Showing results by narrator "Keith Sellon-Wright" in All Categories

Many weapons and inventions were credited with winning World War II, most famously in the assertion that the atomic bomb "ended the war, but radar won the war." What is less well known is that both airborne radar and the atomic bomb were invented in British laboratories, but built by Americans. The same holds true for many other American weapons credited with the Allied victory: the P-51 Mustang fighter, the Liberty ship, the proximity fuze, the Sherman tank, and even penicillin all began with British scientists and planners.

John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.

The images of soldiers and marines coming ashore on hostile shores are embedded in our collective memory of World War II. But what of the sailors who manned the landing craft, going back and forth under fire with nowhere to take cover, their craft the special targets of enemy gunners? In this book, Ken Wiley, a Coast Guardsman on an Attack Transport in the Pacific, relates the intricate, often nerve-wracking story of how the United States projected its power across 6,000 miles in the teeth of fanatical Japanese resistance. 

In late March 2015, ornithologist Bruce M. Beehler set off on a solo three-month trek to track songbird migration and the northward progress of spring through America. Traveling via car, canoe, bike, and on foot, Beehler followed woodland warblers and other neotropical songbird species from the southern border of Texas, where the birds first arrive after their winter sojourns in South America and the Caribbean, northward through the Mississippi drainage to its headwaters in Minnesota and onward to their nesting grounds in the north woods of Ontario.

Central Banking in Turbulent Times examines fundamental questions about the central banking system, asking whether the model of an independent central bank devoted to price stability is the final resting point of a complex development that started centuries ago. It dissects the hypothesis that the Great Recession has prompted a reassessment of that model; a renewed emphasis on financial stability has emerged, possibly vying for first rank in the hierarchy of objectives of central banks.   

Sometimes a murder story lingers for years after the event. This one has lingered for more than a century, especially in New England. The setting is winter, 1873 on a small, obscure island 10 miles off the coast of Maine. Three women await the return of their men the following morning. A killer, who learns they are alone for one night, is rowing to their island, across 10 miles of open sea. The next day, a horrific scene is discovered. It stuns the seacoast towns and begins a series of events that are covered nationally in the months that follow.

It's a case reminiscent of the explosive story of Susan Smith, convicted in the drownings of her two young sons in South Carolina. But in The Unforgiven, three young children are in the back seat of a car driven by Amanda Hamm's boyfriend as it slips into an Illinois lake. Amanda and her boyfriend survive. Her three children do not.

Fun, bright, and playful, power pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, power pop has meant many things to many people. In Go All the Way, today's best and brightest writers go deep on what certain power pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go All the Way is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

One cannot turn on the news today without a report on an extreme-weather event or the latest update on Antarctica. But while our politicians argue, the truth is that climate change is already here. Nobody knows this better than Indigenous peoples, who, having developed an intimate relationship with ecosystems over generations, have observed these changes for decades. For them, climate change is not an abstract concept or policy issue, but the reality of daily life.

In 1955, small-town girls flock to Minneapolis for work, love, and adventure. But Teresa Hickman, from Dollar, North Dakota, is a special case. Beguiling. Promiscuous. And, on a chilly April morning, dead along an abandoned trolley track in a Southside neighborhood. Teresa Hickman was three months pregnant when she was strangled. Was the unborn child's father also her killer? Could the killer have been - among the many men drawn to her like flies to honey - Dr. H. David Rose, a middle-aged dentist who admits he was with her the night she died?

Americans are generous with their pocketbooks, but trying to make a difference and actually making a difference are two different things. Where Am I Giving? by New York Times best-selling author Kelsey Timmerman takes you on a journey to meet people who will inspire you to live a purpose-filled, generous life and make the greatest impact you can through your career, time, consumer dollars, and donations. 

Eminent ecologist Jeremy B. C. Jackson and award-winning journalist Steve Chapple traveled the length of the Mississippi River interviewing farmers, fishermen, scientists, and policymakers to better understand the mounting environmental problems ravaging the United States. Along their journey, which quickly expanded to California, Florida, and New York, the pair uncovered surprising and profound connections between ecological systems and environmental crises across the country. 

In Saving America's Cities, Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. 

All favors come with a cost, and after using what little favors he has in the Newark PD to get his private investigator's license, former crime reporter Russell Avery finds himself paying. Keyonna Jackson, a social justice activist, presents him with a troubling video: a made-for-YouTube cell phone snippet chronicling the same kind of questionable use of force that had set New York City, Ferguson, and Cleveland on fire in recent years. The same use of force that he's been covering up for Newark PD.

Adam Cain had had worse days, but at the moment, he couldn't remember when. And when the native judge slammed an oblong stone on the podium before him, signaling an end to the fifteen-minute trial and sentencing, Adam felt a tingle run down his spine. It was going to take all his skill, experience—and luck—to get out of this one. And his latest challenge was just beginning. But Adam wasn't about to let the situation get the best of him. He had skills, skills which will be tested when he finds he's been placed in more of a zoo than a prison.

1985, Boston. In Vietnam, Andy Roark witnessed death and horrifying destruction. Still feeling adrift and unsettled, Andy has struck up a welcome friendship with Nguyen, a Vietnamese restaurant owner. Sipping beer and trading memories after the restaurant shutters, Andy gradually learns of the extraordinary lengths Nguyen took to flee Saigon shortly after its fall. Andy's latest case, too, has ties to Vietnam. His new client, a beautiful and enigmatic young Vietnamese woman, hires him to investigate her uncle's murder.

The Beatles and Duke Ellington's Orchestra stand as the two greatest examples of collaboration in music history. Duke University musicologist Thomas Brothers delivers a portrait of the creative process at work, demonstrating that the cooperative method at the foundation of these two artist-groups was the primary reason for their unmatched musical success. Help! describes in rich detail the music and mastery of two cultural leaders whose popularity has never dimmed, and the process of collaboration that allowed them to achieve an artistic vision greater than the sum of their parts. 

In this fresh and powerful work of environmental history, Martin Doyle explores how rivers have often been the source of arguments at the heart of the American experiment - over federalism, taxation, regulation, conservation, and development. Doyle tells the epic story of America and its rivers, from the US Constitution's roots in interstate river navigation, the origins of the Army Corps of Engineers, the discovery of gold in 1848, and the construction of the Hoover Dam and the TVA during the New Deal, to the failure of the levees in Hurricane Katrina.

This book, which describes the author's one man crusade for a new penal rehabilitation program, known as The Seventh Step, takes you right into the drama of prison life. In 1963, Bill Sands, an ex convict, and the Reverend James Post formulated a self-help group in the Kansas State Prison. This first pre-release program adopted a slogan and guidelines that are the basis of The Seventh Step programs today. 

On August 26, 2015, Emmy Award-winning 24-year-old reporter Alison Parker was murdered on live television, along with her colleague, photojournalist Adam Ward. Their interviewee was also shot but survived. In the wake of his daughter's murder, Andy Parker became a national advocate for commonsense gun safety legislation. The night of the murder, with his emotions still raw, he went on Fox News and vowed to do "whatever it takes" to end gun violence in America.