Showing results by narrator "Joe Barrett" in All Categories

"Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable." So begins Thomas Nagel's classic 1974 essay "What is it Like to be a Bat?" Nagel's essay initiated the now widespread attention to consciousness as a central problem for philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience; it also influenced the recognition of the consciousness of nonhuman creatures as an important subject of study.

Everyone loves adventure, and Otto Penzler has collected the best adventure stories of all time into one mammoth volume. With stories by Jack London, O. Henry, H. Rider Haggard, Alastair MacLean, Talbot Mundy, Cornell Woolrich, and many others, this wide-reaching and fascinating volume contains some of the best characters from the most thrilling adventure tales, including The Cisco Kid.

A timely look at the impact of China's booming emergence on the countries of Southeast Asia.

In his provocative new book, evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion - including faith, dogma, and revelation - leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions.

Keep your hard-earned cash with Reducing Your Taxes for Dummies. It's full of year-round opportunities for reducing your tax burden and paying less in taxes each year.

Forty years ago, a majority of Americans were highly engaged in issues of war and peace. Whether to go to war or keep out of conflicts was a vital question at the heart of the country's vibrant, if fractious, democracy. But American political consciousness has drifted. In the last decade, America has gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, while pursuing a new kind of warfare in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Pakistan.

Norco '80 tells the story of how five heavily armed young men - led by an apocalyptic born-again Christian - attempted a bank robbery that turned into one of the most violent criminal events in US history, forever changing the face of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama, Norco '80 transports the listener back to the Southern California of the 1970s, an era of predatory evangelical gurus, doomsday predictions, megachurches, and soaring crime rates, with the threat of nuclear obliteration looming over it all.

The setting is a comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience that has come expecting an evening of amusement instead sees a comedian falling apart onstage - an act of disintegration, a man crumbling, as a matter of choice, before their eyes. They could get up and leave or boo and whistle and drive him from the stage, if they were not so drawn to glimpse his personal hell.

From 1792 to 1795, George Vancouver sailed the Pacific as the captain of his own expedition and as an agent of imperial ambition. To map a place is to control it, and Britain had its eyes on America's Pacific coast. And map it Vancouver did. His voyage was one of history's greatest feats of maritime daring, discovery, and diplomacy, and his marine survey of Hawaii and the Pacific coast was at its time the most comprehensive ever undertaken.

Leonardo DiCaprio. Alex Rodriguez. Tobey Maguire. Affleck. Damon. Cassavetes. What do these people have in common? Not just fame and fortune; all these men are also alumni of the ultra-exclusive, high-stakes poker ring that inspired Aaron Sorkin's Oscar-nominated film, Molly's Game. But Houston Curtis, the card shark who co-founded the game with Tobey Maguire, knows that Sorkin's is the whitewashed version. In Billion Dollar Hollywood Heist, Curtis goes all-in, revealing the true story behind the game.

When Ross Lowry moves into his cousin's guest house in the small community of Magdalena, Arizona, he expects nothing more than breathing room and a brief respite from his economic woes. But something is not right in the desert. After a raucous party on New Year's Eve, the luck of the attendees undergoes an immediate U-turn. The rich and successful suddenly find themselves facing catastrophic failure while the less well-off are unexpectedly flush with good fortune.

Toorop, a hard-boiled leatherneck veteran, has been hired to escort a young woman from Russia to Canada. But Marie is no ordinary girl. A schizophrenic and a possible carrier of a new artificial virus, Marie is bearing a mutant embryo created by an American cult, which dreams of producing a genetically modified messiah that will end all human life as we know it.

For all that science knows about the living world, notes David P. Barash, there are even more things we don't know, genuine evolutionary mysteries that perplex the best minds in biology. Paradoxically, many of these mysteries are very close to home, involving some of the most personal aspects of being human. Homo Mysterious examines a number of these evolutionary mysteries, exploring things we don't yet know about ourselves, laying out the best current hypotheses, and pointing toward insights that scientists are just beginning to glimpse.

Jonathan has gone to England for a vacation, but it is interrupted when British Intelligence needs him for his highly skilled services. Jonathan must take over the mission of an agent whose murder was so bizarre and terrifying that no other agent was willing to replace him. His task is to locate a set of secretly made films that incriminate a number of high-ranking British officials. His target is a top underworld figure who delights in debauchery and torture.

The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and Reconstruction. It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman's Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation.

The New England Mafia was a hugely powerful organization that survived by using violence to ruthlessly crush anyone that threatened it, or its lucrative gambling, loansharking, bootlegging, and other enterprises. From information based on newly declassified documents and the use of underworld sources, Boston Mob spans the gutters and alleyways of East Boston, Providence, and Charlestown to the halls of Congress in Washington, D.C., and Boston's Beacon Hill. Its players include governors and mayors, and the Mafia Commission of New York City.

In Born in Africa, Martin Meredith follows the trail of discoveries about human origins made by scientists over the last hundred years, recounting their intense rivalry, personal feuds, and fierce controversies, as well as their feats of skill and endurance. The results have been momentous. Scientists have identified more than 20 species of extinct humans. They have firmly established Africa as the birthplace not only of humankind but also of modern humans.

Hart Tanner is a con man; a grifter who enjoys gaming people as much as he enjoys whatever ill-gotten gains he might receive. When he dies an embarrassing, pain-riddled death, he is beyond surprised to wake up at an earlier point in his life with all memories still intact. A con man with access to life after life with no real consequences, why would he ever change the way he lives? But Hart Tanner does change. No matter how stubbornly he clings to his own resistance.

Colonel Matt Pontowski, grandson of a former US president, attempts to boost the morale of his pilots who know their killer A-10 Warthog aircraft are due to be phased out. When trouble erupts in Hong Kong and southern China, his wing volunteers for a dangerous undercover mission against the world's most feared and volatile superpower. A massacre is looming and millions of innocent people are at risk. Pontowski and his volunteers are now reluctant to withdraw, despite orders, as they initiate their own plans to overthrow the brutal regime that has been gaining power.

This revised edition of Human Nature begins a new phase in the most important intellectual controversy of this generation: Is human behavior controlled by the species' biological heritage? Does this heritage limit human destiny?

With characteristic pungency and simplicity of style, the author of Sociobiology challenges old prejudices and current misconceptions about the nature-nurture debate.