Showing results by narrator "Robertson Dean" in All Categories

The Power Broker tells the story of Robert Moses, the single most powerful man in New York for almost half a century and the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever once being elected to office, he created for himself a position of supreme and untouchable authority, allowing him to utterly reshape the city of New York, turning it into the city we know today, while at the same time blighting the lives of millions and remaining accountable to no one.

On 3 December 1976, just weeks before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions, seven gunmen from West Kingston stormed his house. Marley survived and went on to perform at the free concert. Not a lot was recorded about the fate of the seven gunmen, but much has been said, whispered and sung about in the streets of West Kingston.

Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote on a wide range of subjects, from Greek philosophy to moral duty to friendship. Though he considered philosophy secondary to politics and often used his writings for explicit political ends, his work has nevertheless been widely read for over two thousand years and has influenced everything from the culture of the Renaissance to the ideals of the founding fathers of the United States.

Historian and World War II expert Donald Miller brings us the story of the bomber boys who brought the war to Hitler's doorstep. Unlike ground soldiers, they slept on clean beds, drank beer in local pubs and danced to the swing music of the travelling Air Force bands. But they were also an elite group of fighters who put their lives on the line in the most dangerous role of all. Miller takes listeners from the adrenaline filled battles in the sky, to the airbases across England, the German prison camps and onto the ground to understand the devastation faced by civilians.

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to Scripture - is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

In I Am Legend, a plague has decimated the world, and those unfortunate enough to survive are transformed into blood-thirsty creatures of the night. Robert Neville is the last living man on earth. Everyone else has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville's blood. By day, he stalks the sleeping undead, by night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn.

The New York Times best seller. Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways, but there is an ominous flipside. Criminals are often the earliest and most innovative adopters of technology, and modern times have led to modern crimes. Today's criminals are stealing identities, draining online bank accounts, and wiping out computer servers.

This book says outright what many have merely hinted at: that President George W. Bush knowingly misused the findings of the erroneous and incompetent U.S. intelligence community to provide a pretext for war with Iraq. The author hones in on the systematic weaknesses of the intelligence agencies that caused them to ignore the crucial signs leading up to the attacks of 9/11.

The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the 10 years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower, Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon; but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the American hamburger; Kemmons Wilson, who placed his Holiday Inns along the nation's roadsides; and more.

Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay: In Rashid's opium room a young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame as men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. In Shuklaji Street they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. But then whispers build of a new terror, something that shifts the tenuous balance of survival for the city's nameless, invisible poor. A rich, hallucinatory dream of a novel, Narcopolis captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets and gangsters, it is a lyrical and unforgettable journey into a sprawling underworld.

Beowulf is considered the finest heroic poem in Old English. It celebrates the character and exploits of Beowulf, a young nobleman and warrior, as he proves his superhuman strength and endurance. He also represents the ideal lord and vassal, rewarding his men generously and accomplishing glorious deeds to honor his king.

Based on months spent with the battalions in Fallujah and hundreds of interviews at every level (senior policymakers, negotiators, generals, and soldiers and Marines on the front lines) No True Glory is a testament to the bravery of the American soldier and a cautionary tale about the complex, and often costly, interconnected roles of policy, politics, and battle in the twenty-first century.

Here is the modern classic that interweaves the solitude, silence, and prayer of the fourth- and fifth-century Egyptian Desert Fathers and Mothers with our contemporary search for an authentic spirituality.

Free Play is directed toward people in any field who want to contact, honor, and strengthen their own creative powers. It integrates material from a wide variety of sources among the arts, sciences, and spiritual traditions of humanity. Filled with unusual quotes, amusing and illuminating anecdotes, and original metaphors, it reveals how inspiration arises within us; how that inspiration may be blocked, derailed, or obscured by certain unavoidable facts of life; and how it can finally be liberated - how we can be liberated - to speak or sing, write or paint, dance or play.

Gifted storyteller Winston Groom, the best-selling author of Forrest Gump, has written the fascinating story of three extraordinary heroes who defined aviation during the great age of flight: Charles Lindbergh, Eddie Rickenbacker, and Jimmy Doolittle. These cleverly interwoven tales of their heart-stopping adventures take us from the feats of World War I through the heroism of World War II and beyond, including daring military raids and survival at sea, and will appeal to fans of Unbroken, The Greatest Generation, and Flyboys.

With The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors and Ship of Ghosts, James D. Hornfischer created essential and enduring narratives about America’s World War II Navy, works of unique immediacy distinguished by rich portraits of ordinary men in extremis and exclusive new information. Now he does the same for the deadliest, most pivotal naval campaign of the Pacific war: Guadalcanal. Neptune’s Inferno is at once the most epic and the most intimate account ever written of the contest for control of the seaways of the Solomon Islands.

Tory Bodeen grew up in a run-down house where her father ruled with an iron fist and a leather belt - and where her dreams and talents had no room to flourish. Her one escape was her neighbor Hope, who lived in the big house just a short skip away, and whose friendship allowed Tory to be something she wasn’t allowed to be at home: a child. Then Hope was brutally murdered, and everything fell apart.

Francis Ouimet and Harry Vardon came from different worlds and different generations, but their passion for golf set them on parallel paths that would collide in the greatest match their sport had ever known.

Offering a “CliffsNotes guide” to some of the most important literary works of our time, Benjamin Wiker, author of 10 Books That Screwed Up the World, turns his discerning eye from the great texts that have done damage to Western civilization to the great texts that could help rebuild it.

Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense - one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The book explores the incentives, the visions, and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups but for societies as a whole.