...that fanaticism known only to an overachiever, one who lives with the eternal fear that some lurking underachiever will, in a flash of brilliance, achieve more.

The essence of any hierarchy is retaliation.

The only threat to a dominant group is the quality of connection among the members of the subordinate group. Stick together.

The celebrations had been premature. The victory at Stalingrad had wounded the enemy severely, but it had not permanently broken him. Even the gains of February 1943 proved ephemeral. The Soviets held on to Kharkov for barely a month. In March, they were driven back, leaving the city to the Fascists once again. It was a bitter moment for the army and a catastrophe for Kharkov's citizens, who now faced the redoubled anger of their conquerors as well as the privations of another hungry spring. Far away, in the unimaginable light of the Tunisian desert, Montgomery's troops were driving Rommel and his men toward the sea. The outcome of the Soviet Union's war was still unclear.

That spring, the Soviet leadership gathered to consider the coming year's campaign.

Excerpt:

In October 1949, Wisner teamed up with the British to run rebels into communist Albania, the poorest and most isolated nation in Europe. He saw this barren Balkan outcrop as fertile ground for a resistance army formed from exiled royalists and ragtag loyalists in Rome and Athens. A ship launched from Malta carried nine Albanians on the first commando mission. Three men were killed immediately and the secret police chased down the rest. Wisner had neither the time nor the inclination for introspection. He flew more Albanian recruits to Munich for parachute training, then turned them over to the Athens station, which had its own airport, a fleet of planes, and some tough Polish pilots.

They jumped into Albania and landed in the arms of the secret police.

The director of Fairview-University Children's Hospital's cystic fibrosis center for almost forty years has been Warren Warwick, the pediatrician who had conducted the study of LeRoy Matthews' suspiciously high success rate. Ever since then, Warwick has made a study of what it takes to do better than everyone else. The secret, he insists, is simple, and he learned it from Matthews: you do whatever you can to keep your patients' lungs as open as possible. Patients with Cystic Fibrosis at Fairview got the same things that patients everywhere got - some nebulized treatments to loosen secretions and unclog passageways, antibiotics, and a good thumping on their chests every day. Yet somehow, everything Warwick did was different.

In the clinic one afternoon, I joined him as he saw a 17-year-old high school senior named Janelle, who had been diagnosed with CF at the age of six and had been under his care ever since.