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Audiobooks Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner
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The outbreak of the US Civil War provided an unexpected opportunity for political conservatives across continents. Mere decades after its founding, the United States had become a threat to European hegemony; instability in the United States could be exploited to lay a rival low. Meanwhile, Mexican antidemocrats needed a powerful backer to fend off the republicanism of Benito Juárez. When these two groups found each other, the Second Mexican Empire was born.
Raymond Jonas argues that the Second Mexican Empire, often dismissed as a historical sideshow, is critical to appreciating the globally destabilizing effect of growing US power in the nineteenth century. In 1862, at the behest of Mexican reactionaries and with the initial support of Spain and Britain, Napoleon III of France sent troops into Mexico and installed Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian as an imperial ruler who could resist democracy in North America. But what was supposed to be an easy victory proved a disaster.
Based on research in five languages and in archives across the globe, Habsburgs on the Rio Grande fundamentally revises narratives of global history. Far more than a footnote, the Second Mexican Empire was at the center of world-historic great-power struggles—a point of inflection in a contest for supremacy that set the terms of twentieth-century rivalry.
Franklin Roosevelt awoke on September 1, 1939 to the news that Germany invaded Poland, signaling the start of World War II. The president warned for years that Hitler's fascist regime posed an existential threat to democracy, but the American public remained stubbornly isolationist as fascist sympathizing groups, egged on by right wing media stars promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, plotted to overthrow the president.
The situation was dire, and Roosevelt found himself facing an unexpected adversary: Charles Lindbergh. Wildly popular, the famed aviator's youthful charm, plainspoken rhetoric, and media magnetism earned him a massive following as he led an attack on FDR's policies. The German government provided secret funds to Lindbergh's Nazi followers as he led the radical America First Committee in an effort to prevent Roosevelt from aiding England's survival—and the world's.
Awakening the Spirit of America shows how Roosevelt overcame the forces aligned against him in a war against fascism. Paul Sparrow, former director of the FDR Presidential Library, reveals how FDR's triumph of leadership was by no means a foregone conclusion. Awakening the Spirit of America provides a riveting account of FDR's ultimate victory over pro-Nazi isolationists and provides vital insight into American history and an iconic president.
With this volume, Roe v. Dobbs: The Past, Present and Future of a Constitutional Right of Abortion, we confront the remarkable beginning and end-once again, after a half-century-of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, shockingly overruled by the Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The goal of this book is to bring together some of our nation's experts to share their views on whether there should be a constitutional right to abortion and what the consequences of Dobbs might be.
What makes this subject unique is how it intersects with our own lives, since both Bollinger and Stone were law clerks at the Supreme Court in the year that Roe was decided (1973). During the Court's 1972 Term, when Roe was decided, the Court was in a state of flux. President Nixon had just appointed four Justices to the Court. The era of the Warren Court was clearly over. In those days, the Justices were nonpartisan, often joined opinions across the political/ideological spectrum, and approached cases with an open mind. That in large part explains why the Court could reach the decision it did in Roe, with five of the six Republican-appointed Justices and two of the three Democratic-appointed Justices in the majority, and one Republican-appointed justice and one Democratic-appointed justice in dissent. It was a different Court and a different era.
For much of recorded history, people considered the heart to be the most important organ in the body. In cultures around the world, the heart-not the brain-was believed to be the location of intelligence, memory, emotion, and the soul. Over time, views on the purpose of the heart have transformed. Modern medicine and science dismissed what was once the king of the organs as a mere blood pump subservient to the brain, yet the heart remains a potent symbol of love and health and an important part of our cultural iconography.
This book traces the evolution of our understanding of the heart from the dawn of civilization to the present. Vincent M. Figueredo-an accomplished cardiologist and expert on the history of the human heart-explores the role and significance of the heart in art, culture, religion, philosophy, and science across time and place. He examines how the heart really works, its many meanings in our emotional and daily lives, and what cutting-edge science is teaching us about this remarkable organ. Figueredo considers the science of heart disease, recent advancements in heart therapies, and what the future may hold. He highlights the emerging field of neurocardiology, which has found evidence of a 'heart-brain connection' in mental and physical health, suggesting that ancient views hold more truth than moderns suspect.
