Showing results by narrator "David Colacci" in All Categories

The Hairstons is the extraordinary story of the largest family in America, the Hairston clan. With several thousand black and white members, the Hairstons share a complex and compelling history: divided in the time of slavery, they have come to embrace their past as one family.

After the bursting of the real-estate bubble, the US pushed a monetary and fiscal policy that is, at best, blatantly wrong, and, at worst, carries enormous financial risk. And because Washington knows this, America's greatest weapon - its propaganda machine - has been called into service, diverting attention away from the fact that it was and continues to be government interference in the market economy that's lead us to where we are now, namely at the end of one financial calamity and the beginning of yet another. 

Ivory's Ghosts is the first comprehensive, contemporary look at the world's most treasured organic material, ivory. Using a wide range of historical and firsthand reportage, John Frederick Walker tells the astonishing and sometimes savage story of ivory's enormous impact on both human history and that of its most important source: the majestic African elephant.

Deftly solving critical but intractable national and global problems was the leitmotif of George Pratt Shultz's life. While political, social, and cultural dynamics have changed profoundly since Shultz served at the commanding heights of American power in the 1970s and 1980s, his legacy and the lessons of his career have even greater meaning now that the Shultz brand of conservatism has been almost erased in the modern Republican Party.

The history of Jerusalem is one of conflict, faith, and empire. Few cities have been attacked as often and as savagely. This was no less true in the Middle Ages. From the Persian sack in 614 through the bloody First Crusade and beyond, Jerusalem changed hands countless times. But despite these horrific acts of violence, its story during this period is also one of interfaith tolerance and accord. In this gripping history, John D. Hosler explores the great clashes and delicate settlements of medieval Jerusalem.

My Ántonia chronicles the life of Ántonia, a Bohemian immigrant woman, as seen through the eyes of Jim, the man unable to forget her. Jim, now a successful New York lawyer, recollects his upbringing on a Nebraska farm. Even after twenty years, Ántonia continues to live a romantic life in his imagination. When he returns to Nebraska, he finds Ántonia has lived a battered life and is now abandoned by the very man to whom she dedicated her life.

On the evening before Thanksgiving, Hal Chase, a guard in the San Francisco County Jail, drives to the airport to pick up his step-brother for the weekend. When they return, Hal’s wife, Katie, has disappeared without a clue. By the time Dismas Hardy hears about this, Katie has been missing for five days. The case strikes close to home because Katie had been seeing Hardy’s wife, a marriage counselor. By this time, the original Missing Persons case has become a suspected homicide, and Hal is the prime suspect.

The Curtlees are a powerful force in San Francisco, unscrupulous billionaires who’ve lined every important pocket in the Bay Area in pursuit of their own ascent. So when the family’s heir, Ro Curtlee, was convicted of rape and murder a decade ago, the fallout for those who helped to bring him to justice was swift and uncompromising. The jury foreman was fired from his job and blacklisted in his industry.

When Dismas Hardy agrees to clean up the caseload of recently disappeared attorney Charlie Bowen, he thinks it will be easy. But one of the cases is far from small-time - the appeal to overturn the murder conviction of National Guard reservist Evan Scholler, who has been sentenced to life without parole for the murder of an ex-Navy SEAL and private contractor named Ron Nolan. Two rapid-fire events in Iraq conspired to bring the men into fatal conflict.

In this riveting new novel, best-selling author John Darnton transports us to Victorian England and around the world to reveal the secrets of a legendary 19th-century figure. Darnton elegantly blends the power of fact and the insights of fiction to explore the many mysteries attached to the life and work of Charles Darwin.

In the winter of 1967-68, Robert F. Kennedy, then a US Senator from New York, ventured deep into the heart of Appalachia. As acting chairman of a Senate subcommittee on poverty, RFK went to eastern Kentucky to gauge the progress of the War on Poverty. He was deeply disillusioned by what he found. Kennedy learned that job training programs were useless, welfare programs proved insufficient, and jobs were scarce and getting scarcer. Before he'd even left the state, Kennedy had determined the War on Poverty was a failure - and he blamed Lyndon Johnson.  

"The ultimate literary bucket list . . . 948 pages later, you still want more!" —The Washington Post Celebrate the thrill of discovering new titles in an extraordinary book that's as entertaining, surprising, and enlightening as the titles it recommends. Covering fiction, poetry, science and...

Originally published in 1973, Thomas Szasz's collection of aphorisms, definitions, and maxims strikes at the heart of confusion, mystification, and humbug, in the areas of human relations, language, thought, and psychiatry. The book covers the remarkable range of one of America's most original...

Machiavelli on War offers a comprehensive interpretation of the philosopher-historian's treatment of war throughout his writings, from poems and memoranda drafted while he was Florence's top official to his posthumous works, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. Christopher Lynch argues that the issue of war permeates the form and content of each of Machiavelli works, the substance of his thoughts, and his own activity as a writer, concluding that he was the first great modern philosopher because he was the first modern philosopher of war.

Among the more than 34,000 species of fish, few have the walleye's following—among anglers and diners, states conferring official status on the fish, and towns battling for recognition as the Walleye Capital of the World. And among those passionate fans, few know the walleye as well as Paul J. Radomski does—a fisheries biologist, lake ecology scientist, and old fisherman. In Walleye: A Beautiful Fish of the Dark he unspools the mysteries of this fascinating fish.

Sex is everywhere in modern society, yet it remains taboo. We all have questions about sex that are too uncomfortable to ask—how do we get reliable answers? In this go-to guide Drs Grant and Chamberlain use their clinical expertise to answer the questions you wish you could ask about sex.

American Traitor examines the career of the notorious Gen. James Wilkinson, whose corruption and espionage exposed the United States to grave dangers during the early years of the republic. Wilkinson is largely forgotten today, which is unfortunate because his sordid story is a cautionary tale about unscrupulous actors who would take advantage of gaps in the law, oversight, and accountability for self-dealing.

To place the story of tuberculosis in Arkansas in historical perspective, the authors trace the origins of the disease. Arkansas suffered some of the worst ravages of the disease, and the authors argue that many of the improvements in the state's medical infrastructure grew out of the desperate need to control it.

In The Progress Illusion, Jon D. Erickson charts the rise of the economic worldview and its infiltration into our daily lives as a theory of everything. Drawing on his own experience as a young economist inoculated in the 1980s era of "greed is good," Erickson shows how pseudoscience came to dominate economic thought. He pokes holes in the conventional wisdom of neo-classical economics, illustrating how flawed theories about financial decision-making and maximizing efficiency ignore human psychology and morality.

In the midst of a disagreement, many couples ask themselves, “What are we really fighting about?” Sound familiar? As it turns out, breakups and divorce don’t happen because couples fight, they happen because of how couples fight. In this much-needed book, Judith and Bob Wright—two married counselors and coaches with over thirty years of experience helping couples learn how to fight well—present their tried-and-true methods for exploring the emotions that underlie many relationship fights.