Showing results by narrator "Peter Ganim" in All Categories

Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee. He was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. In this searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship. A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father’s courage, and in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja’s own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably.

For more than a century, Dr. J. Marion Sims was hailed as the “father of modern gynecology.” He founded a hospital in New York City and had a profitable career treating gentry and royalty in Europe, becoming one of the world’s first celebrity surgeons. Statues were built in his honor, but he wasn’t the hero he had made himself appear to be. Sims’s greatest medical claim was the result of several years of experimental surgeries—without anesthesia—on a young enslaved woman known as Anarcha; his so-called cure for obstetric fistula forever altered the path of women’s health.

Based on freshly uncovered primary sources and new firsthand interviews, The Most Dangerous Man in America is an American thriller that takes listeners along for the gonzo ride of a lifetime. Spanning 28 months, President Nixon's global manhunt for Dr. Timothy Leary winds its way among homegrown radicals, European aristocrats, a Black Panther outpost in Algeria, an international arms dealer, hash-smuggling hippies from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and secret agents on four continents, culminating in one of the trippiest journeys through the American counterculture.

Fazlur Rahman was one of the great 20th-century Muslim modernists, whose prolific writing and sheer number of students who make up a who’s who of Islamic studies throughout North America reveal the impact that he has had on both academe and on Muslim communities throughout the world. The modernist approach is contrasted with the radical approach of Mawlana Mawdudi of Pakistan.

If it is possible to conquer space, then perhaps it is also possible to conquer time. At least that was the theory American scientists were exploring in an effort to explain the new sources of knowledge the Russians possessed. Perhaps Russian scientists had discovered how to transport themselves back in time in order to learn long-forgotten secrets of the past.

The obituary page of The New York Times is a celebration of extraordinary lives. This groundbreaking package includes 300 obits of the most important and fascinating obituaries the Times has ever published. The obituary page is the section many readers first turn to not only see who died, but to...

Consisting of fewer than 200 verses written in an obscure if not impenetrable language and style, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra is today extolled by the yoga establishment as a perennial classic and guide to yoga practice. As David Gordon White demonstrates in this groundbreaking study, both of these assumptions are incorrect. Virtually forgotten in India for hundreds of years and maligned when it was first discovered in the West, the Yoga Sutra has been elevated to its present iconic status.

‘This book will destroy you’ – Premee Mohamed, author of The Butcher of the Forest Daedalus of Crete is many things: the greatest architect in the world; the constructor of the Labyrinth that imprisoned the Minotaur; and the grieving father of Icarus, the boy who plunged into the sea as...

Decisions equal success - nothing happens until one is made. Businesses make millions of decisions every day. But once in a great while a leader makes a truly game-changing decision that shifts not only the strategy of a single company but how everyone does business. These big decisions are counterintuitive - they go against the conventional wisdom. In hindsight, taking a different direction may seem easy, but these bet-the-company moves involve drama, doubt, and high tension.

Political historian and commentator David Rothkopf shows how Trump will be judged by history (Spoiler alert: not well) in Traitor. Donald Trump is unfit in almost every respect for the high office he holds. But what distinguishes him from every other bad leader the U.S. has had is that he has...

There is something of both the absolutely spectacular and positively disgraceful about Tehran. But most writers around the world are inclined to think that their own sprawling metropolis is the capital of every imaginable vice and crime, of impossible love and tenderness and cruelty and malice in measures that seldom exist anywhere else. For me, Tehran's case is no different - except that there really is a difference here. The city may be a hothouse of decadence, a den of inequity, all that. But it still exists under the watchful eye of a very unique entity, the Islamic Republic.

Bruce Gordon was an ex-fighter, ex-gambler, ex-cop, ex-reporter, and now he was an ex-patriot of Earth. Security shipped him to Mars with a knife, 100 credits, and a yellow card that meant no return.

Praised by the Horn Book as “both quiet and exhilarating,” this novel by the acclaimed poet and National Book Award Finalist Naomi Shihab Nye follows Aref Al-Amri as he says goodbye to everything and everyone he loves in his hometown of Muscat, Oman, as his family prepares to move to Ann...

Jack Faust is a breathtaking and masterful new spin on Goethe's story of a scholar who sells his soul to the Devil for the gift of unlimited knowledge. But unlike the classic Mephistopheles, the seductive demon who approaches Swanwick's Johannes Faust is not the devil as we know him, but rather a representative of a mysterious race that seeks nothing less than the extermination of the hated human animal.

The planet of Coyote has become the last, best hope of humankind, but it has also become the principal point of contact with the hjadd, the alien race encountered by a European starship many years earlier. Although the hjadd have built an embassy near the original colony, they remain a mystery.

The Koran has constituted a remarkably resilient core of identity and continuity for a religious tradition that is now in its 15th century. In this Very Short Introduction, Michael Cook provides a lucid and direct account of the significance of the Koran both in the modern world and in that of traditional Islam. He gives vivid accounts of its role in Muslim civilization, illustrates the diversity of interpretations championed by traditional and modern commentators, discusses the processes by which the book took shape, and more.

On the surface, this Hugo and Nebula Award-winning classic is about a drifter who comes to stay in a New Mexico commune founded by a group of deaf-blind people. But beneath the story, author John Varley examines deep, universal issues. What is the nature of communication? What does an individual gain - or lose - by subsuming himself to the whole? Can an outsider ever truly "belong"?

The best-selling author of the classic Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt returns with a riveting new trilogy of cutting-edge science, international politics, and the real-life ramifications of global warming as they are played out in our nation's capital - and in the daily lives of those at the center of the action. Hauntingly realistic, here is a novel of the near future that is inspired by scientific facts already making headlines. BONUS AUDIO: Includes an exclusive introduction by author Kim Stanley Robinson.

The thrilling story of the Bonnot Gang, a band of anarchist bank robbers whose crimes terrorized Belle Ã?oque Paris, and whose escapades reflected the fast-paced, dizzyingly modern, and increasingly violent period on the eve of World War I. For six terrifying months in 1911-1912, the citizens...

From a psychiatrist on the frontlines of addiction medicine and an expert on the history of drug use comes the "authoritative, engaging, and accessible" history of the flower that helped to build (Booklist) -- and now threatens -- modern society. Opioid addiction is fast becoming the most deadly...