Showing results by narrator "Adam Barr" in All Categories

As increasingly contentious politics in the United States raise concerns over the "politicization" of traditionally non-partisan institutions, many have turned their attention to how the American military has been—and will be—affected by this trend. Since a low point following the end of the Vietnam War, the US military has experienced a dramatic reversal of public opinion, becoming one of the most trusted institutions in American society. However, this trend is more complicated than it appears.

Belief and Cult argues that belief isn't uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion. Drawing on cognitive theory, Jacob Mackey shows that despite having nothing to do with salvation or faith, belief underlay every aspect of Roman religious practices—emotions, individual and collective cult action, ritual norms, social reality, and social power. In doing so, he also offers a thorough argument for the importance of belief to other non-Christian religions.

As head of the crisis management team at a Madison Avenue PR firm, Leonard Lundell spends his days counseling executives whose reputations have been ruined by scandal. But Leonard has been managing a strange and debilitating crisis of his own that’s held him captive his entire adult life: Leonard likes to eat soap, pencils, paint chips—anything with no nutritional value. For years, he’s kept his compulsion hidden behind a professional veneer. 

Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis are diseases that disrupt your body's ability to digest food, absorb nutrition, and eliminate waste in a healthy manner. Crohn's and Colitis For Dummies is the ultimate reference to these common forms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including tips on how to recognize and control the symptoms, so you can get your life back.

The vivid, behind-the-scenes story of perhaps the most consequential political moment in American history—Abraham Lincoln’s history-changing nomination to lead the Republican Party in the 1860 presidential election.

The last time Canada qualified for a men's World Cup was in 1986. For a generation afterwards, the Canadian national men's soccer team struggled in obscurity, an afterthought in a country that was not yet soccer-mad. The twenty-first century brought a wave of soccer passion and expertise to this frozen country—and a crop of new superstar players who lifted the forgotten team into the international spotlight.

In ways visible and invisible to their fellow recruits and conscripts, the experience of Jews was distinct from that of other soldiers who served in Lincoln's armies. Adam D. Mendelsohn draws for the first time upon the vast database of verified listings of Jewish soldiers serving in the Civil War collected by The Shapell Roster, as well as letters, diaries, and newspapers, to examine the collective experience of Jewish soldiers and to recover their voices and stories.

Our culture today is in a state of crisis where intellectual virtue is concerned. Dishonesty, cheating, arrogance, laziness, cowardice—such vices are rampant in society, even among the world's most prominent leaders. We find ourselves in an ethical vacuum, as the daily headlines of our newspapers confirm again and again. Central to the problem is the state of education. We live in a technological world that has ever greater access to new information and yet no idea what to do with it all.

Three seemingly unrelated events are part of a mosaic created by Satan’s warriors to lure Brady, the young man who talks with angels and who can call on the Light of the Blessed Virgin, to a place where his maddening interference will be destroyed once and for all. But Brady is anointed by God for such a time as this. With his brothers and an ancient line of Hebrew warriors at his side, he again charges boldly into battle, facing Satan’s foulest in Rome, Paris, and a place of unspeakable horror in Calcutta, India, as he comes to the aid of an Albanian nun.

The United States spends enormous sums on helping people—$3.8 trillion on healthcare, $182 billion on prisons, and $604 billion on higher education—and yet these systems routinely fail us. When we seek to improve how they function, our efforts focus on policy debates, technical solutions, funding, and data. But if these systems are to truly improve, we have to start with the human values behind them. Broken explores the deeply human dimensions we must consider if we want to rebuild the policies, technologies, processes, and most importantly, the heart we use to serve people.

Democracy is in trouble. Populism is a common scapegoat, but not the root cause. More basic are social and economic transformations eroding the foundations of democracy, ruling elites trying to lock in their own privilege, and cultural perversions like making individualistic freedom the enemy of democracy's other crucial ideals of equality and solidarity. In Degenerations of Democracy, three of our most prominent intellectuals investigate democracy gone awry, locate our points of fracture, and suggest paths to democratic renewal.

Brought to you by Penguin. Winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Award Best Book of the Year -New York Public Library, Cosmopolitan, Independent Book Review In 1913, a Russian ballet incited a riot in Paris at the new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées. "Only a Russian could do that," says...

This middle grade edition of the groundbreaking bestseller by Doug Tallamy will inspire kids to use their backyard to help save the planet. In Nature's Best Hope (Young Readers' Edition), Tallamy empowers kids to use their own yards to help combat the negative effects of climate change. He does...

Liberalism puts its trust in civil discourse and rational argument. Today, its opponents enthusiastically flout these norms, making a show of defying so-called political correctness. In the Trump era and beyond, right-wing figures delight in sheer offensiveness. What is at stake in breaking the rules of civility to "own the libs"? 

Paul is a recently demoted adjunct instructor of freshman comp, a divorced but doting Brooklyn father, and a self-desc­ribed “curmudgeonly crank” cataloging his resentment of the priorities of modern life in a book called The Luddite Manifesto. Outraged by the authoritarian creeps ruining the country, he is determined to better the future for his young daughter, one aggrieved lecture at a time. 

Accessible to students, tourists, and general listeners alike, this book provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, new material has come to light on the history of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of Russia's pre-revolutionary past.

One of Slate's 10 Best Audiobooks of 2023 "There may be no more important listen regarding the fate of the nation's democracy than this historical record."- AudioFile "This fact-based accounting of the events of January 6, 2021, is one of the essential historical documents of this era. The...

Political journalist Michael Tomasky tracks an exciting change among progressive economists who are overturning decades of conservative dogma and offering an alternative version of capitalism that can serve broadly shared prosperity to all. "Engaging, briskly paced ... On balance, history...

In 1997 a six-year-old boy questioned by authorities relayed disturbing stories of abuse. The more he talked, the more people were implicated in his shocking revelations. And he was only the first child to come forward. Within a year, fifteen more children with similar tales were transferred out of the Bassa region of Italy to protected locations. Their parents were accused of belonging to a satanic sect that performed sex rituals under the aegis of beloved local priest Don Giorgio Govoni. With each child’s confession, the network of monsters grew. 

They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. Until now, the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here.