Showing results by narrator "Robertson Dean" in All Categories

In this widely hailed book, NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten fuses the story of the Bacardi family and their famous rum business with Cuba's tumultuous experience over the last 150 years to produce a deeply entertaining historical narrative. The company Facundo Bacardi, launched in Cuba in 1862, brought worldwide fame to the island, and in the decades that followed, his Bacardi descendants participated in every aspect of Cuban life.

There was no single, dramatic event that set the current financial crisis off. A whole series of very questionable decisions by many people, in many places, over a period of years, built up the pressures that led to a sudden collapse of the housing market and of financial institutions that began to fall like dominoes as a result of investing in securities based on housing prices. This book is designed to unravel the tangled threads of that story.

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.

When historians want to find out about the ideas that motivated American foreign policy in the early years of the twenty-first century, they would do well to read this book. Robert Kagan has formally set out a case for unilateralism on the part of the United States, as opposed to the multilateralism now characteristic of Europe. Kagan believes that the United States can disregard a weak Europe, and have a free hand in pursuing its global interests.

No radio distress call ever crackled from the submarine USS Grunion. In 1942, under the fog of World War II, the vessel simply vanished without a trace. For nearly sixty-five years, only a dead silence lingered regarding the fate of the sub and its seventy-man crew—until now. Here author Peter F. Stevens reveals the incredible true story of the search for and discovery of the Grunion—as well as the navy’s shocking and willful cover-up of the submarine’s baffling disappearance.

In the highly anticipated new book from the best-selling author of Judgment of Paris,George M. Taber reveals the integral role gold played in World War II, from its influence on the Nazi war machine to the ultimate triumph by the Allies and the fall of Berlin.

The Gettysburg Address, delivered by Lincoln on November 19, 1863, in the aftermath of a narrow, bloody Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg, is considered one of the greatest speeches in American history.

From the author of the New York Times best-selling Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism) comes Red Hot Lies, an exposé of the hypocrisy, deceit, and outright lies of the global warming alarmists and the compliant media that supports them. Did you know that most scientists are global-warming skeptics? Or that environmental alarmists have knowingly promoted false and exaggerated data on global warming?

Renowned critic Greil Marcus takes on the fascinating legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. An enthralling parable (or a cheap metaphor) of the American Dream as a beckoning finger toward a con game, a kind of virus infecting artists of all sorts over nearly a century, Fitzgerald's story has become a key to American culture and American life itself.

Captain Guyan March had spent his entire professional career aboard Windjammer Barefoot Cruises’ fleet of extravagant tall ships that carry passengers on weeklong fantasy cruises spiced with rum and sun. When he agreed to command the Fantome, Windjammer’s marquee ship, a beautiful 282-foot schooner that “sailed like a pig” in the Gulf of Honduras, he knew that a storm would leave him little space to run. In the southern reaches of the Caribbean, Tropical Storm Mitch whirled to life like a nebula and became Captain March’s worst nightmare.

Martin Conway comes from a family filled with heroes and disgraces. His grandfather was a statesman who worked at the US Embassy in London during WWII. His father is an alcoholic who left his family. His sister is an overachieving Ivy League graduate. And Martin? Martin is stuck in between—floundering. But during the summer after 7th grade, Martin meets a boy who will change his life forever. Jimmy Harker appears one night with a deceptively simple question: Will you help?

Nevada; the near future; a family about to implode. In a world run by computers, hackers have power - and awkward, home-schooled Colt is among the best. But when Colt secretly submits his mother Naomi's breakthrough research to a biotech conference and it is immediately shut down, mother and son are forced to go on the run. Now Colt is coding for his life.

Imagine a robotic stuffed animal that can read and respond to a child's emotional state or a commercial that can change based on a customer's facial expression. Heart of the Machine explores the next giant step in the relationship between humans and technology: the ability of computers to recognize, respond to, and even replicate emotions. Computers have long been integral to our lives, and their advances continue at an exponential rate.

An exploration of how we can be transformed by the God who gives abundantly and who forgives unconditionally.

This landmark, myth-shattering work chronicles the most powerful institution in America, the people who created it, and the pathologies it has spawned. Carroll proves a controversial thesis: The Pentagon has, since its founding, operated beyond the control of any force in government or society. It is the biggest, loosest cannon in American history, and no institution has changed this country more.

Long fascinated with the Mexican Revolution and the vicious border wars of the early 20th century, Winston Groom brings to life a much-forgotten period of history in this sprawling saga of heroism, injustice, and love. An episodic novel set in six parts, El Paso pits the legendary Pancho Villa, a much-feared outlaw and revolutionary, against a thrill-seeking railroad tycoon known as the Colonel, whose fading fortune is tied up in a colossal ranch in Chihuahua, Mexico.

Iain Murray's exposé reveals how environmental blowhards actually do more to waste energy, endanger species, and kill people than those they finger, while capitalism, hunting, and old-fashioned property rights have made the planet better. Rather than just myth busting and blame shifting, Murray offers applicable and effective solutions for each catastrophe - something the Left has yet to do.

The culminating volume in Richard Rhodes’s monumental and prizewinning history of nuclear weapons, offering the first comprehensive narrative of the challenges faced in a post-Cold War age. The past 20 years have transformed our relationship with nuclear weapons drastically. With extraordinary depth of knowledge and understanding, Rhodes makes clear how the five original nuclear powers - Russia, Great Britain, France, China, and especially the United States - have struggled with new realities.

President George W. Bush leads our nation in a time of unprecedented peril. But how well do we really know him or his remarkable family, whose history often mirrors the history of America? Now, in the first full-scale biography of the Bushes, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer trace the extraordinary trajectory of their rise to power. Through a series of exclusive, surprisingly candid interviews with members of the family and close friends, the inner workings of this very private family are revealed.

The central issue of Jesus' death is not the cause, but the meaning - God's meaning. That is what this book is about. John Piper has gathered from the New Testament 50 reasons. Not 50 causes, but 50 purposes - in answer to the most important question that each of us must face: What did God achieve for sinners like us in sending his Son to die?