Showing results by narrator "Peter Lerman" in All Categories

The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 tells the twin stories of mostly uneducated women immigrants who discovered their collective consumer power and of the Beef Trust, the midwestern cartel that conspired to keep meat prices high despite efforts by the U.S. government to curtail its nefarious practices.

In 1989 a woman fishing in Texas on a quiet stretch of the Colorado River snagged a body. Her “catch” was the corpse of Johnny Jenkins, shot in the head. His death was as dramatic as the rare book dealer’s life, which read, as the Austin American-Statesman declared, “like a best seller”. At the time of his death, Jenkins was about to be indicted by the ATF for the arson of his rare books, warehouse, and offices. Another investigation implicated Jenkins in forgeries of historical documents, including the Texas Declaration of Independence.

From ancient battlefields to the modern business landscape, competitors have tried innumerable approaches to conquering adversaries. Success for the victors has taken many forms and traveled many paths, but at its heart, winning strategy can be boiled down to ten universal principles. When...

In Under the Dome, Alan Hantman, the Architect of the Capitol from 1997 to 2007, provides a personal account of how the Capitol works as a physical space; who runs it, how and why decisions are made about the security of the Capitol and the people who work there, and how politicians think about the Capitol Building.

Surveillance Capitalism in America offers a crucial historical perspective on the intimate relationship between surveillance and capitalism. While surveillance is often associated with governments, today the role of the private sector in the spread of everyday surveillance is the subject of growing public debate. Tech giants like Google and Facebook are fueled by a continuous supply of user data and digital exhaust. Surveillance is not just a side effect of digital capitalism; it is the business model itself.

Guthrie kept moving throughout his life, making friends, soaking up influences, and writing about his experiences. Along the way, he produced more than 3,000 songs, as well as fiction, journalism, poetry, and visual art, that gave voice to the distressed and dispossessed. In this insightful audiobook, Will Kaufman examines the artist’s career through a unique perspective: the role of time and place in Guthrie’s artistic evolution.

Jack London—author of The Call of the Wild, White Fang,and Sea Wolf—was among the most highly regarded and most successful writers of the early 20th century. This is a collection of eight of his best short stories: “Moon-Face” “The Leopard Man’s Story” “Local Color” “Amateur...

In the late 19th century, a sea captain on his first voyage in the Gulf of Siam, on an unfamiliar ship, with a crew of strangers, takes aboard a fugitive stowaway. He must conceal his presence from the sailors with whom he shares this ship, and so he and the stowaway become conspirators. The young captain must challenge his own morality and the sworn obligations of a sea captain. He must decide who he wants to be as a man and as a moral actor in the arduous undertaking of endeavoring to deliver this fugitive to safety.

Justice in Plain Sight is the story of a hometown newspaper in Riverside, California, that set out to do its job: tell readers about shocking crimes in their own backyard. But when judges slammed the courtroom door on the public, including the press, it became impossible to tell the whole story. Pinning its hopes on business lawyer Jim Ward, whom Press-Enterprise editor Tim Hays had come to know and trust, the newspaper took two cases to the US Supreme Court in the 1980s. Hays was convinced that the public - including the press - needed to bear witness to justice....

Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt.

When the terrorist attacks struck New York City on September 11, 2001, boat operators and waterfront workers quickly realized that they had the skills, the equipment, and the opportunity to take definite, immediate action in responding to the most significant destructive event in the United States in decades. For many of them, they were “doing what needed to be done”. American Dunkirk shows how people, many of whom were volunteers, mobilized rescue efforts in various improvised and spontaneous ways on that fateful date.

This interdisciplinary study offers a comprehensive analysis of the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Providing full historical context and drawing on a wide range of literature, this book explores the continuous economic and social transformation of the post-socialist world. While the future is yet to be determined, understanding the present phase of transformation is critical.

The Anatomy of Fake News offers the first historical examination of fake news that takes as its goal the effective teaching of critical news literacy in the United States. Higdon employs a critical-historical media ecosystems approach to identify the producers, themes, purposes, and influences of fake news.

The appearance of the warp drive from the long lost Fenrir spaceship triggers an epic quest for Captain Mikhail Volkov. According to the drive's computers, Fenrir had been lost to hypothetical "nowhere" of subspace, but with the drive's housing covered with coral and sea life, obviously Fenrir has gone somewhere. Faced with genocide at the hands of the alien Nefrim, humans need a miracle to survive. On the chance that Fenrir's mysterious location holds such a miracle, Mikhail jumps into the unknown and crashes into the endless blue of the Sargasso Sea.

Just before the First World War a shaggy, unkempt, malodorous person from the Siberian provinces of Russia pretending to be a prophet and a saint, appeared at the imperial palace in Petrograd. He claimed he was the only one who could ‘cure’ the young son of the royal Ronamoff family, who was...

Since the dawn of civilization, humans had believed comets were evil portents. In 1705, Edmond Halley liberated humanity from these primordial superstitions, proving that Newtonian mechanics rather than the will of the gods brought comets into our celestial neighborhood. Despite this scientific advance, when Halley's Comet returned in 1910, newspapers gleefully provoked a global hysteria that unfolded with tragic consequences. Richard J. Goodrich examines the 1910 appearance of Halley's Comet and the ensuing frenzy sparked by media manipulation, bogus science, and outright deception.

Schmitz illuminates how the policies FDR pursued in response to the crises of the 1930s transformed Americans' thinking about their place in the world. He shows how the president developed an interlocking set of ideas that prompted a debate between isolationism and preparedness, guided the United States into World War II, and mobilized support for the war while establishing a sense of responsibility for the postwar world.

A lethal mix of natural disaster, dangerously flawed construction, and reckless human actions devastated San Francisco in 1906 and New Orleans in 2005...the poor, the elderly, and the medically infirm were disproportionately among the thousands who perished. In Recovering Inequality, Steve Kroll-Smith builds a convincing case that disaster recovery and the reestablishment of social and economic inequality are inseparable.

One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant of politics and government. Many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This creates a nation of people with little political knowledge and little ability to objectively evaluate what they do know.

Harness the natural rhythms already present within us and the world, which are so basic and instinctual to who we are as humans, and experience a lifetime of balance and wholeness. Dr. Frank Lawlis's evidence-based methods are centered around connecting to healing rhythms - in our body, in nature, and in the universe. These tools and exercises interrupt pain and illness signals to encourage coping, healing, and thriving alike.