Showing results by narrator "Michael Prichard" in All Categories

Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past?

The purpose of Why Architecture Matters is to "come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually" - with its impact on our lives. "Architecture begins to matter," writes Paul Goldberger, "when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads."

Whether hunting warlords in Japan, druglords in Colombia, or nuclear terrorists in the United States, John Clark is efficient and deadly ? but even he has ghosts in his past, demons that must be exorcised. And nothing is more demonic than the peril he must face as the commander of a covert multi-national anti-terrorism squad known as Rainbow. Almost as soon as the group is formed, three terrorist attacks occur that seem unrelated at first, but may be the beginning of a new brand of terrorism like nothing the world has ever encountered before.

The US President, along with most of the Cabinet and Congress, is dead. Dazed and confused, the man who only minutes before had been confirmed as the new Vice-President of the United States is told that he is now President. President John Patrick Ryan. With stunning force, Ryan's responsibilities crush on him. He must calm an anxious and grieving nation, all while attempting to reconstitute a Cabinet and a Congress with the greatest possible speed.

CIA analyst Jack Ryan, historian and former Marine, is vacationing in London with his wife and young daughter. Suddenly, right before his eyes, a terrorist group launches its deadly attack. Instinctively, Jack dives forward to intervene. By his impulsive act, he gains both the gratitude of a nation and the enmity of its most dangerous men who will not sit on their hate. In an explosive wave of violence, Jack's new enemies will seek to make him pay for his act of salvation...with his life.

In the Soviet hills of Dushanbe near the Afghanistan border, an otherworldly array of pillars and domes rises into the night. Between the USA and the Soviet Union, no contest is more urgent than the race to build the first missile defense system, and no one knows that more than the two men charged with assessing the Soviet's capabilities: Colonel Mikhail Filitov of the Soviet Union, an old-line warrior distrusted by the army's new inner circle of technocrats, and CIA analyst Jack Ryan, hero of the Red October affair. Each must use all his craft to arrive at the truth, but Filitov gets there first?

President Jack Ryan faces a world crisis unlike any he has ever known. A high-level assassination attempt in Russia has the newly elected Ryan sending his most trusted eyes and ears - including antiterrorism specialist John Clark - to Moscow, for he fears the worst is yet to come. And he’s right. The attempt has left the already unstable Russia vulnerable to ambitious forces in China eager to fulfill their destiny. If they succeed, the world as we know it will never look the same. If they fail, the consequences may be unspeakable.

At what point does criminal activity threaten national security? When can a nation respond to it as to an enemy? These are the questions Jack Ryan must consider when he hears the awful news: Colombian drug lords, tired of being harassed by US law enforcement agents, have assassinated three high American officials, and that is just the beginning. The message is clear: Leave us alone. But they have pushed too far. Someone steps quietly over the line they have drawn, deploying covert-action teams in Colombia, intending to take the fight to the enemy.

His code name is Mr Clark. And his work for the CIA is brilliant, cold-blooded, and efficient...but who is he really? In a harrowing tour de force, Tom Clancy shows how an ordinary man named John Kelly crossed the lines of justice and morality - to become the CIA legend, Mr Clark.

This is an unforgettable journey into the heart of darkness. Without mercy. Without guilt. Without remorse.

When Moslem fundamentalists blow up a key Soviet oil complex, making an already critical oil shortage calamitous, the Russians figure they are going to have to take things into their own hands. They plan to seize the Persian Gulf, and more ambitiously, to neutralise NATO. Thus begins Red Storm, an audacious gamble that uses diplomatic maneuvers to cloak a crash military build-up. When Soviet tanks begin to roll, the West is caught off guard. What looks like a thrust turns into an all-out shooting war, possibly the climactic battle for control of the globe.

In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world's hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands.

On a wager, the eccentric English gentleman Phileas Fogg accepts a challenge to circle the globe in 80 days. Follow Phileas and his faithful valet Passepartout in this classic fantastic adventure.

Over the last decade, the center of world power has been quietly shifting from Europe to Asia. With oil reserves of several billion barrels, an estimated 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and several centuries' worth of competing territorial claims, the South China Sea in particular is a simmering pot of potential conflict. The underreported military buildup in the area where the Western Pacific meets the Indian Ocean means that it will likely be a hinge point for global war and peace for the foreseeable future.

In the tradition of John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this best-selling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism.

Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. This is the story of his absurd life - a life that is going well enough until a chemical spill from a rail car releases an Airborne Toxic Event, and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear: his own mortality. White Noise is an effortless combination of social satire and metaphysical dilemma in which Don DeLillo exposes our rampant consumerism, media saturation and novelty intellectualism.

As recently as 11,000 years ago - "near time" to geologists - mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, ground sloths, giant armadillos, native camels and horses, the dire wolf, and many other large mammals roamed North America. In what has become one of science's greatest riddles, these large animals vanished in North and South America around the time humans arrived at the end of the last great ice age.

So said Brigadier S. James Hill, commanding officer of the British 3rd Parachute Brigade, in an address to his troops shortly before the launching of Operation Overlord - the D-Day invasion of Normandy. No more prophetic words were ever spoken, for chaos indeed reigned on that day, and many more that followed.

Strategic planning needs to be a more integral part of America's foreign policymaking. While thousands of troops are engaged in combat and homeland security concerns abound, long-term coordination of goals and resources would seem to be of paramount importance. A change in presidential administration brings the hope that strategic planning will play an elevated role in U.S. foreign policy. Can policy planners - in the Pentagon, State Department, Treasury, NSC, and National Intelligence Council - rise to the challenge?

In the not-distant-enough future, a man takes a boat trip up the Susquehanna River with his most trusted friend, intent on reuniting with his son. But the man is pursued by an army, and his own harrowing past; and the familiar American landscape has been savaged by war and climate change until it is nearly unrecognizable. Lost Everything is a stunning novel about family and faith, what we are afraid may come to be, and how to wring hope from hopelessness.

Although best known as an author of westerns and espionage fiction, Brian Garfield is at heart an observer of human behavior. While traveling, he sometimes writes short fiction, usually setting the story in whatever city or country he just left. The eight stories in this slim volume are fine examples of Garfield’s keen eye. Mostly tales of crime and criminals, they star men like Deke Allen, a long-haired building contractor arrested after a rat-shoot for driving with his father’s shotgun on the seat. There are women like Vicky, a desperate con artist who engineers one of history’s most outlandish scams.