A New Feature: Upcoming Books

Book reviews, roundups of current titles, and interviews with authors are going to be a regular fixture on Dead Drop. But I also want to alert readers to books you are going to be seeing on shelves in the future, maybe in a few months, or even a few years. 

Today I’m launching a regular feature, spotlighting interesting national security-themed titles on the horizon. There’s some reader service here, in that I hope this helps you better curate your probably long reading list. But there’s also a bit of intelligence gathering. Publishers routinely announce deals they have just signed with authors, and those deals give you a ground-level insight into what ideas are selling in the book business, what stories are hot, and what topics publishers are betting are so salient that you’ll want to read about them a few years from now, which is about how long it will take books that are now being written to get to market. 

So, here are some upcoming reads that might interest Dead Drop readers. Keep in mind that book titles and publishing dates are often tentative. 


The Man Who Was George Smiley, by Michael Jango (Biteback Publishing) 

A biography of the author and MI5 officer John Bingham, the 7th Baron Clanmorris, who was the real-life inspiration for John Le Carre’s fictional spymaster. 

Pub date: February 2013 

Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat, by Jeffrey D. Simon (Prometheus Books) 

Simon, who has more than a quarter century of experience studying terrorism, examines the motivations and backgrounds of those who strike terror on their own, independent of an organized group. 

Pub date: February 2013

The Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, by Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady (Wiley) 

Two close observers of the national security apparatus investigate how the government keeps secrets, and why “real secrets can’t be kept, trivial ones are held forever, and sensitive ones are far too susceptible to political manipulation.” 

Pub date: April 2013

The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, by Mark Mazzetti (The Penguin Press) 

The New York Times reporter draws from his beat to write about the evolution of the CIA and U.S. special forces into “competing covert manhunting and killing operations.” 

Pub date: April 2013

Wilson, by A. Scott Berg (Putnam) 

The long-awaited biography of Woodrow Wilson from the author of many books on larger-than-life Americans, including Katharine Hepburn and Charles Lindbergh. Berg also wrote a definitive biography of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

Pub date: September 2013 

Brothers Forever, by Tom Sileo and Col. Thomas Manion (Da Capo Press) 

Sileo, a military writer, and Manion, a retired Marine colonel, tell the story of his Marine son, Travis Manion, and his Naval Academy roommate, Navy SEAL Brendan Looney. The two men are now* buried next to each other in Arlington National Cemetery. President Obama spoke about them during Memorial Day remarks in 2011. 

Pub date: Spring 2014 

*This post has been updated from a previous version.