Showing results by narrator "Tom Beyer" in All Categories

America's political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes listeners from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today's parties, overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding.

The first comprehensive history of modern American evangelicalism to appear in a generation, American Apocalypse shows how a group of radical Protestants, anticipating the end of the world, paradoxically transformed it.

On a dark, rainy night in October 1900, George E. Bailey, caretaker of Breakheart Hill farm, disappeared. He no longer made his daily milk runs or stopped at the tavern for his favorite cherry rum. Some suspected foul play right away, as Bailey's "wife" had recently gone to Maine, leaving Bailey alone with his farmhand, John C. Best, who was known to be a drunk and a potentially violent man. Nine days later, when Bailey's dismembered body was fished out of a local pond, all eyes quickly focused on Best. Douglas L. Heath and Alison C. Simcox uncover the facts of this shocking tale.

Amid growing international concerns about income inequality, labor abuses, racial injustice, and disinformation online, Conscience Incorporated examines the gaps in current corporate social responsibility measures and what more needs be done to address these challenges. The rise of new technologies such as smartphones and social media have made it easier than ever to document and spread awareness of corporate actions. Despite these developments, large corporations often fail to meaningfully address the human rights abuses linked to their business models and practices.

For nearly 100 years, the Lindbergh Kidnapping still remains a major topic of controversy and fascination. A Talent to Deceive uses investigative journalism to dive into evidence ignored by previous investigators in search of the truth. Who really committed the crime? What really happened the night of March 1, 1932? What was the motive to kidnap and murder the Lindbergh baby? Follow Norris in this history-meets-mystery tale as he performs a thorough investigation to solve the case that will never die.

Jake lost his wife and unborn daughter on a West Texas highway when three police officers abused their authority. The pigs thought they had got off scot-free until Jake took justice into his own hands.

In this classic work of twentieth-century history, William Sheridan Allen demonstrates how dictatorship subtly surmounted democracy in Germany and how the Nazi seizure of power encroached from below. Relying upon legal records and interviews with primary sources, Allen dissects Northeim, Germany with microscopic precision to depict the transformation of a sleepy town to a Nazi stronghold. This cogent analysis argues that Hitler rose to power primarily through democratic tactics that incited localized support rather than through violent means.

We all keep secrets—from our locker codes to our passwords to our online interactions. And we choose to share those secrets only with those whom we trust. So, too, do organizations, businesses, governments, and armies. In Cryptography, Panos Louridas provides a broad and accessible introduction to cryptography, the art and science of keeping and revealing secrets.

Contrary to popular belief, not all scientists are materialists fervently discounting the spiritual. Science, Being, & Becoming shares interviews with some of the world's foremost scientists who recount their own transpersonal, metaphysical, and mystical experiences and how those experiences transformed them and their scientific work. This groundbreaking book makes it evident that the long-standing divide between science and spirituality has not served us well and in fact continues to have significant adverse consequences for us all.

It's hard to imagine our world without its stars and celebrity geniuses—they become a part of our culture and history, seeming permanent and preordained. But as Cass Sunstein shows in this startling book, that is far from the case. Focusing on both famous and forgotten (or simply overlooked) artists and luminaries in music, literature, business, science, politics, and other fields, he explores why some individuals become famous and others don't, and offers a new understanding of the role of greatness, luck, and contingency in the achievement of fame.

In Canopy of Titans, Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate examine the global importance of the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest that stretches from Northern California to Alaska. Their urgent and authoritative account sets out the threats facing a vital environmental resource, and celebrates the beauty and complexity of one of the world's great forests.

It took a brain surgeon who's spent a lifetime in the operating room experiencing the brain's union of form and function to write this book. Cerebral Entanglements, unlike most books on the brain, looks at the intimate and vital emotions in our lives, and shows as well, how neuroimaging studies can transform our understanding of crucial emotional or mental health concerns.

In 1991, Ioan Culianu was on the precipice of a brilliant academic career. Culianu had fled his native Romania and established himself as a widely admired scholar at just forty-one years old. He was teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School where he was seen as the heir apparent to his mentor, Mircea Eliade, a fellow Romanian expatriate and the founding father of the field of religious studies, who had died a few years earlier.

During the height of the Cold War, a group of small-town young men would lead their underdog hockey team from the little country of Czechoslovakia against the Soviet Union, the juggernaut in their sport. As they battled on the ice, the young players would keep their people's quest for freedom alive, and forge a way to fight back against the authoritarian forces that sought to crush them. Freedom to Win tells a story that ranges from iconic moments in history to courageous individual stories.

For hardworking and dedicated professional service providers, Make Them Smile offers a way out of the grind of living hour to billable hour, providing a road map for how to build a scalable, standardized brand that provides a consistent, repeatable, and high-quality customer experience.

John Kruger is a commercial pilot long on the run from Afrikaner nationalists for smuggling Black activists out of Apartheid-era South Africa. As a flyer of old collectible planes, he now wants nothing more than to enjoy his hobby, party, and play the field. Then John discovers that World War I hero and flying ace Andrew Beauchamp-Proctor seems to be buried in two places 6,000 miles apart. Out of a sense of duty toward the man who inspired him to become a pilot, John begins a search for the truth.

After the unprecedented events of the COVID-19 pandemic, it may be hard to imagine a time not so long ago when deadly diseases were a routine part of life. It is harder still to fathom that the best medical thinking at that time blamed these diseases on noxious miasmas, bodily humors, and divine dyspepsia. This all began to change on a day in April 1676, when a little-known Dutch merchant described bacteria for the first time. Ending Epidemics explains how we came to understand and prevent many of our worst infectious diseases—and double average life expectancy.

Under the cover of night, on February 19, 1973, another U.S. president witnessed extraterrestrials. President Richard Nixon made a secret trip to a top security U.S. Air Force base, as his former boss, President Dwight Eisenhower, did in 1954. Nixon was said to have taken his golfing buddy, comedian Jackie Gleason. According to Gleason's then wife, Beverly McKittrick Gleason, Jackie was deeply shaken later that night when he returned home and confessed to their clandestine trip.

Since the 1950s, the American war on drugs has positioned white middle-class youth as sympathetic victims of illegal drug markets who need rehabilitation instead of incarceration. The Suburban Crisis traces how politicians, the media, and grassroots political activists crusaded to protect white families from perceived threats while criminalizing and incarcerating urban minorities, and how a troubling legacy of racial injustice continues to inform the war on drugs today.

London im Jahr 1866. Scotland Yard steht am Abgrund. Der Reihe nach begehen gestandene Beamte des Metropolitan Police Services kuriose Verbrechen, die unweigerlich zu ihrer Festnahme führen. Inspector Rodes und sein neuer Partner Sergeant Wimpelbee versuchen alles, um die Ehre Scotland Yards und des amtierenden Commissioners Sir Richard Willsher zu retten. Doch als sie beginnen, gegen ihre eigenen Kollegen zu ermitteln, erkennen sie schon bald, wer in Wahrheit die Fäden aus dem Hintergrund zieht.