solution, cette thèse postule que des parties du droit des contrats, de la responsabilité délictuelle et du droit fiduciaire reconnaissent déjà implicitement un principe sous-jacent de l'autre apparence. Ce principe fonctionne au même titre que le laissez-faire, offrant une protection contre l'irrationalité humaine qui protège l'intérêt personnel d'une manière qui serait impossible dans le cadre d'un pur laisser-faire. En fin de compte, le droit commercial privé pourrait mieux atteindre ses objectifs en reconnaissant un système de principes concurrents plutôt qu'une hégémonie.

This story is about the Marines who served in Panama around the time of Operation Just Cause. Since the Marine forces comprised only a fraction of the troops in Panama, the contribution has been overlooked in some other histories. This is especially true of the Marines who served in Panama before and after the operation itself. Nevertheless, they faced, and met, a very real set of challenges of their own, and wrote one of the first chapters in the Marine Corps' history of operations other than war since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Marines who patrolled the jungles of the Canal Zone in the period before Just Cause, in what was neither peace nor war, broke new ground. So did the young officers and NCOs who, for all intents and purposes, took over the reins of municipal government after the operation.

This particular book is about Marines during the first stage of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). It spans the period from 11 September 2001 to March and April 2003, when the Coalition removed Saddam Hussein from power, and concludes in November 2003 when the Marines left Kuwait to return to their home bases in the United States. While many then believed that the "kinetic" phase of the fighting in Iraq was largely over, as we now know, it was only a prelude to a longer but just as deadly phase of operations where Marines would be redeployed to Iraq in 2004 tocombat insurgents (both foreign and domestic) who had filtered back into the country. However, this phase of the fighting would be very different from the one the Marines and U.S. Army had fought in the spring of 2003 in the march up to take Baghdad.

The hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA), Adelges tsugae Annand, is an invasive pest that is causing declines in populations of eastern hemlock, Tsuga canadensis Carriere, in eastern North American forests. The threat of losing the hemlock as a foundation species in eastern forests prompted reserve managers to devise and implement HWA management strategies integrating cultural, biological, and chemical control tactics. Chemical control methods, systemic imidacloprid applications and horticultural oil foliar sprays, provide the most immediate and effective control of HWA in accessible hemlocks. Non-target impacts of HWA chemical control methods on soil arthropod communities are undocumented. Empirical studies in the field and in the laboratory were performed to determine the extent of effects of the common HWA chemical control treatments to non-target soil arthropods. Treatments were the horticultural oil foliar spray (no imidacloprid), imidacloprid trunk injection, imidacloprid soil injection, imidacloprid soil drench, and untreated controls. Microarthropods in soil drench plots displayed marginally non-significant decreases in abundance and richness. Microarthropod species composition was distinct in all of the imidacloprid treatments when compared to controls. Acari, the mites, consisted of approximately 50% of the observed abundance, and showed no responses to imidacloprid or horticultural oil treatments. Abundance and richness of Collembola, in contrast, were markedly decreased by the soil drench treatments. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was used to quantify concentrations of imidacloprid from soils following imidacloprid treatments. Concentrations of imidacloprid observed in soils from imidacloprid treatment plots exceeded the LD50 and ED50 concentrations for Folsomia candida Willem (Collembola: Isotomidae) observed in the laboratory, especially in the soil drench plots, less frequently so in the soil injection plots and in a few of the trunk injection plots. The springtail Folsomia candida were reared in the laboratory on standard soil substrates containing a series of known imidacloprid concentrations to observe impacts to reproduction and survival. The imidacloprid concentration at which Folsomia candida adults displayed 50% mortality in the laboratory, as inferred from regression analysis of observed dose responses (LD50), was 1.38 mg imidacloprid / kg dry soil. The concentration at which F. candida produced half the number of juveniles observed in control microcosms (ED50) was 0.598 mg imidacloprid / kg dry soil.

This particular book is about Marines during the first stage of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). It spans the period from 11 September 2001 to March and April 2003, when the Coalition removed Saddam Hussein from power, and concludes in November 2003 when the Marines left Kuwait to return to their home bases in the United States. While many then believed that the "kinetic" phase of the fighting in Iraq was largely over, as we now know, it was only a prelude to a longer but just as deadly phase of operations where Marines would be redeployed to Iraq in 2004 to combat insurgents (both foreign and domestic) who had filtered back into the country. However, this phase of the fighting would be very different from the one the Marines and U.S. Army had fought in the spring of 2003 in the march up to take Baghdad. The primary focus of the book is I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF)-the runup to the war in 2002 and early 2003, especially the development of "the plan," with its many changes, the exhaustive rehearsals, and other preparations, and then the conduct of decisive combat operations and the immediate postwar period, mostly under the control of the U.S. Central Command's Coalition Forces Land Component Command. The book also touches upon other Marine activities in the Military Coordination and Liaison Command in northern Iraq and with the British in the south. Nonetheless, the primary focus remains on I Marine Expeditionary Force and the interactions of its constituent elements. Other forthcoming History Division publications will soon offer detailed narratives on Marines in Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan and II MEF operations inside Iraq.