One Click From Collapse
The author of POLAR WAR turns his attention to the insecurity of our digital infrastructure, arguing that as individuals and a nation, our data and lives have never been more vulnerable to criminals, rogue states, and environmental disaster, blending gripping narrative with policy and personal security advice to help keep us safe when the grid inevitably goes down.
Coming from Simon & Schuster, Spring 2028.
A gripping blend of travelogue and frontline reporting, Polar War reveals how climate change, military ambition, and economic opportunity are transforming the Arctic into the epicenter of a new Cold War, where a struggle for dominance between the planet’s great powers heralds the next global conflict.
Russian spies. Nuclear submarines. Sabotaged pipelines. Undersea communications severed in the dark of night. The fastest-warming place on earth—where buildings crumble as permafrost melts and villages get washed away by rising seas—the Arctic stands at the crossroads of geopolitical ambition and environmental catastrophe. As climate change thaws the northern latitudes, opening once ice-bound shipping lanes and access to natural resources, the world’s military powers are rushing to stake their claims in this increasingly strategic region. We’ve entered a new cold war—and every day it grows hotter.
In Polar War, Kenneth R. Rosen takes readers on an extraordinary journey across the changing face of the far north. Through intimate portraits of scientists, soldiers, and Indigenous community leaders representing the interests of twenty-one countries across four continents, he witnesses firsthand how rising temperatures and growing tensions are reshaping life above and below the Arctic Circle.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and three years of reporting from the frontlines of climate change and great power competition, Rosen blends incisive analysis with the vivid immediacy of a travelogue. His deeply researched and personal accounts capture the diverse landscapes, people, and conflicted interests that define this complex northern region. The result is both an elegy for a vanishing landscape and an urgent warning about how the race for Arctic dominance could spark the next global conflict.
“A series of merciless vignettes … anyone in the White House wanting to understand the context of the US president’s Greenland landgrab should buy Kenneth Rosen’s book Polar War.” — The Times of London
“These stories ground his higher-level geopolitical commentary in personal experience and contribute to humanizing a region frequently portrayed either as an empty frontier or a strategic chessboard.” — Science Magazine
“Timely, provocative…. Rosen is a talented writer. He deftly distills his research into vignette-like chapters filled with show-stopping adventures and small, intimate moments…. in less talented hands, a book such as Polar War might easily have turned out to be a dry, US-heavy affair. It will appeal to a wide audience.” — The Spectator
“Polar War acts as a valuable corrective.” — The Times Literary Supplement
“Captivating … Lyrical and deeply reported … Two years of travel to the Arctic regions and hundreds of interviews bolster Rosen’s hypnotic descriptions of the frigid crossroads where nations vie for domination and control.” — Publishers Weekly
“First-class reportage on an urgent dilemma… Not one to simply explain the problems, Rosen also provides a roadmap toward effective solutions. What might have been a stilted recitation of issues is instead an engrossing, soberly rendered cautionary tale.” — Kirkus (Starred Review)
“At once both immensely fascinating and alarming… a robust depiction of the Arctic climate, physically and politically … [an] extensively researched and accessible exposé.” — Booklist (Starred Review)
“Troubling and revealing.” — The Independent (U.K.)
“Rosen is fearless in his travels and perspicacious in his assessments … a timely wake-up call to the U.S.” — The Cipher Brief (A prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats)
“Terrifying, in a good way.” — New Scientist (U.K.)
“Thrilling … compelling.” — The Telegraph (U.K.)
“A timely warning of climate change and melting ice paving the way to military-led land-grabs for resources…Such reporting is indispensable in helping readers understand the region.” — Financial Times
“By anchoring the geopolitics in the realities of the region and its human stories, Kenneth R. Rosen makes an essential contribution to understanding what is really at stake at the top of the world.” — Keir Giles, author of Who Will Defend Europe?
