Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in State & Local

During Prohibition, while Al Capone was rising to worldwide prominence as Public Enemy Number One, the townspeople of rural Templeton, Iowa - population just 418 - were busy with a bootlegging empire of their own. Led by Joe Irlbeck, the whip-smart and gregarious son of a Bavarian immigrant, the outfit of farmers, small merchants, and even the church Monsignor worked together to create a whiskey so excellent, it was ordered by name: Templeton Rye.

Actor Mahershala Ali performs the gripping tale of an armed band of Confederate deserters and slaves living in a mixed-race community who rose up against the Confederate Cavalry in 1863 to form their own republic, free of slavery, in what is now the state of Mississippi. The community they formed - and the ambiguous racial identity of their descendants - confounded the rules of the segregated South well into the 20th century.

In the 1970s, New York City hit rock bottom. Crime was at its highest, the middle class exodus was in high gear, and bankruptcy loomed. Many people credit New York’s master builder Robert Moses with turning Gotham around, despite his brutal, undemocratic. and demolition-heavy ways. Urban critic and journalist Roberta Brandes Gratz contradicts this conventional view. New York City, Gratz argues, recovered precisely because of the waning power of Moses.

Writing in luminous prose, Liza Dalby, acclaimed author of Geisha and The Tale of Murasaki, brings us this elegant and unique year’s journal a brilliant mosaic that is at once a candid memoir, a gardener’s diary, and an enlightening excursion through cultures east and west. Structured according to the seasonal units of an ancient Chinese almanac, East Wind Melts the Ice is made up of 72 short chapters that can be read straight through or dipped into at random.

William McCloskey’s best-selling novel Highliners established him as an authority on the dangers and hardships of the Alaskan fishing industry. Now in an epic sequel, Breakers returns to Kodiak to chart the fortunes of McCloskey’s beloved characters as they make their living from the sea.

Tales from the Indiana Hoosier Locker Room covers over a century of Indiana University basketball. Current and former Hoosiers talk of the excitement, the disappointment, and the celebration that has turned IU basketball into a statewide religion. The history of the Indiana program is revealed through the memories of the school’s hundreds of lettermen. Without a doubt, this is a must-listen for every March Madness and college basketball fan.

The Seven Days Campaign was a series of battles fought near Richmond at the end of June 1862. General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had routed General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. Depriving McClellan of a military decision meant the war would continue for two more years. The Seven Days depicts a critical turning point in the Civil War that would ingrain Robert E. Lee in history as one of the finest generals of all time.

Despite the abundance of books on the Civil War, not one has focused exclusively on what was in fact the determining factor in the outcome of the conflict: differences in union and southern strategy. In The Grand Design, Stoker examines how Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis identified their political goals and worked with their generals to craft the military means to achieve them - or how they often failed to do so.

When asked to name the world’s first major nuclear accident, most people cite the Three Mile Island incident or the Chernobyl disaster. Revealed in this book is one of American history’s best-kept secrets: the world’s first nuclear reactor accident to claim fatalities happened on United States soil. Chronicled here for the first time is the strange tale of SL-1, a military test reactor located in Idaho’s Lost River Desert that exploded on the night of January 3, 1961, killing the three-man maintenance crew on duty.

Yunte Huang ingeniously traces Charlie Chan from his real beginnings as a bullwhip-wielding detective in territorial Hawaii to his reinvention as a literary sleuth and Hollywood film icon. Huang finally resurrects the "honorable detective" from the graveyard of detested postmodern symbols and reclaims him as the embodiment of America’s rich cultural diversity. The result is one of the most critically acclaimed books of the year and a "deeply personal...voyage into racial stereotyping and the humanizing force of storytelling" (Donna Seaman, Los Angeles Times).

For most of us, the story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy depicts Lee Harvey Oswald as a convenient cliche or a conspiracy puppet, Lone Gunman or Framed Patsy. Lost among the competing theories of villainy and cover-up is the real Lee Harvey Oswald, a troubled young man from a fractured family, a lonely child born without a future. In this original and dramatic work, Steven Beschloss draws on a rich but relatively unmined public record, key interviews with Marguerite and other family members, and Lee's own writing.

On May 3, 1946, in St. Martinsville, Louisiana, a 17-year-old Black boy was scheduled for execution by electric chair. Willie Francis had been charged with murder; his trial had been brief; his death sentence never in doubt. When the executioners flipped the switch, Willie screamed and writhed as electricity coursed through his body. But Willie Francis did not die. Having miraculously survived, Willie was informed that the state would attempt to execute him a second time within a week.

Starr brilliantly illuminates the dominant economic, social, and cultural forces in California in these pivotal years. In a powerful blend of telling events, colorful personalities, and insightful analyses, Starr examines such issues as the overnight creation of the postwar California suburb, the rise of Los Angeles as Super City, the reluctant emergence of San Diego as one of the largest cities in the nation, and the decline of political centrism.

Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters were playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like, "a roaring surf," one of them said later. Like, "a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence," said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window - "Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!" A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour.

An updated edition celebrating the greatest Steelers players including members of the Super Bowl XLV team!Who are the men made of steel? In this behind-the-scenes look at the AFC Conference championship team, Jim Wexell digs deep to bring out the stories and legacies which have defined this NFL empire for the last seventy years. Through interviews with players, coaches, and managers, Wexell captures the determination and brashness that has made Pittsburgh the powerhouse of football.

Using the story of Raven and the Box of Daylight (and relating it to Sun Tzu’s equally timeless Art of War) to deepen her narration and reflection, Hayes expresses an ongoing frustration and anger at the obstacles and prejudices still facing Alaska Natives in their own land, but also recounts her own story of attending and completing college in her 50s and becoming a professor and a writer.

Hood’s Defeat Near Fox’s Gap is an exceptional analysis of Confederate Brigadier General John Bell Hood’s troop movements during the battle of South Mountain. For the past 160 years, all other authors misplaced Hood’s troop positions on the Fox’s Gap battlefield by approximately a half-mile. The actual location of Hood's attack reconfigures the entire placement of the competing forces in the battle and, thus, the conclusions one makes about the struggle.

In Black on the Block, Mary Pattillo - a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century - uses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago’s North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America.

President Emerita of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Karen Brooks Hopkins pens BAM... and Then It Hit Me, an inspiring memoir of her 36 years at the iconic cultural institution, America's oldest performing arts center. The book has a sharp focus on concepts such as leadership, innovation, urban revitalization (including the transformation of Brooklyn from Manhattan outpost to the coolest neighborhood on the planet), as highly successful cultural fundraising played critical roles in the colorful evolution of this world-class cultural juggernaut in the performing arts.

After covering racial unrest in the remote northwest corner of his home state of Nebraska in 1999, journalist Stew Magnuson returned four years later to consider the larger questions of its peoples, their paths, and the forces that separate them. Examining Raymond Yellow Thunder’s death at the hands of four White men in 1972, Magnuson looks deep into the past that gave rise to the tragedy. Situating long-ranging repercussions within 130 years of context, he also recounts the largely forgotten struggles of American Indian Movement activist Bob Yellow Bird.