Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies that Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership by Conrad Black chronicles American strategic history from our pre-revolution days to becoming the unrivaled supreme power in the world in just 235 years.

The book debunks the notion that our superpower status is merely the product of good geography, demographics, and good luck. Instead, it explores the challenges overcome and wars won, the visionary ideals of freedom and enterprise achieved, and the statesmen and their momentous strategic decisions, some well-known and others under-appreciated, that won the future for America.

Conrad Black has an extraordinary personal history—as colorful as any blockbuster film. Journalist, biographer, historian, attorney, financier, international media magnate and member of the British House of Lords (“Lord Black of Crossharbour”), in 2003 Black was named “business newsmaker of the year” by The Canadian Press.

His successful career was abruptly interrupted in 2003 and 2004 when he and his associates were fired from the positions they had held for decades, indicted, in Black’s case on 17 counts including racketeering, money laundering, embezzlement, fraud, and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors sought life imprisonment and fines and restitution of $140 million, but Black never ceased to deny all the charges and all were abandoned, rejected by jurors, or unanimously vacated by the US Supreme Court.

Black gained the largest libel settlement in Canadian history against his original accusers, but not before a lower court retrieved one count of fraud and one of obstruction of justice and he spent a total of three years in federal prison, where he wrote A Matter of Principle, a book about his legal travails, a powerful defense of his case, and also wrote much of his new book, Flight of the Eagle. The book, by the convicted criminal who fought his case all the way to almost complete success, is a fine work of history for which Henry Kissinger wrote the introduction. Much of the work was written from his prison cell.

At this time, Black cannot re-enter the United States, but is available for radio and print interviews by phone and remote TV interviews through Canadian studios. He remains an admirer of many aspects of the United States, and an ardent believer in the “long, swift rise of America.”

Flight of the Eagle was published by Encounter Books in May 2013.