“Polar War is a wake up call for the west to turn words into actions.” — Jonathan Beale, BBC Defence Correspondent
Instant U.K. Sunday Times bestseller
#1 Bestseller on Amazon (U.S., U.K., Canada)
Next Big Idea Book Club Finalist
Trump, Greenland, and the future of the arctic (1A, NPR)
Greenland, Minnesota, Army-Navy game: Another day, another emergency (Washington Post)
The Next Big Idea Club’s January 2026 Must-Read Books (NBIC)
Notable New Nonfiction (Daily Kos)
Intervista a Kenneth R. Rosen: “Ecco perché le superpotenze puntano alla conquista del Grande Nord” (La Repubblica)
Deep Dish Podcast (Chicago Council on Global Affairs)
Today Programme (BBC Radio 4)
Trump’s Threats to Greenland and the New Great Power Competition in the Arctic (Public Sphere)
A Recent Book Shows Why Invading Greenland Would Be a Dumb Idea (Reason)
Democrats, Europeans Decry ‘Appalling’ Trump Administration Rhetoric About Acquiring Greenland in the Name of Arctic Security (The New York Sun)
Melting Ice & Vanishing Cultures: The Chilling Costs of the New Cold War in the Artic (Keen On)
Trump Launching Polar War ‘Feels Inevitable’: Author (The Daily Beast)
All Eyes on the Arctic: The Race to Conquer a Vanishing Landscape (Next Big Idea Club)
Trump claims Russian and Chinese ships are “all over” Greenland. This is the reality (The New Statesman)
Kenneth R. Rosen, auteur de “Polar War” : “L’Amérique n’est pas prête pour la guerre en Arctique” (L’Express)
The Weekly Leaf Book of the Week (Aspen Security Forum)
Muito antes de Trump, Groenlândia já interessa aos EUA (Revista Oeste)
Troubled
An award-winning journalist’s breathtaking mosaic of the tough-love industry and the young adults it inevitably fails.
In the middle of the night, they are vanished.
Each year thousands of young adults deemed out of control―suffering from depression, addiction, anxiety, and rage―are carted off against their will to remote wilderness programs and treatment facilities across the country. Desperate parents of these “troubled teens” fear it’s their only option. The private, largely unregulated behavioral boot camps break their children down, a damnation the children suffer forever.
Acclaimed journalist Kenneth R. Rosen knows firsthand the brutal emotional, physical, and sexual abuse carried out at these programs. He lived it. In Troubled, Rosen unspools the stories of four graduates on their own scarred journeys through the programs into adulthood. Based on three years of reporting and more than one hundred interviews with other clients, their parents, psychologists, and health-care professionals, Troubled combines harrowing storytelling with investigative journalism to expose the disturbing truth about the massively profitable, sometimes fatal, grossly unchecked redirection industry.
Not without hope, Troubled ultimately delivers an emotional, crucial tapestry of coming of age, neglect, exploitation, trauma, and fraught redemption.
“A searing exposé.”—The New York Times
“Not just a work of extended empathy but a public service; these life stories, taken together, shine a light on an industry that has been able to thrive in darkness.” —Robert Kolker, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
“A necessary exposé for any parent.” —Kirkus Reviews
“An engrossing book, the saddest chapter of which details not the programmes themselves, but what happened to [the] protagonists afterwards.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Rosen is the exact right Conrad to take us into the heart of this immense darkness. Rosen’s insight, rigor, and immense sympathy ensure this book will stand as the definitive treatment of this troubled, troubling industry. An experience you won’t forget.” —Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life and The Queen of Tuesday
“Troubled is a searing chronicle of the unfortunate era of ‘tough love’ programs for wayward American youth, told with detail and compassion as well as an eloquent kind of well-merited rage.” —Luke Mogelson, contributing writer at The New Yorker
“Profoundly unsettling, Troubled reveals a tough-love industry in disarray. Rosen combines brilliant reporting skills and brutal first-hand experience in this captivating read.” —Michael Harris, author of Solitude and The End of Absence
“Rosen is a relentless reporter and provides a piercing view inside the disturbing, largely unregulated, teen rehabilitation industry. Rosen ensures you ask the question of what we’re doing to our nation’s children and who and what is in fact ‘troubled.’” —Sylvia A. Harvey, author of The Shadow System
“A vivid and eye-opening plea for reform.” —Michael Scott Moore, author of The Desert and the Sea
“Rosen makes a powerful case for eliminating this cruel part of the school-to-prison pipeline. A powerful, revealing expose.” —Katherine Reynolds Lewis, author of The Good News About Bad Behavior
Instant #1 Bestseller on Amazon
One of Newsweek’s Most Highly Anticipated Books of 2021
A New York Times Editor’s Choice
A New York Times ‘Book to Watch For’
Next Big Idea Book Club Finalist
Vol.1 Brooklyn Book of the Month
A Bustle Best Book of 2021
Q&A: The Writer Taking on the “Troubled Teen” Industry (Narratively)
Review: Scared Straight or Scarred for Life? (New York Times Sunday Book Review)
Essay: When I Was Labeled a ‘Troubled’ Teen, I Obliged (New York Times)
Op-Ed: How ‘troubled’ teens might be troubled no more (Salt Lake Tribune)
Bulletproof Vest
Bulletproof Vest is at once an introspective journey into the properties and precisions of a bulletproof vest on a molecular level and on the world stage.
