Showing results by narrator "David Colacci" in All Categories

China's reform era is ending. Core factors that characterized it - political stability, ideological openness, and rapid economic growth - are unraveling.   

In this monumental history, Vaclav Smil provides a comprehensive account of how energy has shaped society, from pre-agricultural foraging societies through today's fossil fuel-driven civilization and offers listeners a magisterial overview of humanity's energy eras.

1816 was a remarkable year - mostly for the fact that there was no summer. As a result of a volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia, weather patterns were disrupted worldwide for months, allowing for excessive rain, frost, and snowfall through much of the Northeastern US and Europe in the summer of 1816.  

Set in the 23rd century, The Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, which has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish. Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and scientific arts, such as mathematics, music, logic, and philosophy, which he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).

Sex is at the core of our identities. And when it becomes a compulsion, it can unravel our lives. Out of the Shadows is the premier work on this disorder, written by a pioneer in its treatment. Revised and updated to include the latest research - and to address the exploding phenomenon of cybersex addiction - this third edition identifies the danger signs, explains the dynamics, and describes the consequences of sexual addiction and dependency.

 My Years with General Motors became an instant best seller when it was first published in 1963. It has since been used as a manual for managers, offering personal glimpses into the practice of the "discipline of management" by the man who perfected it. This is the story no other businessman could tell - a distillation of half a century of intimate leadership experience with a giant industry and an inside look at dramatic events and creative business management.   

He performs his profane ceremony in a wooded Minneapolis park, anointing his victims, then setting the bodies ablaze. He has already claimed three lives, and he won't stop there. Only this time there is a witness. But she isn't talking. Enter Kate Conlan, former FBI agent turned victim/witness advocate. Not even she can tell if the reluctant witness is a potential victim or something more troubling still.

The first victim is Dylan Vogler, a charming ex-convict who manages the Bay Beans West coffee shop in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. When his body is found, inspectors discover that his knapsack is filled with high-grade marijuana. It soon becomes clear that San Francisco's A-list flocked to Bay Beans West not only for their caffeine fix. But how much did Maya Townshend - the beautiful socialite niece of the city's mayor, and the absentee owner of the shop - know about what was going on inside her business?

It's 1939, in New York City. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat: smuggling himself out of Hitler's Prague. He's looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a partner in creating the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and dreams, they create the Escapist.

Returning to Rome from a forced sabbatical, a newly appointed Jesuit cardinal discovers a dark force that has ruled a single family for over 700 years has been unleashed against the world. With the clock ticking, he joins with a dedicated group of Israeli and Spanish scientists who are thrust into an endgame scenario as they race across the globe in an effort to stop the greatest threat mankind has ever faced, only to discover that they may already be too late.

How do neurons turn into minds? The problem of consciousness has gnawed at us for millennia. In the last century there have been massive breakthroughs that have rewritten the science of the brain, and yet the puzzles faced by the ancient Greeks are still present. In The Consciousness Instinct, the neuroscience pioneer Michael S. Gazzaniga puts the latest research in conversation with the history of human thinking about the mind, giving a big-picture view of what science has revealed about consciousness. 

By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics reaching back before the fifth-century-BCE Plague of Athens to the distrust and violence that erupted with Ebola in 2014, Epidemics challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics, that invariably across time and space, epidemics provoked hatred, blaming of the "other", and victimizing bearers of epidemic diseases, particularly when diseases were mysterious, without known cures or preventive measures.

At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer named Philip, living in London, and she is an articulate, intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage to which, in her 30s, she is already nervously half-resigned. The book's action consists of conversation - mainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love.

Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.   

Physician Ed Wheat has helped thousands of couples improve their love lives and build happier marriages. In Love Life for Every Married Couple, he'll help you improve your marriage through sharing, touching, appreciating, and focusing healing attention on your mate. Answering physical, psychological, and stress-related questions in a Christian context, Dr. Wheat demonstrates how to bring your feelings of love back to life. 

On their quest to reach the very core of the Earth, Professor Lindenbrock and his nephew, Axel, gain access to the interior by travelling north to cold and barren Iceland, where they enter the subterranean regions through the cone of the extinct volcano Sneffels.

Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum's dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human.... But the museum's directors plan to go ahead with a big bash to celebrate the new exhibition, in spite of the murders.

This book consists of two parts: the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" and "The Law of Peoples", a major reworking of a much shorter article by the same name. Taken together, they are the culmination of more than 50 years of reflection on liberalism and on some of the most pressing problems of our times.

The bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers was the pivotal event of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed. Ever since the bankruptcy, there has been heated debate about why the Federal Reserve did not rescue Lehman in the same way it rescued other financial institutions, such as Bear Stearns and AIG. The Fed's leaders from that time, especially former Chairman Ben Bernanke, have strongly asserted that they lacked the legal authority to save Lehman because it did not have adequate collateral for the loan it needed to survive. 

Each year,John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, challenges some of the world's greatest scientists, artists, and philosophers to answer a provocative question crucial to our time. In 2014 he asked 175 brilliant minds to ponder: What scientific idea needs to be put aside in order to make room for new ideas to advance? The answers are as surprising as they are illuminating.