Showing results by narrator "Adam Barr" in All Categories

When Americans created civilization from wilderness, there were those who followed the rules, and those who created their own—an enduring conflict between liberty and virtue that formed a new land.

In the decades between the Great Depression and the advent of cable television, when daily newspapers set the conversational agenda in the United States, the best reporter in the business was a rumpled, hard-drinking figure named Homer Bigart. Despite two Pulitzers and a host of other prizes, he quickly faded from public view after retirement. Few today know the extent to which he was esteemed by his peers. Get the Damn Story is the first comprehensive biography to encompass all of Bigart's journalism, including both his war reporting and coverage of domestic events.

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.

Bruce Goldfarb spent ten years with Maryland's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where every sudden or unattended death in the state is scrutinized. Touching on numerous scandals, including Derek Chauvin's trial for the murder of George Floyd and the tragic killing in police custody of Freddie Gray, Goldfarb pulls back the curtain on a pioneer institution in crisis.

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.

Lelah was wandering alone in the desolate wilderness of southern Oman's Dhofar Desert when a Royal Omani Air Force helicopter pilot found her. She had no memory of how she got there or where she came from. Ebrahim Hatami, the former supreme leader of Iran, has been deposed and exiled. He is intent on two things: Revenge and returning to power....

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.

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.

Brady, the young man who talks with angels and who can call on the Light of the Blessed Virgin to both heal and destroy, retreats to a sanctuary, far off the grid, to protect his wife and unborn child. But there is a prophecy on his destiny, passed to him through his grandfather and great grandfather, which will not allow him to dwell in peace and safety. Brady is a warrior, chosen by God and sealed by his relentless courage and obedience. With his brothers at his side, he has wreaked death and devastation on Satan’s plans to create a new world order.

It is 1979, and the Cold War tensions between the the United States and Soviet Union have risen to a peak of intensity that makes MAD—mutually assured destruction—seem inevitable. But the nuclear arsenals are not the true weaponry. Spiritual forces, powers of darkness and light, are gathering to battle for the soul and future of the world. Off the coast of Brazil, Brady, a young man who has received a beautiful and terrible gift from the Blessed Virgin, begins the dance of death, delivering long overdue vengeance on a Nazi war criminal.

Minneapolis, 1953—A wild crime spree stuns the Upper Midwest, leaving a trail of blood and betrayal that terrifies a region and shatters the family at its core. Thirty-eight years later, the tattered remnants of the notorious LaVoie crime family—sisters, brothers, and children too young to remember or understand—gather for an edgy reunion in a Minneapolis suburb. Among the guests is Joe LaVoie, sole survivor of the fraternal gang behind the '50s bloodshed, a convicted cop-killer crippled by a police bullet during the final shootout.

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"?

DAVID LOGAN just suffered the worst week of his entire life. A lot of people died because he overlooked something. His sister was one of them... PAKISTAN'S GENERAL JHALAWAN is guilty of crimes against humanity under JUS COGENS, the highest principle of international law. David and Captain Davignon will lead a joint CIA and French Special Forces team to bring Jhalawan to justice. But the odds of surviving the mission aren't very good...

Who gets to control the media we consume? Can we intervene, or at least mitigate the influence of constant content? Mixing personal anecdotes with historical and political criticism, Image Control explores art, social media, photography, and other visual mediums to understand how our culture and our actions are manipulated, all the while building toward the idea that if fascism emerges as aesthetics, then so too can anti-fascism.

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.

Lieutenant Devlin Collins, an Irish American flier in the Royal Flying Corps, expecting to fly on the Western Front, instead finds himself flying antiquated two-seater bomber and photo reconnaissance missions over the Egyptian desert against the forces of the Central Powers that are trying to capture the Suez Canal.

Set against a backdrop of World War II, the Grace family and friends live in and operate out of Gracestone, a Miami Beach luxury estate. Most of them are "Graced", meaning they have special powers: Navigators can get anywhere without a map and are never lost; Incapacitators are never bested in a fight and can turn any item into a weapon; and Knowers can learn all there is to know about any topic just by concentrating on it for a few moments. In Gracestone 1943, the first book in The Grace Family Chronicles, the characters are focused on protecting the children of Gracestone.