It is also an ode to living precariously, an open letter that defends the notion that life is worth the risk.
“Nothing’s bulletproof,” the salesman said. “The thing’s only bullet resistant.”
New York Times journalist Kenneth R. Rosen had just purchased his first bulletproof vest and was headed off on assignment in Iraq. He was travelling into the city of Mosul when he came to realize that the idea of a bulletproof vest is more effective than the vest itself.
From its very inception, poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide, as the chemical compound of Kevlar is known, was meant for tires. Its humble roots and applications are often lost to the colloquialism of the word, now synonymous with body armor, war zones and domestic terrorism.
But in fact, Kevlar is used as a material in more than 200 applications, including tennis rackets, skis, and parachute lines.
What Rosen learned through an intimate use of his bulletproof vest was that it acts as a metaphor for all the precautions we take toward digital, physical, and social security; at their most extreme, bulletproof vests represent a human desire to forge ahead.
Named One of the Most Fascinating Books WIRED Read in 2020
“In Bulletproof Vest, Rosen explores the significance of this war zone accessory with compelling nuance and knowledge of military history. Perhaps more impressive, though, is his willingness to explore the relationship between military protective gear and human vulnerability.”
–LA Review of Books
“For the author, a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, the idea of a bulletproof vest (or a ‘bullet resistant’ one, as the salesman reminded him) suggested a potent metaphor for humanity’s relationship to violence, security, and mortality. His book mixes his own wartime accounts from Iraq and Syria with discussions of anxiety and the history of body armor; along the way, Rosen seeks to describe just what he was trying to banish when he put on his vest. The author’s prose alternates between being confessional and informative . . . Over the course of this reliably tense book, Rosen does a wonderful job of emphasizing the destructive power of warfare by framing his thoughts around accounts of being a noncombatant in a war zone. Overall, it’s a quick read but one with great impact, as it asks its audience not only to think about protective vests, but also about the soft, vulnerable things that they’re meant to protect. A compelling, thoughtful dive into the pursuit of being bulletproof.”
–Kirkus Reviews
“A tense but beautifully written frontlines study of war in the fashion of Michael Herr’s Vietnam era book ‘Dispatches.’”
–The Day (Conn.)
“Rosen, war-reporter, journalist, abyss-looker, intuiter of the human spirit, presents the materials of war, stitches them together in a fascinating story that shows no matter how tight and polymeric the jacket, the true dangers of war are the mental wounds that go straight to your head. His insights into war do what they can to protect us from those wounds – but like the vest, offer an imperfect protection. Thankfully, Rosen’s words are near perfect and perfectly moving.”
–Nicole Walker, Professor of English at Northern Arizona University, USA, and author of Sustainability: A Love Story (2018)
Necessary Protection: Erica Wright interviews Kenneth R. Rosen (Los Angeles Review of Books)
The Long, Fraught History of the Bulletproof Vest (Smithsonian Magazine)
The Illusion of Perfect Protection (WIRED)
Where Journalists Prepare for the Worst the World Can Throw at Us (Narratively)
Reliably tense … A quick read but one with great impact … A compelling, thoughtful dive into the pursuit of being bulletproof. (Kirkus)
In Searching for Dead ISIS Fighters in Iraq, I Found Refuge in My Friends (Newsweek)
Bulletproof Coffee to Bulletproof Vest: An Object Lessons Interview (The Millions)