Charles Freeman Popular Books
Charles Freeman Biography & Facts
Charles "Chas" W. Freeman Jr. (Chinese: 傅立民, born March 2, 1943) is an American retired diplomat and writer. He served in the United States Foreign Service, the State and Defense Departments in many different capacities over the course of thirty years. Most notably, he worked as the main interpreter for Richard Nixon during his 1972 China visit and served as the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992, where he dealt with the Persian Gulf War. He is a past president of the Middle East Policy Council, co-chair of the U.S. China Policy Foundation and a Lifetime Director of the Atlantic Council. In February 2009, it was reported that Freeman was then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair's choice to chair the National Intelligence Council in the Obama administration. After several weeks of criticisms, he withdrew his name from consideration. Early life and education Freeman was born in Washington, D.C., on March 2, 1943, to Charles Wellman Freeman and Carla Elizabeth Park. His mother died when he was nine years old. His father, an MIT graduate from Rhode Island who served in the United States Navy during World War II, "declined to join the family business" in Rhode Island and started his own business, with the help of a G.I. loan. As a child Freeman lived in Nassau, the Bahamas, where his father's business was located, and attended the St. Andrew's School. But he returned to the United States at age 13 to attend Milton Academy, a private boarding school in Massachusetts. Freeman matriculated at Yale University in 1960 with a full scholarship and graduated early, magna cum laude, in 1963. He studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico "for a while, when I was supposed to be at Yale." After graduating from Yale he entered Harvard Law School, but he left during his second year to pursue a career in the United States Foreign Service. He finished his JD degree at Harvard nine years later. Career Government Freeman joined the United States Foreign Service in 1965, working first in India and Taiwan before being assigned to the State Department's China desk. As an officer on the China desk, he was assigned as the principal American interpreter during U.S. President Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. He later became the State Department Deputy Director for Republic of China (ROC, commonly known as Taiwan) affairs. The State Department sent Freeman back to Harvard Law School during this time, where he completed his JD The legal research he did there eventually became "the intellectual basis for the Taiwan Relations Act." After various positions within the State Department he was given overseas assignments as chargé d'affaires and deputy chief of mission at the Embassy in Beijing, China, and then Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand. In 1986, he was appointed as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs in 1986, a position in which he played a key role in the negotiation of Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola and the independence of Namibia. He became United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in November 1989, serving before and after Operation Desert Storm, until August 1992. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs described his career as "remarkably varied." From 1992 to 1993 he was a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies. From 1993 to 1994 he was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. From 1994 to 1995 he was a Distinguished Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. Private sector In 1995 he became Chairman of the Board of Projects International, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based business development company that arranges international joint ventures. From 2004 to 2008 he served on China National Offshore Oil Corporation's international advisory board, which convened annually to advise the corporate board on the implications of various global developments (Freeman was neither consulted nor involved in the company's dealings with Iran or its attempt to buy U.S. oil company Unocal). He served as a member of the board of several other corporate and non-profit advisory boards, including diplomatic institutes. He was the editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica's entry on "Diplomacy". In his thirty-year diplomatic career, Freeman received two Distinguished Public Service Awards, three Presidential Meritorious Service Awards, two Distinguished Honor Awards, the CIA Medallion, a Defense Meritorious Service Award, and four Superior Honor Awards. He speaks fluent Chinese, French, Spanish, and Arabic and has a working knowledge of several other languages. In 1997, Freeman succeeded George McGovern to become the president of the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC), formerly known as the American Arab Affairs Council, which "strives to ensure that a full range of U.S. interests and views are considered by policy makers." In 2006 MEPC was the first American outlet to publish Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer and Harvard Professor Stephen Walt's working paper called The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. According to a The Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Freeman endorsed the paper's thesis, and he said of MEPC's stance that "No one else in the United States has dared to publish this article, given the political penalties that the Lobby imposes on those who criticize it." Freeman has written two books on statecraft. Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy was published by the U.S. Institute of Peace in 1997. The Diplomat's Dictionary has gone through several revisions, the most recent of which, also published by USIP, came out in 2010. He is also the author of three books on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and in China. America's Misadventures in the Middle East, published by Just World Books in 2010, focused on Bush's invasion of Iraq, America's failure to lead in the same way it did in the postwar years, and Saudi Arabia. Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige, published in 2013, is Freeman's analysis of China-U.S. relations between 1969 and 2012 and his predictions about its future. America's Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East, which continues Freeman's analysis of the evolving disorder in the region, came out in 2016. National Intelligence Council appointment controversy On February 19, 2009, Laura Rozen reported in Foreign Policy's " The Cable" blog that unidentified "sources" had told her that Freeman would become chair of the National Intelligence Council, which culls intelligence from sixteen (now 17) U.S. agencies and compiles them into National Intelligence Estimates and which Rozen described as "the intelligence community's primary big-think shop and the lead body in producing national intelligence estimates." Within hours, Steve J. Rosen, a former top official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), had published a scathing criticism of the reported (but still unconfirmed) appointmen.... Discover the Charles Freeman popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Charles Freeman books.
Best Seller Charles Freeman Books of 2024
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Micromegas and Other Short Fictions
Francois VoltaireSomething between a tale and a polemic, these "fables of reason" are feats of narrative compression and contain much of Voltaire's best and funniest writing. From ribald tales of a...
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Captains Courageous
Rudyard KiplingHarvey Cheyne is the overindulged son of a millionaire. When he falls overboard from an ocean liner her is rescued by a Portuguese fisherman and, initially against his will, joins ...
