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An all-star team of 18 conservative writers offers a hilarious, insightful, sanctimony-free remix of William Bennett's The Book of Virtues - without parental controls. The Seven Deadly Virtues sits down next to listeners at the bar, buys them a drink, and, an hour or three later, ushers them into the revival tent without them even realizing it.

When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an "empire for liberty" populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves.

When Stephen Hawking died, he was widely recognized as the world's best physicist, and even its smartest person. He was neither. In Hawking Hawking, science journalist Charles Seife explores how Stephen Hawking came to be thought of as humanity's greatest genius. Hawking spent his career grappling with deep questions in physics, but his renown didn't rest on his science. He was a master of self-promotion, hosting parties for time travelers, declaring victory over problems he had not solved, and wooing billionaires.

During his years as a public official, Mitchell Weiss was told that government can't do new things or solve tough challenges - it's too big and slow and bureaucratic. Sadly, this is what so many of us have come to believe. But in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, he and his city hall colleagues raced to support survivors in new, innovative ways. This kind of entrepreneurial spirit and savvy in government is growing, transforming the public sector's response to big problems at all levels.

Investors traditionally view low-risk stocks as safe but unprofitable, but this old canard is based on a flawed premise; it fails to see beyond the monthly horizon and ignores compounding returns. This book updates the thinking and brings reality to modelling to show how low-risk stocks actually outperform high-risk stocks by an order of magnitude. Accessible and easy to implement, the plan presented here will help you construct a portfolio that delivers higher returns per unit of risk and explains how to achieve excellent investment results over the long term.

There is no single theory of what caused the Great Depression and never will be, Morris argues. Macreconomics is a social science, and such a massive event always takes its shape from a terrible confluence of factors. The mismanagement of the gold standard, the growth in consumer credit, the insistence on deflation, and the inability of the major European belligerents of World War I to agree on a reconstruction agenda are just a few of the shocks that pushed the world into an economic Armageddon.

In The Science of Breaking Bad, Dave Trumbore and Donna Nelson explain, analyze, and evaluate the show's portayal of science, from the pilot's opening credits to the final moments of the series finale. The intent is not, of course, to provide a how-to manual for wannabe meth moguls but to decode the show's most head-turning, jaw-dropping moments. Trumbore, a science and entertainment writer, and Nelson, a professor of chemistry and Breaking Bad's science advisor, are the perfect scientific tour guides.

Going beyond the well-known history, this book offers World War II buffs and history fans something altogether different. Just beneath the surface of the traditional perspectives and legendary events lurks a vast and shadowy world of virtually untraceable maneuvers, deceptive appearances, and confidences betrayed.

The freedom to think what you want and to say what you think has always generated a pushback of regulation and censorship. This raises the thorny question: to what extent does free speech actually endanger speech protection? This book examines today's calls for speech legislation and places it into historical perspective, using fascinating examples from the past 200 years, to explain the historical context of laws regulating speech.

Whether you farm or garden, live in the country or long to move there, or simply enjoy an occasional rural retreat, you will be delighted by this cornucopia of writings about living and working on the land, harvested from the fertile fields of ancient Greek and Roman literature. An inspiring antidote to the digital age, How to Be a Farmer evokes the beauty and bounty of nature with a rich mixture of philosophy, practical advice, history, and humor.  

Levels of violent crime have been in a steady decline for centuries-for millennia, even. Over the past 500 years, homicide rates have decreased a hundred-fold. We live in a time that is more orderly and peaceful than ever before in human history. Why, then, does fear of crime dominate modern politics? In Command and Persuade, Peter Baldwin examines the evolution of the state's role in crime and punishment over 3,000 years.

The Gulf of Mexico presents a compelling, salt-streaked narrative of the Earth's 10th-largest body of water. In this beautifully written volume, John S. Sledge explores the people, ships, and cities that have made the Gulf's human history and culture so rich. Many famous figures who sailed the Gulf's viridian waters are highlighted, including Ponce de Leon, Robert Cavelier de La Salle, Francis Drake, Elizabeth Agassiz, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Dwight Sigsbee. Sledge also introduces a fascinating array of people connected to maritime life in the Gulf.

The Education of John Adams is the first biography of John Adams by a biographer with legal training. It examines his origins in colonial Massachusetts, his education, and his struggle to choose a career and define a place for himself in colonial society.

Featuring a wealth of sample puzzles ranging from simple to extremely challenging, this lively and engaging book brings together many of the most ingenious puzzles ever devised, including the "Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever", metapuzzles, paradoxes, and the logic puzzles in detective stories.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt organized an extraordinary partnership between the US government and America's media outlets to communicate to the reluctant and isolationist American public the nature of the threat that World War II posed to the nation and the world. The coalition's aim was to promote the concept of American exceptionalism and use it to galvanize the public for the government's cause.

Biologist Rob Dunn's Every Little Thing is the story of man's obsessive quest to catalog life, from nanobacteria to new monkeys. In the tradition of E. O. Wilson, this engaging and fascinating work of popular science follows humanity's unending quest to discover every living thing in our natural world-from the unimaginably small in the most inhospitable of places on earth to the unimaginably far away in the unexplored canals on Mars.

From the beginning, American cinema has been both a powerful mythmaker and a social critic. D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, arguably the first feature film, shows us just how early in its history cinema had established its influence. Birth of a Nation famously portrayed the Ku Klux Klan in a favorable light, a portrayal that contributed to the modern resurgence of the group and brought racist depictions of African Americans imported from the minstrel show to the silver screen. In response, filmmakers of color have created nuanced and indelible portraits of race.

From 1953 to 1969, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren brought about many of the proudest achievements of American constitutional law. The Warren Court declared racial segregation and laws forbidding interracial marriage to be unconstitutional; it expanded the right of citizens to criticize public officials; it held school prayer unconstitutional; and it ruled that people accused of a crime must be given a lawyer even if they can't afford one. Yet conservative critics have fiercely accused the justices of the Warren Court of abusing their authority....

Wide-ranging yet intimate, The Lives of Isaac Stern is a portrait of an artist and statesman who began as an American dreamer and left a lasting inheritance to his art, profession, and the world. 

Hugely popular when it was first published in 1911, and regarded as a classic ever since, Where the Money Grows is an honest, humorous, and richly perceptive tour of Wall Street and its enduring customs, institutions, and characters. The Street, according to author Garet Garrett, is a world populated not only by bulls and bears, but also by "wolves", "hoodoos", and "invisibles". You'll meet them all in this immensely entertaining and revealing audiobook.