Are you retired or soon-to-be retired? Did you wake up and wonder what the heck to do with the rest of your life? Do you worry about being fulfilled?
You're not alone in your quest for meaning in retirement life. Newly found free time can be hard to fill, and most retirees at some point feel a loss of purpose, value, and connection.
Through relatable stories of actual coaching experiences, retirement coaches Charlie Baker, Larry Wofford, and Craig Bothwell highlight common retirement challenges, present habits to overcome them, and help you define your retirement 'type'.
Hear stories from:
- A workaholic CEO, who retired and struggled to build back her routine
- A meticulous planner, who had no clue how to account for all his free time
- A former business owner, who missed the fast-paced nature of his job and had to find new ways to use his strengths
- And several other retirees just like you
Find your purpose, then make retirement the dream chapter of your life!
Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: 'Method acting.' The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method-what its author Justin Rawlins calls 'methodness'-created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book maps the forces giving shape to methodness and policing its boundaries.
Imagining the Method traces the primordial conditions under which the Method was conceived. It explores John Garfield's tenuous relationship with methodness due to his identity. It considers the links between John Wayne's reliance on 'anti-Method' stardom and Marlon Brando and James Dean's ascribed embodiment of Method features. It dissects contemporary emphases on transformation and considers the implications of methodness in the encoding of AI performers. Altogether, Justin Rawlins offers a revisionist history of the Method that shines a light on the cultural politics of methodness and the still-dominant assumptions about race, gender, and screen actors and acting that inform how we talk about performance and performers.
The Gunner and the Grunt is written in the voices of two soldiers who fought in the same battles as members of the same recon unit but from different angles. Michael Kelley, the 'Gunner,' was flying in an armed helicopter above the jungle providing suppressive fire support, while Peter Burbank, the 'Grunt,' was down in the jungle on foot patrol involved in fire fights with Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army troops.
The book follows these two Boston boys from army training through deployment to the war zone and the shock of first combat missions, to helicopter air assault 'Search and Destroy' operations from the Cambodian border to the sands of the South China Sea.
Michael Tougias and Adam Gamble had good lives: married with two children each, nice homes in the suburbs, jobs that paid the bills, and frequent fishing trips out on the ocean. But those comfortable lives had cracks in them and soon they found themselves hit by a rogue wave of divorce, financial hardship, addiction, and career upheaval. What kept them going—and helped them navigate the rough waters of middle age—was fishing and friendship. Alone on the ocean they not only learned some of the successful secrets of striped bass fishing, but they were also brutally honest in their advice for each other. They began to see their time spent on Adam’s boat, the Scout, as a way to explore new ways of thinking and dreaming big. The two not only discovered ways forward but achieved goals far beyond what they thought possible.
Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they're practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the US alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill. Creatures from antelope to salmon are losing their ability to migrate in search of food and mates; invasive plants hitch rides in tire treads; road salt contaminates lakes and rivers; and the very noise of traffic chases songbirds from vast swaths of habitat.
Yet road ecologists are also seeking to blunt the destruction through innovative solutions. Goldfarb meets with conservationists building bridges for California's mountain lions and tunnels for English toads, engineers deconstructing the labyrinth of logging roads that web national forests, animal rehabbers caring for Tasmania's car-orphaned wallabies, and community organizers working to undo the havoc highways have wreaked upon American cities.
Reincarnation has been a popular belief in cultures throughout the world for many millennia. The possibility that we lived before and may be born again, whether as a human or in some other form of existence, continues to fascinate us and features heavily in popular novels and movies, and also as a subject of recent scholarly studies. Although Buddhism is one of the religious traditions best known for asserting rebirth, the history and scope of Buddhist approaches to the idea has not received comprehensive treatment-until now.
This first-ever guide to ideas and practices surrounding rebirth in Buddhism covers the historical context for the Buddha's teachings on the topic, explains what Buddhists believe is actually reborn and where, surveys rebirth-related practices in multiple Buddhist cultures, and considers whether all Buddhist traditions agree about what happens after death. The book also addresses interpretations of rebirth in modern Buddhist contexts and recent scientific attempts to document reincarnation in conversation with Buddhist beliefs. It is, in short, the first truly comprehensive overview of rebirth across the major Buddhist traditions, written by a leading scholar and teacher of Buddhism.
