Showing results by narrator "Mel Foster" in All Categories

Tragically, they come from two different worlds. Elias is a Christian Arab living on the eastern side of the newly divided city, and Lila is a Jew living on the western side. A growing conflict between their cultures casts a heavy shadow over the region and their burgeoning relationship. Between them lie not only a wall of stone and barbed wire but also the bitter enmity of two nations at war.

Vincent Bugliosi turns his critical eye on both religious believers and theatheists who reflexively oppose them. Here he indicts both camps, and argues that agnosticism is the most responsible position to take with regard to such eternal questions as the existence of God. Bugliosi examines such developments as the decline of belief in evolution and the disturbing vengefulness of God, as depicted in the Old Testament.

Barry Goldwater was a defining figure in American public life, a firebrand politician associated with an optimistic brand of conservatism. In an era in which American conservatism has lost its way, his legacy is more important than ever. For over 50 years, in those moments when he was away from the political fray, Senator Goldwater kept a private journal, recording his reflections on a rich political and personal life.

The struggle within American Christianity, Garry Wills argues, now and throughout our country's history, is between the head and the heart: between reason and emotion, Enlightenment and Evangelism. Why has this been so? How has the tension between the two poles played out, and with what consequences, over the past 400 years? How "Christian" is America, after all? Wills brings a lifetime's worth of thought about these questions to bear on a magnificent historical reckoning.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when perfectly rational people ran the Republican Party. So how did the party of Lincoln become the party of lunatics? That is what this book aims to answer. Fear not, the Dems come in for their share of tough talk - they are zombies, a party of the living dead. Mike Lofgren came to Washington in the early eighties - those halcyon, post-Nixonian glory days - for what he imagined would be a short stint on Capitol Hill.

Houston homicide detective Roland March was once one of the best. Now he's disillusioned, cynical, and on his way out. His superiors farm him out on a variety of punishment details until an unexpected break gives March one last chance to save his career. And his humanity. All he has to do? Find the missing teenage daughter of a Houston evangelist that every cop in town is already looking for. But March has an inside track: a multiple murder nobody else thinks is connected. Battling a new partner, an old nemesis, and the demons of his past, getting to the truth could cost March everything.

Peter Alan Nelsen is a super-successful movie director who is used to getting what he wants. And what he wants now is to find the wife and infant child he dumped on the road to fame. It's the kind of case that Cole could handle in his sleep, except that when Cole actually finds Nelsen's ex-wife, everything takes on nightmarish proportions - a nightmare which involves Cole with a nasty New York mob family and a psycho killer who is the son of the godfather.

Written between 1843 and 1848, A Disquisition on Government addresses such issues as states' rights and slavery and articulates the doctrine of the concurrent majority, today a central tenet of American political thought.

Seventy-one and a man used to controlling those around him, Saul finds himself slipping into what he describes as his slow dance with death. His ramblings, humor, emotions, lucid moments, and confusion are laid bare as well as the thoughts and feelings of his loved ones: his wife, Monique, conflicted and depressed, caring yet angry; his daughter, Florence, compassionate yet proper and reserved; his son, Joey, self-centered and narcissistic, seemingly indifferent to his family's challenges.

In Lion's Honey, award-winning writer David Grossman takes on one of the most vivid and controversial characters in the Bible. He revisits Samson's famous battle with the lion, his many women, and his betrayal by them all - including the only one he ever loved. Grossman gives us a provocative new take on the story and its climax - Samson's final act of death - when he brings down a temple on himself and 3,000 Philistines

Even 150 years later, we are haunted by the Civil War---by its division, its bloodshed, and perhaps, above all, by its origins. Today, many believe that the war was fought over slavery. This answer satisfies our contemporary sense of justice, but as Gary W. Gallagher shows in this brilliant revisionist history, it is an anachronistic judgment.

Ater a tour in Vietnam and several years working the streets of Detroit as a private investigator, Amos Walker has seen a lot. But he’s never encountered anything quite like his newest assignment. Ann Maringer, an aging stripper hard at work at one of the city’s many low-grade joints, hires him to find a missing person: herself. She expects to disappear any day now, she says, and she wants to be found.

Clark's Harbor was the perfect coastal haven, jealously guarded against outsiders. But now strangers have come to settle there. And a small boy is suddenly free of a frenzy that had gripped him since birth. But his sister is haunted by fearful visions. And one by one, in violent, mysterious ways, the strangers are dying. Never the townspeople, only the strangers. Has a dark bargain been struck between the people of Clark's Harbor and some supernatural force?

Between Hope and Fear tells the remarkable story of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases and their social and political implications. While detailing the history of vaccine invention, Michael Kinch reveals the ominous reality that our victories against vaccine-preventable diseases are not permanent - and could easily be undone. Between Hope and Fear relates the remarkable intersection of science, technology, and disease that has helped eradicate many of the deadliest plagues known to man.

A scientist meets a grisly end when he falls from a military research ship and is attacked by a two-ton white shark off the Japanese coast. By the time Special Investigator Vin Cooper reaches the scene, there's literally very little left to prove that the death wasn't an accident. But Cooper's instincts tell him that he's looking at murder and that in assigning him to this case someone might just as well have shoved him, too, into shark-infested waters.

Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life: his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties; his education in American life at a conventional college; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the “girl of my dreams” Roth calls her); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by Goodbye, Columbus; and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write Portnoy’s Complaint.

In a quiet seaside town near Genoa, experts gather for a linguistics conference. One speaker, Philipp Perlmann, is recently widowed and, struggling to contend with his grief, is unable to write his keynote address. As the hour approaches, an increasingly desperate Perlmann decides to plagiarize the work of Leskov, a Russian colleague who cannot attend, and pass it off as his own.

A prominent seafaring environmentalist and researcher shares his shocking discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean, which inspired a fundamental rethinking of the Plastic Age and a growing global health crisis.

William Peter Blatty, the best-selling author and Oscar Award-winning screenwriter of The Exorcist, lived a charmed life among the elite stars of Hollywood. His son, Peter, born over a decade after The Exorcist, grew from an apple-cheeked boy into an "imposing young man with a quick, warm smile". But when Peter died very suddenly from a rare disorder, Blatty's world turned upside down.

Best-selling author Ken Fisher here explains how investor's memories play (often costly) tricks on them. Fisher takes aim at some major market memory mishaps, like the idea that stocks have become inherently more volatile or that wildly above - or below - average returns are abnormal. He shows how, early in every recovery, investors don’t believe in it - often at a huge cost. And he shows how, in investing, ideology is deadly. Most important, he explains how you can use history as a powerful investing tool.