Showing results by narrator "Peter Ganim" in All Categories

In 2011, Marwan Hisham and his two friends - fellow working-class college students Nael and Tareq - joined the first protests of the Arab Spring in Syria, in response to a recent massacre. Arm in arm they marched, poured Coca-Cola into one another’s eyes to blunt the effects of tear gas, ran from the security forces, and cursed the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad. It was ecstasy. A long-bottled revolution was finally erupting, and freedom from a brutal dictator seemed, at last, imminent.  

Ash Rashid is a detective with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department and one of the few Muslims on the force. Never one to play by the rules, Ash has decided he wants out of the police. So the last thing he wants to get involved in is a fresh murder investigation. But when Ash hears that the mother of his daughter's best friend has been killed in a brutal hit and run he steps in to help.

Al Qaeda is no longer the central organizing force that aids or authorizes terrorist attacks or recruits terrorists. It is now more a source of inspiration for terrorist acts carried out by independent local groups that have branded themselves with the Al Qaeda name. Building on his previous groundbreaking work on the Al Qaeda network, forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman has greatly expanded his research to explain how Islamic terrorism emerges and operates in the 21 century.

In spring 2008, inspired by the Vietnam-era Winter Soldier hearings, Iraq Veterans Against the War gathered veterans to expose war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here are the powerful words, images, and documents of this historic gathering, which show the reality of life in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the aftermath of a mass shooting at a mosque in Quebec, the local police apprehend Amadou Duchon - a young Muslim man at the scene helping the wounded - but release Etienne Roy, the local priest who was found with a weapon in his hands. The shooting looks like a hate crime, but Detectives Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty sense there is more to the story. Sent to liaise with a community in the grip of fear, they find themselves in fraught new territory, fuelled by the panic and suspicion exploited by a right-wing radio host.  

Mr. Shmooze is the parable of a man who reveals the secret shared by all superstar salespeople. Selling, in its most exquisite form, is not about "taking", nor is it about "persuading". Selling, believe it or not, is about "giving". Mr. Shmooze gives for a living. He starts by listening and he quickly comes to understand what people really need. His customers love him because he gives more than he takes. They trust him because he is passionate about their interests. 

For 40 years John Hadden and his father of the same name fought at the dinner table over politics, art, and various issues concerning America. One was haunted by what he had witnessed during his long CIA career, from Berlin to Tel Aviv; the other retreated to the Vermont woods to direct Shakespeare until finally he confronted his father at the table one last time with a tape recorder.

On leave from Canada's Community Policing department, Esa Khattak is traveling in Iran, reconnecting with his cultural heritage and seeking peace in the country's beautiful mosques and gardens. But Khattak's supposed break from work is cut short when he's approached by a Canadian government agent in Iran, asking him to look into the death of renowned Canadian Iranian filmmaker Zahra Sobhani. Zahra was murdered at Iran's notorious Evin prison, where she'd been seeking the release of a well-known political prisoner. 

June 14, 1944, just nine days after the D-Day invasion of Normandy, another mighty fleet steamed towards its own D-Day landing. A huge U.S. flotilla of 800 ships carrying 162,000 men was about to attempt to smash into the outer defenses of the Japanese Empire. Their target was the Marianas Island group, which included Saipan, home to an important Japanese base and a large population of Japanese civilians, and Guam, the first American territory captured in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.

Welcome to Los Angeles - where anger, hunger and disease run rampant. Jonny is a black-market dealer in drugs that heal the body and cool the mind. All he cares about is his own survival. Until a strange new plague turns L.A. into a city of death, and Jonny is forced to put everything on the line to find the cure... if it can be found on Earth.

The charismatic Boko Haram leader Ratty Festus, also known as the Leopard, has been terrorizing drought-ridden Northeastern Nigeria: raiding villages, blowing up government buildings, and kidnapping schoolgirls. When Thomas Crocker and his Black Cell team, who are in the country on a special training mission, hear about a possible arms-for-schoolgirls exchange between Boko Haram and a Russian arms dealer on the Cameroon border, they convince a Nigerian Special Forces unit to join them in trying to stop it. The operation quickly goes south, with a deadly helicopter crash and an ambush.

Conversations with RBG is a remarkable and unique audiobook, an informal portrait of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, drawing on a series of her conversations with Jeffrey Rosen, starting in the 1990s and continuing through the Trump era. Rosen, a veteran legal journalist, scholar, and president of the National Constitution Center, shares with us the justice’s observations on a variety of topics, and her intellect, compassion, sense of humor, and humanity shine through.

The Blood Flag was last seen on October 18, 1944, when Heinrich Himmler displayed it proudly as he commissioned the Volkssturm, the Nazi Party's new militia created to avert the certain defeat that awaited Germany. Hitler believed the Blood Flag, Blutfahne, carried sacred powers. It held the blood of the first Nazi martyrs, those killed in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, when Hitler first tried to take over Germany. Several Nazis were shot and fell onto the flag, pouring their blood into the already red fabric.

There had been two demons in Modigliani’s life. One was a fever and one was a woman. The Demon Room tells the story of the debauched and troubled artist Amedeo Modigliani through the eyes of Leo, his art dealer, friend, and rival. Consumed by the thought of his own demise, Modigliani throttles through life - and women - hoping to escape the demons that plague him. But when he stumbles into the arms of Jeanne, a young and struggling artist, his salvation might also be his undoing.

Victor Apfel, a troubled war vet, gets an odd, pre-recorded phone message, instructing him to go inside the house next door. He opens the door to find his neighbor shot through the head. But is it suicide - or murder? And is it possible that a computer is to blame?

The credit crunch affected every investor and every consumer, every industry and every government program, yet few people truly understand how it happened. Subprime mortgages were center stage, but behind the scenes a conspiracy of greed among bankers, investors, rating agencies and regulators imperiled everyone's financial future. We need to know what went wrong and how to change the practices that led to this calamity.

In the decade since 9/11, the United States has grown weaker: It has been bogged down by costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has spent billions of dollars on security to protect air travel and other transport, as well as the homeland more generally. Much of this money has been channeled into efforts that are inefficient by design and highly bureaucratic, a lack of coordination between and among the government, and an array of contractors making it difficult to evaluate the return on the enormous investment that we have made in national security.

Brought to Justice is a history of Osama bin Laden's infamous campaign against America and the decade-long U.S. attempt to find and bring him to justice. The last chapter includes a detailed depiction of the mission that eliminated bin Laden.

One of fantasy fiction's foremost creators concludes the epic Black Throne Saga with this magnificent tale of a world coveted by a ruthless spirit, returned to life in the mind of an innocent monarch.

For Inspector Esa Khattak and Sergeant Rachel Getty, the Syrian refugee crisis is about to become personal. Esa's childhood friend, Nathan Clare, calls him in distress: his sister, Audrey, has vanished from a Greek island where the siblings run an NGO. Audrey had been working to fast-track refugees to Canada, but now she is implicated in the double murder of a French Interpol agent and a young man who had fled the devastation in Syria.