Showing results by narrator "Peter Lerman" in All Categories

In his new book, leading neuroscientist Gordon M. Shepherd expands on the startling discovery that the brain creates the taste of wine. This approach to understanding wine's sensory experience draws on findings in neuroscience, biomechanics, human physiology, and traditional enology. Shepherd shows that creating the taste of wine engages more of the brain than does any other human behavior.

Ballot box voting is often considered the essence of political freedom. But it has two major shortcomings: individual voters have little chance of making a difference, and they also face strong incentives to remain ignorant about the issues at stake. "Voting with your feet", however, avoids both of these pitfalls and offers a wider range of choices. In Free to Move, Ilya Somin explains how broadening opportunities for foot voting can greatly enhance political liberty for millions of people around the world.  

Rot and Revival is one of the first scholarly works to comprehensively theorize and document how politics make American constitutional law and how the courts affect the path of partisan politics. Rejecting the idea that the Constitution's significance and interpretation can be divorced from contemporary political realities, Anthony Michael Kreis explains how American constitutional law reflects the ideological commitments of dominant political coalitions, the consequences of major public policy choices, and the influences of intervening social movements.

Early Americans were suspicious of centralized authority and executive power. Casting away the yoke of England and its king, the founding fathers shared in this distrust as they set out to pen the Constitution. Weighing a need for consolidated leadership with a demand for states' rights, they established a large federal republic with limited dominion over the states. This Very Short Introduction audiobook provides a concise overview of federalism, from its origins and evolution to the key events and constitutional decisions that have defined its framework.

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.

They're loyal, loving, and big-hearted - dogs are our best friends for a good reason. Yet they have much more to offer than just love and friendship. Let CEO Scott MacDonald and rescue dog Sadie show you how to have a more rewarding life and a more successful career in Think Like a Dog.

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.

School safety has become a critical topic of concern in educational contexts. In this book, editors Christopher C. Morphew, Vanya C. Jones, and Ashley Cureton bring together a timely collection of essays to outline the obstacles to and most promising approaches for creating safe, healthy, and inclusive schools for all children.

All that serenity was broken by human behavior gone off the rails. Philanthropist Marilyn Boggs, is murdered on her private island near Naples. Though irresponsible and spoiled, Marilyn was a pillar of the community. Who'd want her dead? There's a huge difference between fear and being afraid and the suspects in this murder feared their existence was in jeopardy. Det. Luca instincts point to the husband whose motives are clear but inconveniently, other, credible suspects surface. Full of betrayal, tension, and suspense, Det. Luca is back in another hard-boiled mystery.

Thanks to the popularity of personal genetic testing services, it's now easier than ever to get information about our own unique DNA - but who does this information really benefit? And, as genome editing and gene therapy transform the healthcare landscape, what do we gain - and what might we give up in return?

H. G. Wells, one of the 20th Century’s greatest writers—author of The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man—wrote The Open Conspiracy to express his ideas about how a peaceful and cooperative world community could bring happiness and prosperity to all the inhabitants of the earth. Wars would no longer be fought and hunger would not rear its ugly head. Writing shortly after World War One, he writes of the horrible waste of life and immense suffering that extreme nationalism brought to Europe.

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.

Upton Sinclair, the muckraking giant of 20th century journalism and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Jungle, turns his critical eye upon the world of religion. Mind you, he is not critical of God nor of the teachings of Christ, but of the organized religions throughout history and of our times.

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.

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.

For 75 years, the basic patterns of world politics and the contours of international economic activity took place in the shadow of American leadership and the institutions it designed—an order designed to avoid the horrors of previous eras, including, most poignantly, two world wars and the Great Depression. But all things must pass. The global financial crisis of 2008, the legacy of two long, losing wars, and the polarizing and tumultuous presidency of Donald Trump all suggest that global affairs have reached a turning point. The implications of this are profound.

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.

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.

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.

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.