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Reveries of the Solitary Walker
Jean-Jacques Rousseau & Peter FranceAfter a period of forced exile and solitary wandering brought about by his radical views on religion and politics, JeanJacques Rousseau returned to Paris in 1770. Here, in the last...
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The Closing of the Western Mind
Charles FreemanA radical and powerful reappraisal of the impact of Constantine’s adoption of Christianity on the later Roman world, and on the subsequent development both of Christianity and of W...
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The Ambassadors
Henry James & Harry LevinConcerned that her son Chad may have become involved with a woman of dubious reputation, the formidable Mrs Newsome sends her 'ambassador' Strether from Massachusetts to Paris to e...
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The Monk
Matthew LewisWith an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.'He now saw himself stained with the most loathed and monstrous sins, the object of universal execration ... doomed to perish in tortures t...
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The Earth
Émile ZolaWhen Jean Macquart arrives in the peasant community of Beauce, where farmers have worked the same land for generations, he quickly finds himself involved in the corrupt affairs of ...
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This Idea Must Die
John BrockmanThe bestselling editor of This Explains Everything brings together 175 of the world’s most brilliant minds to tackle Edge.org’s 2014 question: What scientific idea has become a rel...
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The Last Chronicle of Barset
Anthony Trollope"He is so scandalously weak, and she is so radically vicious, that they cannot but be wrong together. The very fact that such a man should be a bishop among us is to me terribly st...
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Nostromo
Joseph Conrad'There is something in a treasure that fastens upon a man's mind. He will pray and blaspheme and still persevere, and will curse the day he ever heard of it, and will let his last ...
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A Christmas Carol Murder
Heather RedmondIn this clever reimagining of Charles Dickens’s life, he and fiancée Kate Hogarth must solve the murder of an old miser, just before Christmas . . . London, December 1835: C...
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When Crickets Cry
Charles MartinFrom the bestselling author of The Mountain Between Us comes the moving story of a man with a painful past, a little girl with a doubtful future, and a shared journey tow...
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The Parkhurst Years
Bobby Cummines‘The next stage meant that there was no going back. An Irish prisoner stepped forward and slipped a blade into my hand. I felt the ice cold metal and pressed it against the governo...
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The Treasure Chest
Johann Hebel & John HibberdA wonderful collection of moral tales, anecdotes, jokes, reports of murders, disasters and mysteries, all originally written for inclusion in a popular religious almanac.
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Under the Greenwood Tree
Thomas Hardy'At sight of him had the pink of her cheeks increased, lessened, or did it continue to cover its normal area of ground? It was a question meditated several hundreds of times by her...
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The Wit and Wisdom of London
J. B. EdwardsLondon has been one of the world's great cities for over 2,000 years and has produced countless scholars, artists, rogues and wits, each of whom left their mark on the metropolis b...
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Defying Gravity
Roger McGoughIn this evocative and personal collection of poems Roger McGough comes to terms with painful memories as well as confronting fears that are universal. Here he remembers his father ...
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The Confidence-man
Herman MelvilleOnboard the Fidèle, a steamboat floating down the Mississippi to New Orleans, a confidence man sets out to defraud his fellow passengers. In quick succession he assumes numerous gu...
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By Battersea Bridge
Janet DaveyAnita Mostyn feels the need to take a holiday from her life. As a child, she was dismissed by her parents in favour of her more confident brothers, and as an adult, her choices are...
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Chasing Fireflies
Charles MartinWhen paramedics find a malnourished sixyearold boy near a burning car that holds a dead woman, they wonder who he isand why he won't speak. From the New York Times bestselling auth...
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Running Away
Leslie ThomasWritten with the characteristic wit and good humour, Leslie Thomas's novel tells the story of a grown man who runs away from home, and the adventures that befall him in his que...
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Of Man
Thomas HobbesThe founding father of modern political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes, living in an era of horrific violence, saw human life as meaningless and cruel; here, he argues the only way to e...
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Ultimate Guide to Home Business
Charles FreemanUltimate Guide to Home Business really is the ultimate guide. It is one of the largest books ever created on the subject of home business and online earning. In this book you will ...
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The Time Machine
H.G. Wells & Patrick Parrinder'The father of science fiction' GuardianThe Time Machine is the first and greatest modern portrayal of timetravel. It sees a Victorian scientist propel himself into the year 802,70...
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Melmoth the Wanderer
Charles MaturinWith an essay by Alathea Hayter.'My hour is come ... the clock of eternity is about to strike, but its knell must be unheard by mortal ears!'This violent, profound, baroque and bla...
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King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table
Roger Lancelyn GreenKing Arthur is one of the greatest legends of all time. From the magical moment when Arthur releases the sword in the stone to the quest for the Holy Grail and the final tragedy of...
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Flash Point
Matt Croucher GCDan Coldrain is a former elite Royal Marine Commando haunted by the death of his best mate Reese, killed in action by enemy forces. Coldrain used to believe in honour, service, and...
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The Reopening of the Western Mind
Charles FreemanA monumental and exhilarating history of European thought from the end of Antiquity to the beginning of the Enlightenment500 to 1700 ADtracing the arc of intellectual history as it...
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The Tragic Muse
Henry James & Philip Horne'You must paint her just like that ... as the Tragic Muse' Suggests one of James's characters to Nick Dormer, the young Englishman who, during the course of the novel, will courage...
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The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works
A. SpearingContains The Cloud of Unknowing, The Mystical Theology of Saint Denis, The Book of Privy Counselling, and An Epistle on Prayer. Against a tradition of devotional writings which fo...
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Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan
Gordon JarvieMystery and excitement abound in this lively collection of fairy tales, folklore and legends, which celebrate Scotland's enormously rich oral tradition and offers a carefully chose...