Showing results by narrator "Keith Wright" in All Categories

Benno Neuburger, a modest land investor from Munich, and Anna Einstein, daughter of a cattle dealer from Laupheim, marry in 1907. They begin their lives together with great hope. It is a relatively prosperous time and a very optimistic one for German Jews who are enjoying a social renaissance in the industrializing, urbanizing rising star that is Germany. It’s not clear that this good fortune might begin to unravel.

When The Human takes on a minor mercenary job of protecting a group of settlers against alien marauders, it seems simple enough . . . until the bad guys don't take no for an answer, leaving Adam with only one option.

After his last two jobs left him broke and in debt, The Human for Hire is looking for a way to make some quick cash. And that's when three Human friends from his past show up, offering him a piece of the action in an upcoming bank robbery. At first, he says no. But then the details come out. It's behind enemy lines . . . and it's a Klin bank they'd be robbing. As Adam Cain says, "This could be the perfect crime." Get ready for Kelly's Heroes in Space, as Adam Cain and friends embark on a hair brain scheme to rob half-a-billion energy credits from a Klin bank.

Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them - including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson - came to deem America's constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation.

Is there a point to recycling? Is recycling even good for the environment? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Finn Arne Jørgensen answers: it depends. From a technical point of view, recycling is a series of processes - collecting, sorting, processing, manufacturing. Recycling also has a cultural component; at its core, recycling is about transformation and value, turning material waste into something useful - plastic bags into patio furniture, plastic bottles into T-shirts.

John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.

1985, Boston. In Vietnam, Andy Roark witnessed death and horrifying destruction. Still feeling adrift and unsettled, Andy has struck up a welcome friendship with Nguyen, a Vietnamese restaurant owner. Sipping beer and trading memories after the restaurant shutters, Andy gradually learns of the extraordinary lengths Nguyen took to flee Saigon shortly after its fall. Andy's latest case, too, has ties to Vietnam. His new client, a beautiful and enigmatic young Vietnamese woman, hires him to investigate her uncle's murder.

Inspired by a colleague's involvement in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, Wall Street attorney Donald A. Jelinek traveled to the Deep South to volunteer as a civil rights lawyer during his three-week summer vacation in 1965. He stayed for three years. In White Lawyer, Black Power, Jelinek recounts the battles he fought in defense of militant civil rights activists and rural African Americans, risking his career and his life to further the struggle for racial equality.

Sometimes a murder story lingers for years after the event. This one has lingered for more than a century, especially in New England. The setting is winter, 1873 on a small, obscure island 10 miles off the coast of Maine. Three women await the return of their men the following morning. A killer, who learns they are alone for one night, is rowing to their island, across 10 miles of open sea. The next day, a horrific scene is discovered. It stuns the seacoast towns and begins a series of events that are covered nationally in the months that follow.

It's a case reminiscent of the explosive story of Susan Smith, convicted in the drownings of her two young sons in South Carolina. But in The Unforgiven, three young children are in the back seat of a car driven by Amanda Hamm's boyfriend as it slips into an Illinois lake. Amanda and her boyfriend survive. Her three children do not.

One cannot turn on the news today without a report on an extreme-weather event or the latest update on Antarctica. But while our politicians argue, the truth is that climate change is already here. Nobody knows this better than Indigenous peoples, who, having developed an intimate relationship with ecosystems over generations, have observed these changes for decades. For them, climate change is not an abstract concept or policy issue, but the reality of daily life.

In 1955, small-town girls flock to Minneapolis for work, love, and adventure. But Teresa Hickman, from Dollar, North Dakota, is a special case. Beguiling. Promiscuous. And, on a chilly April morning, dead along an abandoned trolley track in a Southside neighborhood. Teresa Hickman was three months pregnant when she was strangled. Was the unborn child's father also her killer? Could the killer have been - among the many men drawn to her like flies to honey - Dr. H. David Rose, a middle-aged dentist who admits he was with her the night she died?

Americans are generous with their pocketbooks, but trying to make a difference and actually making a difference are two different things. Where Am I Giving? by New York Times best-selling author Kelsey Timmerman takes you on a journey to meet people who will inspire you to live a purpose-filled, generous life and make the greatest impact you can through your career, time, consumer dollars, and donations. 

Eminent ecologist Jeremy B. C. Jackson and award-winning journalist Steve Chapple traveled the length of the Mississippi River interviewing farmers, fishermen, scientists, and policymakers to better understand the mounting environmental problems ravaging the United States. Along their journey, which quickly expanded to California, Florida, and New York, the pair uncovered surprising and profound connections between ecological systems and environmental crises across the country. 

In Saving America's Cities, Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. 

Highlighting forgotten Black and White civil rights pioneers and weaving in the story of the author's own great-grandfather's crimes as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Freedom on Trial tells a gripping story of a moment pregnant with promise when race relations in the United States might have taken a dramatically different turn. 

All favors come with a cost, and after using what little favors he has in the Newark PD to get his private investigator's license, former crime reporter Russell Avery finds himself paying. Keyonna Jackson, a social justice activist, presents him with a troubling video: a made-for-YouTube cell phone snippet chronicling the same kind of questionable use of force that had set New York City, Ferguson, and Cleveland on fire in recent years. The same use of force that he's been covering up for Newark PD.

Arieel Bol is the religious leader of the planet Formil, Speaker of the Gods, and Carrier of the Sacred Bloodline. She also happens to be The Human's ex-lover and the mother of his daughter, Lila. So when Arieel is kidnapped by a radical religious sect known as the Armies of the Sun, Adam Cain is set loose on a mad mission to save Arieel, and before her scheduled public execution. The Armies of the Sun have already assassinated a dozen galactic religious leaders in the past few months and no one has been able to stop them . . . until now.

The alien with an attitude is back! But for how long? After the tragic events at the end of Secondary Protocol, the truth is finally revealed to Adam and his friends. Now, he's living on borrowed time as his resurrected body is rapidly deteriorating. To save Adam, the mutants—Panur and Lila—must take him to the Sol-Kor universe. But in doing so, they awaken the wrath of Queen J'nae, who will use all her resources to destroy Panur—along with any hope of Adam surviving. And to add insult to injury, the New Klin from Kracion's universe have invaded the Milky Way.

The Beatles and Duke Ellington's Orchestra stand as the two greatest examples of collaboration in music history. Duke University musicologist Thomas Brothers delivers a portrait of the creative process at work, demonstrating that the cooperative method at the foundation of these two artist-groups was the primary reason for their unmatched musical success. Help! describes in rich detail the music and mastery of two cultural leaders whose popularity has never dimmed, and the process of collaboration that allowed them to achieve an artistic vision greater than the sum of their parts.