Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Politics & Government

Award-winning journalist and author Simon Winchester takes readers on a personal tour of the Balkans. Combining history and interviews with the people who live there, Winchester offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex issues at work in this chaotic region. Unrest in the Balkans has gone on for centuries. A seasoned reporter, Winchester visited the region twenty years ago. When Kosovo reached crisis level in 1997, Winchester thought a return visit to the beleaguered area would help to make sense out of the awful violence.

This devastating book illuminates America's gun culture - its manufacturers, dealers, buffs, and propagandists - but also offers concrete solutions to our national epidemic of death by firearm. It begins with an account of a crime that is by now almost commonplace: on December 16, 1988, 16-year-old Nicholas Elliot walked into his Virginia high school with a Cobray M-11/9 and several hundred rounds of ammunition tucked in his backpack. By day's end, he had killed one teacher and severely wounded another.

This exciting course introduces vital works of political theory from some of history's greatest minds, luminaries like Plato, Thucydides, and Hobbes. Professor Kaplan's goal is to make these works accessible without distorting or oversimplifying them. By the conclusion of this course, you will see a dramatic difference in your ability to understand what you read or watch in the news.

John Adams told Thomas Jefferson that “history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine.” Thomas Edison called him “the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible.” He was a founder of both the United States and the French Revolution. He invented the phrase, “The United States of America.” He rose from abject poverty in working-class England to the highest levels of the era’s intellectual elite. And yet, by the end of his life, Thomas Paine was almost universally reviled.

This panoramic book shows how the Greek Revolution was a demographic upheaval more consequential than the overthrow of a ruler. Drawing on Ottoman sources together with archival evidence from Greece, Britain, France, Russia, and Switzerland, the book reframes the birth of modern Greece within the imperial history of the global nineteenth century.

Best-selling author Winston Groom tells the complex story of how Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin - the three iconic and vastly different Allied leaders - aligned to win World War II and created a new world order.

Our increasingly interconnected, digitized, and globalized world presents immense opportunities and unique challenges. Modern businesses and schools interact with individuals and organizations from a diverse range of cultural and national backgrounds - increasing the likelihood for miscommunication, errors in strategy, and unintended consequences in the process. Use Your Difference to Make a Difference provides listeners with a skills-based, actionable plan that transforms differences into agents of inclusiveness, connection, and mutual understanding.

The Osama bin Laden I Know is the definitive history of the world's most wanted man. Author Peter Bergen is CNN's terrorism analyst and an acclaimed journalist who actually spent time with bin Laden prior to the events of September 11, 2001. The book features interviews with people from each stage of bin Laden's life, from childhood to the present day, and reveals both formative moments and intimate details that reveal his character and personality.

This course examines the life of Benjamin Franklin and his influence on both American and world history. He remains the model of the American thinker - a man who was interested in nearly everything, and who pursued those interests with an admirable and contagious passion. To study Franklin's life is to learn not only the history of a single man, but to understand some of the most monumental changes in all of human history.

Arrested in 1962 as South Africa's apartheid regime intensified its brutal campaign against political opponents, 44-year-old lawyer and African National Congress activist Nelson Mandela had no idea that he would spend the next 27 years in jail. During his 10,052 days of incarceration, Mandela wrote hundreds of letters to unyielding prison authorities, fellow activists, government officials, and, most memorably, his courageous wife, Winnie, and his five children. Now, 255 of these letters, a majority of which were previously unpublished, provide the most intimate portrait of Mandela since Long Walk to Freedom.

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation - that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, he incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation - the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments - that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King's time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. King of the North follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination.

Derek Black was raised to take over the White nationalist movement in the United States. Derek’s father, Don Black, was a former Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan and started Stormfront, the internet’s first White supremacist website—Derek built the kids’ page—and David Duke was a mentor. Racist hatred, though often wrapped up in respectability and American history, was all Derek knew. It was their inheritance, their community, their identity. Then, while in college in 2013, Derek publicly renounced White nationalism and apologized for their actions and the suffering that they had caused.

The Islamic State has stunned the world with its savagery, destructiveness, and military and recruiting successes. What explains the rise of ISIS, and what does it portend for the future of the Middle East? In this book, one of the world's leading authorities on political Islam and jihadism sheds new light on these questions as he provides a unique history of the rise and growth of ISIS. Moving beyond journalistic accounts, Fawaz Gerges provides a clear and compelling account of the deeper conditions that fuel ISIS.

To mark the 75th anniversary of D-day, the stirring climax to Nigel Hamilton's three-part saga of FDR at war - proof that he was WWII's key strategist, even on his deathbed. Nigel Hamilton's celebrated trilogy culminates with a story of triumph and tragedy. Just as FDR was proven right by the D-day landings he had championed, so was he found to be mortally ill in the spring of 1944. He was the architect of a victorious peace that he would not live to witness.

Noam Chomsky is widely regarded as the most influential thinker of our time, but never before has he devoted a major book to one topic: income inequality. Requiem for the American Dream is not an essay collection but an entire work of some 70,000 words, based on four years of interviews with Chomsky by the editors. It is a book that makes Chomsky's breadth and depth accessible and at the same time gives us his most powerful political ideas with unprecedented, breathtaking directness.

Nigel Hamilton's Mantle of Command, long-listed for the National Book Award, drew on years of archival research and interviews to portray FDR in a tight close-up as he determined Allied strategy in the crucial initial phases of World War II. Commander in Chief reveals the astonishing sequel - suppressed by Winston Churchill in his memoirs - of Roosevelt's battles with Churchill to maintain that strategy.

Is George Orwell the most influential writer who ever lived? Yes, according to John Rodden's provocative book about the transformation of a man into a myth. Rodden does not argue that Orwell was the most distinguished man of letters of the last century, nor even the leading novelist of his generation, let alone the greatest imaginative writer of English prose fiction. Yet his influence since his death at midcentury is incomparable. No writer has aroused so much controversy or contributed so many incessantly quoted words and phrases to our cultural lexicon.

Elizabeth was not just Queen, she was ruler. In an age of male supremacy she, by sheer force of character, became not only the unchallenged leader of the English but also the first leader of an empire upon which the sun never set. Erickson’s biography tells the truth about this extraordinary woman and profiles some amazing people - their personalities and culture.

From the halls of the Philadelphia City Council to the challenges of single motherhood, Blondell Reynolds-Brown's memoir Walking a Tightrope Backward in High Heels offers an unflinching look at what it takes to succeed in the bruising arena of big-city politics. As one of Philadelphia's most influential councilwomen, Reynolds-Brown shattered glass ceilings and championed transformative legislation for women, children, and families during her remarkable twenty-year tenure.