Showing results by narrator "Robertson Dean" in All Categories

A gripping history of banking and the booms and busts that shaped the world on both sides of the Atlantic, The House of Morgan traces the trajectory of the J. P.Morgan empire from its obscure beginnings in Victorian London to the crash of 1987. Ron Chernow paints a fascinating portrait of the private saga of the Morgans and the rarefied world of the American and British elite in which they moved. Based on extensive interviews and access to the family and business archives, The House of Morgan is an investigative masterpiece.

This revised and expanded edition of The Essential Rumi includes a new introduction by Coleman Barks and more than 80 never-before-published poems. Through his lyrical translations, Coleman Barks has been instrumental in bringing this exquisite literature to a remarkably wide range of listeners, making the ecstatic, spiritual poetry of 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi more popular than ever. 

Tough, cynical PI Sam Spade is hired by the story's irresistible femme fatale, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, to locate the client's sister by tailing her companion. Spade's partner, Miles Archer, takes on the assignment, and quickly both he and the man he was shadowing are murdered. As Spade pursues the mystery of his partner's death, he is drawn into a circle of colorful characters - all of them after a legendary statuette of a falcon fashioned long ago for King Charles of Spain.

The Making of Modern Economics presents a bold and engaging history of economics—the dramatic story of how the great economic thinkers built today’s rigorous social science. This comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the major economic philosophers begins with Adam Smith and continues through to the present day. It examines the contributions each one made to our understanding of the role of the economist, the science of economics and economic theory. 

Travel the Nine Worlds with your favourite characters from the world of Magnus Chase in a brand-new series of adventures. Find out why Amir Fadlan hates clothes shopping in Midgard, see how Mallory Keen learns in icy Niflheim that insulting a dragon can be a good idea, and join Alex Fierro as they play with fire (and a disco sword) in the home of the fire giants, Muspellheim. But watch out for Thor, who is jogging through all Nine Worlds so he can log his million steps - and is raising quite a stink....

During the last years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union sent some of its most elite troops to unfamiliar lands in Central Asia to fight a vaguely defined enemy, which eventually defeated their superior number with unconventional tactics. Although the Soviet leadership initially saw the invasion as a victory, many Russian soldiers came to view the war as a demoralizing and devastating defeat, the consequences of which had a substantial impact on the Soviet Union and its collapse.

This reissue of Thomas Sowell’s classic study of decision making, which includes a preface by the author, updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell, one of America’s most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making—a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency but our very freedom.

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.

Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were the weapons of choice at Wall Street investment bank Lazard Frères & Co. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built.

Is there life beyond the grave? Is it reasonable to believe in the afterlife? If so, how should we act on those beliefs? Best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza undertakes an unprecedented voyage of intellectual discovery to reveal the truth about life, death and beyond.

This book is about the great moral issues underlying many of the headline-making political controversies of our times. It is not a comforting book but a book about disturbing and dangerous trends. The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up promoting inequality, and how the tyranny of social visions prevents many people from confronting the actual consequences of their own beliefs and policies.

These selections from the many writings of Thomas Sowell over a period of half a century cover social, economic, cultural, legal, educational, and political issues. The sources range from Dr. Sowell’s letters, books, newspaper columns, and articles in both scholarly journals and popular magazines. The topics range from latetalking children to tax cuts for the rich, baseball, race, war, the role of judges, medical care, and the rhetoric of politicians.

Discrimination and Disparities challenges believers in such one-factor explanations of economic outcome differences as discrimination, exploitation, or genetics. It is listenable enough for people with no prior knowledge of economics. Yet the empirical evidence with which it backs up its analysis spans the globe and challenges beliefs across the ideological spectrum.

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.

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.

These wide-ranging essays - on many individual political, economic, cultural, and legal issues - have as a recurring, underlying theme the decline of the values and institutions that have sustained and advanced American society for more than two centuries. This decline has been more than erosion. It has, in many cases, been a deliberate dismantling of American values and institutions by people convinced that their superior wisdom and virtue must override both the traditions of the country and the will of the people.

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.

In 1969, a series of riots over police action against The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, changed the longtime landscape of the homosexual in society literally overnight. Since then the event itself has become the stuff of legend, with relatively little hard information available on the riots themselves.

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.

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.