Showing results by narrator "Stuart Appleton" in All Categories

A powerful treatise that demonstrates the existence of altruism in nature, with surprising implications for human society. Does altruism exist? Or is human nature entirely selfish? In this eloquent and accessible book, famed biologist David Sloan Wilson provides new answers to this age-old question based on the latest developments in evolutionary science.

This revised, expanded, and updated edition of the 1979 landmark Breaking the Magic Spell examines the enduring power of fairy tales and the ways they invade our subjective world. In seven provocative essays, Zipes discusses the importance of investigating oral folk tales in their socio-political context and traces their evolution into literary fairy tales, a metamorphosis that often diminished the ideology of the original narrative.

The authors examine the dynamic interplay of texts and their concomitant rhetorical situations by drawing on a number of case studies, including controversial constitutional arguments put forward by activists and presidents in the 19th century, inventive economic pivots by Franklin Roosevelt and Alan Greenspan, and the rhetorical trajectory and method of Barack Obama.

In the 19th century, Texas’s advancing western frontier was the site of one of America’s longest conflicts between White settlers and native peoples. The Texas Hill Country functioned as a kind of borderland within the larger borderland of Texas itself, a vast and fluid area where, during the Civil War, the slave-holding South and the nominally free-labor West collided. As in many borderlands, Nicholas Roland argues, the Hill Country was marked by violence.  

Jared Lobdell examines Tolkien's methods and his worldview by following the thread of three influences: the Edwardian adventure story, the science of philology, or comparative languages, and Roman Catholic theology. The "Edwardian mode" of adventure story ( King Solomon's Mines, The Lost World) is one in which a small group of Englishmen make an expedition to foreign parts and find supernatural terrors awaiting them, finally returning home, mission accomplished.

A car jockey at a luxury hotel in Beverly Hills, youthful hacker-turned-slacker Rollo Hemphill devises a screwball scheme for making his girlfriend jealous. Through a silly but magical ruse, our hero gets everything he's ever dreamed about - except the real love of a real, live girl. My Inflatable Friend is a witty, cautionary tale about the perils of pretending to be someone you're not - and the hazards of stroking every male's most private and vulnerable part - his swelling ego.

In 1971, while US ground forces were prohibited from crossing the Laotian border, a South Vietnamese Army corps, with US air support, launched the largest airmobile operation in the history of warfare, Lam Son 719. The objective: to sever the North Vietnamese Army's main logistical artery, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at its hub, Tchepone in Laos, an operation that, according to General Creighton Abrams, could have been the decisive battle of the war. Hastening the withdrawal of US forces and ensuring the survival of South Vietnam.

In a 40-year career as an oil and gas investment analyst and as an investment banker and strategic adviser on petroleum-sector mergers, acquisitions, and financings, Thomas A. Petrie has witnessed dramatic changes in the business. In Following Oil, he shares useful lessons he has learned about domestic and global trends in population and economic growth, a maturing resource base, variable national energy policies, and dynamic changes in geopolitical forces.

Bioethics and the Human Goods offers students and general listeners a brief introduction to bioethics from a "natural law" philosophical perspective. This perspective, which traces its origins to classical antiquity, has profoundly shaped Western ethics and law and is enjoying an exciting renaissance. While compatible with much in the ethical thought of the great religions, it is grounded in reason, not religion.

Estes describes the mobilization, organization, and operations of First Brigade during the first three months of American participation in the Korean War. Focusing on the battalions, companies, and platoons that faced the hardened soldiers of the North Korean army, he brings the listener directly to the battlefield. The story he reveals there, woven with the voices of soldiers and officers, is one of cooperation rather than interservice rivalry. At the same time, he clarifies differences in the organizational cultures of the US Army and the Marine Corps.