OBJECTIVE TROY: A Terrorist, A President, and the Rise of the Drone

Scott Shane’s 2015 book tells the story of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American terrorist who began as a very successful imam outside Washington, D.C. and ended up as an Al Qaeda leader in Yemen, where President Obama ordered a drone strike to kill him. Objective Troy — the title was Awlaki’s code name on the American kill list — was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Lionel Gelber Prize, awarded each year to the best book in English on foreign affairs.

“No one has written a better book about Obama’s war against terrorists. Shane is a superb reporter and a wonderful story teller. I literally could not put this book down. It will join a short list of books that helps all of us to really understand the wars against terrorist groups that have defined US foreign policy since 9/11.” —Peter Bergen, CNN security analyst, author of The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden

“Scott Shane has written a 21st century morality tale about a president steeped in Constitutional law and his hunt for a charismatic American terrorist—who just happens to be a ‘skirt-chasing mullah.’ But this murder mystery is alarmingly all true. The writing is riveting, the intelligence sources are impeccable and the book is quietly elegant—echoing the human story told in Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Towers. Shane’s Objective Troy is destined to become a classic text on both the Obama Presidency and drone warfare.” —Kai Bird, author of American Prometheus and The Good Spy

Scott Shane is unsurpassed in shedding clear light on America’s darkest secrets, including the gripping human drama behind a drone strike that changed history. It’s a story that had to be told, and must be read.” —Jane Mayer, New Yorker staff writer, author of The Dark Side

DISMANTLING UTOPIA: How Information Ended the Soviet Union

Scott’s first book, published in 1994, is an eyewitness account of the collapse of the Soviet Union and an argument that it was Gorbachev’s decision to end the elaborate Soviet regime of information control that doomed the system. Dismantling Utopia has gained new relevance in recent years, with Vladimir Putin’s restoration of information control and Russia’s aggressive export of disinformation, notably in its 2016 interference in the U.S. presidential election in support of Donald Trump.

“A critical book to understanding the era...Scott Shane tells the story of the way the modern information age helped destroy the last pillars of communism, and he tells it with grace, sympathy, and intelligence.” -- David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, author of Lenin's Tomb

“Shane writes with such bracing authority, such startling insight, that Dismantling Utopia must be regarded as one of the essential works on the fall of the Soviet Union.” — Jonathan Kirsch in The Los Angeles Times