Showing results by narrator "Sean Runnette" in All Categories

Hamilton Stark is a New Hampshire pipe fitter and the sole inhabitant of the house from which he evicted his own mother. He is the villain of five marriages and the father of a daughter so obsessed that she has been writing a book about him for years. Hamilton Stark is a boor, a misanthrope, a...

This dark yet funny story is told by a man who for two months has been a patient at a New York City mental ward. Having suffered a breakdown, he now finds himself caught between two worlds: the world of the ward, where abnormality and an odd sort of freedom reign, and the outside world, where convention and restrictive behavior rule. Finally on his way to becoming reasonably "normal" again, he is granted a “solo pass”, which allows him to leave the ward for several hours and visit the city.

It's 1976. Dr. Colin Sanford, a brilliant, ambitious obstetrician in the Pacific Northwest city of Emerald, has a plan to create the first in vitro baby. He recruits Dr. Giselle Hearn, an experienced laboratory geneticist/embryologist at the university who’s frustrated by the ultraconservative policies of her department chairman. Drs. Sanford and Hearn, working secretly, set out to put their names in the history books. Unfortunately, a secret that big is hard to keep....

From day one of the BP oil spill, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal acted as a leader in a crisis should: quickly and decisively - providing a stark contrast to President Obama, who dithered and bogged down the containment process with needless bureaucracy. In his new book, Leadership and Crisis, Jindal reveals the extent of the Obama administration’s incompetence during the oil spill and shows why commonsense conservative solutions are exactly what we need to solve all of our nation’s biggest problems.

Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the "Hollywood Renaissance" or "New Hollywood" period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema.

Lewis' day begins with a bitter quarrel with his wife and ends on a crumbling, overgrown jungle airstrip somewhere deep in war-torn Congo. With the cockpit on fire, the pilots of his plane make an emergency landing and within hours the plane is seized by rebel troops. When his wife makes a daring decision to search for him in Africa, The Curve of the World becomes a gripping, heartrending tale about regaining love and conviction.

In Trajectory of Power, leading political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe provide a sweeping account of the historical rise of presidential power, arguing that it has now grown to the point where, in the wrong hands, it threatens to subvert American democracy and replace it with a de facto system of strongman rule, whether led by Donald Trump or someone else.

Psychologist Kenneth Barish explains the sources and consistency of our political beliefs and why we continue to disagree about fundamental issues in American life. He offers antidotes to the angry, repetitive, and unproductive arguments that now dominate our political culture. Barish teaches us how to listen, think, and speak about our political opinions in a way that allows us to understand each other's concerns, resist false dichotomies and ideological certainty, see new perspectives and possibilities, and find common ground. 

Heirs to the renowned German-American Bergdoll Beer fortune at a young age, the Bergdoll boys used their millions to become champion race car drivers and pioneer aviation heroes in the early 1900s. Then, just as Grover is trying to buy a bigger plane to set more records and attempt to fly to Europe a decade before Lindbergh, they're snared by vengeful local military draft officials. Running and hiding from their war duty, the fugitives are so reviled by nationalistic Americans that two older brothers change their names to avoid infamy.