American Industry

Timothy R. White begins his history of the theater industry with the dispersed pre-Broadway era, when components such as costumes, lights, and scenery were built and stored nationwide. Subsequently, the majority of backstage operations and storage were consolidated in New York City during what is now known as the golden age of musical theater. Toward the latter half of the 20th century, decentralization and deindustrialization brought the emergence of nationally distributed regional theaters and performing arts centers.

From the acclaimed author of Billion Dollar Molecule and The Antidote, a revisionist, passionate history of the pharmaceutical industry, detailing how the nascent industry ushered in an age of cures. The Age of Cures is the in-depth history of the birth of the pharmaceutical industry in the...

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania who also served as a special adviser to the White House on health-care reform, has written a brilliant diagnostic explanation of why health care in America has become such a divisive social issue, how money and medicine have their own American story, and why reform has bedeviled presidents of the left and right for more than one hundred years.

Blisteringly sharp, hypersmart, and compulsively listenable—meet Isabel Kaplan’s searing debut novel about a young woman trying to succeed in Hollywood without selling her soul. "The rare kind of read that made me giggle just as much as it left me gutted." —Zakiya Dalila Harris, New York...

For decades, researchers have chased a pharmaceutical cure for memory loss. But despite the fact that no disease-modifying biotech treatments have emerged, new research suggests that dementia rates have actually declined in the United States and Western Europe over the last decade. Why is this happening? And what does it mean for brain health in the future?

In November 1942, Paul Andrew Kennedy (1912-1993) boarded the St. Elena in New York Harbor and sailed for Casablanca as part of Operation Torch, the massive Allied invasion of North Africa. As a member of the US Army's 2nd Auxiliary Surgical Group, he spent the next 34 months working in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany, in close proximity to the front lines and often under air or artillery bombardment. He was uncomfortable, struck by the sorrows of war, and homesick for his wife.

The instant New York Times bestseller about one man's battle to save hundreds of jobs by demonstrating the greatness of American business. The Bassett Furniture Company was once the world's biggest wood furniture manufacturer. Run by the same powerful Virginia family for generations, it was also...

For readers of Karen Russell, Maggie Shipstead, and Eowyn Ivey, an exuberant, highly imaginative epic about a family that settles, against all odds, in the far reaches of the Arctic and the unexpected industry that keeps them afloat for generations. In the far reaches of the Territory of the...

At its core, American Disgust wrestles with how changing cultural notions of digestion-what goes into the body and what comes out of it-create and impose racial categories motivated by feelings of disgust rooted in American settler-colonial racism. It shows how disgust is a changing, yet fundamental, aspect of American subjectivity and that engaging with it-personally, politically, and theoretically-opens up possibilities for conceptualizing health at the individual, societal, and planetary levels.

Before You Go Pro is a very candid look into author Terrence Wood's life working within the family business: football. Before You Go Pro is not just a story. Listeners will gain a true insider perspective of this multi-billion dollar entertainment industry that we call college and professional football. Within the audiobook, you will find valuable gems of advice and great teaching points for any aspiring football player.

In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country - and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year. With "arresting tales of heroism," it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease.

Between the years 1918 and 1920, influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history, killing at least 50 million people, more than half a million of them Americans. Yet despite the devastation, this catastrophic event seems but a forgotten moment in our nation's past. American Pandemic offers a much-needed corrective to the silence surrounding the influenza outbreak.

When I wrote the original version of PILOTS DAWN in the last decade of the previous century, the world was a different place. Three manufacturers of passenger aircraft existed in the United States. Boeing dominated the global market for airliners without serious competition. Airbus, whose share of sales fell short of 20%, was considered by many experts a challenger doomed to failure—if not an outright joke. Politically, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. The Cold War was over; the KGB had receded into history and expectations of a peaceful democratic Russia were the norm.

For the crime of falling sick without wealth, Americans today face lawsuits, wage garnishment, home foreclosure, and jail time. Yet who really profits from aggressive medical debt collection? Your Money or Your Life reveals how medical debt collection became a multi-billion-dollar industry and how everyday Americans are made to pay the price. Emergency physician and historian Luke Messac weaves patient stories into a history of law, finance, and medicine to show how debt and debt collection are destroying the foundational trust between doctors and patients at the heart of American healthcare.

Former executive editor of The New York Times and one of our most eminent journalists Jill Abramson provides a “valuable and insightful” (The Boston Globe) report on the disruption of the news media over the last decade, as shown via two legacy (The New York Times and The Washington Post)...

African American Slave Medicine offers a critical examination of how African American slaves' medical needs were addressed during the years before and surrounding the Civil War. Drawing upon ex-slave interviews conducted during the 1930s and 1940s by the Works Project Administration (WPA), Dr. Herbert C. Covey inventories many of the herbal, plant, and non-plant remedies used by African American folk practitioners during slavery.

Experience music history with this memoir by one of the last of the genuine old school Blues and R&B legends, the Grammy-winning dynamic showman Bobby Rush. This memoir charts the extraordinary rise to fame of living blues legend, Bobby Rush. Born Emmett Ellis, Jr. in Homer, Louisiana, he...

John Harvey Kellogg was one of America's most beloved physicians; a best-selling author, lecturer, and health-magazine publisher; founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium; and patron saint of the pursuit of wellness. His youngest brother, Will, was the founder of the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company. In The Kelloggs, Howard Markel tells the sweeping saga of these two extraordinary men, whose lifelong competition and enmity toward one another changed America's notion of health and wellness and who helped change the course of American medicine, nutrition, wellness, and diet.

Bart Stupak, a nine-term Democratic Congressman from Michigan’s First Congressional District, brought two unshakable principles with him to Capitol Hill in 1992: a firm belief in the sanctity of life, and the conviction that health care was a right for all Americans and not a privilege for the fortunate few. Studies indicating that 45,000 Americans died needlessly every year for lack of access to health care inspired Congressman Stupak’s tireless efforts, often at great personal cost, to pass lifesaving legislation while remaining true to his right-to-life principles.

Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the board, consumption has shot up in the twenty-first century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here?