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"I never ask for mercy and seek no one's sympathy. I would never, as was once needlessly feared in this court, be a fugitive from justice in this country, only a seeker of it."—Conrad Black, in his statement to the court, June 24, 2011In 1993, Conrad Black was the proprietor of London's Daily Telegraph and the head of one of the world's largest newspaper groups. He completed a memoir in 1992, A Life in Progress, and «great prospects beckoned.» In 2004, he was fired as chairman of Hollinger International after he and his associates were accused of fraud. Here, for the first time, Black describes his indictment, four-month trial in Chicago, partial conviction, imprisonment, and largely successful appeal.In this unflinchingly revealing and superbly written memoir, Black writes without reserve about the prosecutors who mounted a campaign to destroy him and the journalists who presumed he was guilty. Fascinating people fill these pages, from prime ministers and presidents to the social, legal, and media elite, among them: Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Jean Chrétien, Rupert Murdoch, Izzy Asper, Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, Eddie Greenspan, Alan Dershowitz, and Henry Kissinger.Woven throughout are Black's views on big themes: politics, corporate governance, and the U.S. justice system. He is candid about highly personal subjects, including his friendships – with those who have supported and those who have betrayed him – his Roman Catholic faith, and his marriage to Barbara Amiel. And he writes about his complex relations with Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, and in particular the blow he has suffered at the hands of that nation.In this extraordinary book, Black maintains his innocence and recounts what he describes as «the fight of and for my life.» A Matter of Principle is a riveting memoir and a scathing account of a flawed justice system.

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Like an eagle, American colonists ascended from the gulley of British dependence to the position of sovereign world power in a period of merely two centuries. Seizing territory in Canada and representation in Britain; expelling the French, and even their British forefathers, American leaders George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson paved their nation’s way to independence. With the first buds of public relation techniques—of communication, dramatization, and propaganda—America flourished into a vision of freedom, of enterprise, and of unalienable human rights.In Flight of the Eagle, Conrad Black provides a perspective on American history that is unprecedented. Through his analysis of the strategic development of the United States from 1754-1992, Black describes nine “phases” of the strategic rise of the nation, in which it progressed through grave challenges, civil and foreign wars, and secured a place for itself under the title of “Superpower.” Black discredits prevailing notions that our unrivaled status is the product of good geography, demographics, and good luck. Instead, he reveals and analyzes the specific strategic decisions of great statesmen through the ages that transformed the world as we know it and established America’s place in it.

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