Showing results by narrator "Arthur Morey " in All Categories

The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence.

The writing of Death of a President, William Manchester's award-winning account of President Kennedy's assassination, is the topic of the title essay in this collection, as it was a controversy like few others, pitting one of the most prominent historians of the day against Jackie Kennedy, the most famous and private widow in the world. The essay provides an insider's account of the struggle to see the book published.

There are only two places where the powerful and great in this world lose their courage, tremble in the depths of their souls, and become truly afraid. These are the manger and the cross of Jesus Christ. No priest, no theologian stood at the cradle of Bethlehem. And yet, all Christian theology finds its beginnings in the miracle of miracles, that God became human. These stirring words are among forty devotions that guide and inspire readers as they move thematically through the weeks of Advent and Christmas....

What if the year we have long commemorated as America’s defining moment was in fact misleading? What if the real events that signaled the historic shift from colony to country took place earlier, and that the true story of our nation’s emergence reveals a more complicated - and divisive - birth process? In this major new work, iconoclastic historian and political chronicler Kevin Phillips upends the conventional reading of the American Revolution by puncturing the myth that 1776 was the struggle’s watershed year. Mythology and omission have elevated 1776, but the most important year, rarely recognized, was 1775.

Joshua Rubenstein's riveting account takes us back to the second half of 1952, when no one could foresee an end to Joseph Stalin's murderous regime. He was poised to challenge the newly elected US president Dwight Eisenhower with armed force and was also broadening a vicious campaign against Soviet Jews. Stalin's sudden collapse and death in March 1953 was as dramatic and mysterious as his life. It is no overstatement to say that his passing marked a major turning point in the 20th century.

Rights of Man presents an impassioned defense of the Enlightenment principles of freedom and equality that Thomas Paine believed would soon sweep the world. He boldly claimed, "From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen, not to be extinguished. Without consuming...it winds its progress from nation to nation."

1242. On a dark night, travelers from across France cross paths at an inn and begin to tell stories of three children: William, an oblate on a mission from his monastery; Jacob, a Jewish boy who has fled his burning village; and Jeanne, a peasant girl who hides her prophetic visions. They are accompanied by Jeanne’s loyal greyhound, Gwenforte...recently brought back from the dead. As the narrator collects their tales, the story of these three unlikely allies begins to come together.

One of the most clear and repeated directives in the Bible is to be prepared and ready. In Ephesians, Paul encourages this preparedness through the imagery of putting on armor, as Christians are in the midst of a great spiritual battle. William Gurnall expounds on this powerful instruction and brings to life the deep theology, practical application, and extreme urgency of girding oneself for war.

The title story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. In the outlandishly dark “Camp Sundown” vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave. “Free Fruit for Young Widows” is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son. “Sister Hills” chronicles the history of Israel’s settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur War through the present, a political fable constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child.

The Eyes of the Overworld is the first of Vance’s picaresque novels about the scoundrel Cugel. Here he is sent by a magician he has wronged to a distant unknown country to retrieve magical lenses that reveal the Overworld. Conniving to steal the lenses, he escapes and, goaded by a homesick monster magically attached to his liver, starts to find his way home to Almery. The journey takes him across trackless mountains, wastelands, and seas.

They are voices lost to time. Beginning in the late 1970s, five veteran airmen sat for private interviews. Decades after the guns fell silent, they recounted in vivid detail the most dangerous missions that made the difference in the war. Ed Haydon dueled with the deadliest of German aces - and forced him to the ground. Robert Johnson racked up 27 kills in his P-47 Thunderbolt, but nearly lost his life when his plane was shot to ribbons and his guns jammed. Cigar-chomping Curtis LeMay was the Air Corps general who devised the bomber tactics that pummeled Germany's war machine.

In his landmark book How We Die, Sherwin B. Nuland profoundly altered our perception of the end of life. Now in The Art of Aging, he steps back to explore the impact of aging on our minds and bodies, strivings and relationships. Melding a scientist's passion for truth with a humanist's understanding of the heart and soul, Nuland has created a wise, frank, and inspiring book about the ultimate stage of life's journey.

In his straight-forward, no-nonsense style, bestselling author Daniel R. Solin offers the new rules for investing for retirement. He shows readers how to quickly and simply determine their own needs, get control of their assets, avoid scams and sucker bets, discover untapped resources at retirement, and eventually get income out of tax deferred plans - the smart way.

November 1958: the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Into the rarefied atmosphere of wealth and tradition comes the most unlikely of horses - a drab white former plow horse named Snowman - and his rider, Harry de Leyer. They were the longest of all longshots - and their win was the stuff of legend.

In this sweeping narrative, which takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils an astonishing discovery: there is a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright's findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy.

Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History. In this magisterial biography, T. J. Stiles paints a portrait of Custer both deeply personal and sweeping in scope, proving how much of Custer’s legacy has been ignored. He demolishes Custer’s historical caricature, revealing a volatile, contradictory, intense person - capable yet insecure, intelligent yet bigoted, passionate yet self-destructive, a romantic individualist at odds with the institution of the military (he was court-martialed twice in six years).

World War I stands as one of history's most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war's critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain's leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper.

Season of the Witch is the first book to fully capture the dark magic of San Francisco in this breathtaking period, when the city radically changed itself - and then revolutionized the world. The cool gray city of love was the epicenter of the 1960s cultural revolution. But by the early 1970s, San Francisco’s ecstatic experiment came crashing down from its starry heights. The city was rocked by savage murder sprees, mysterious terror campaigns, political assassinations, street riots, and finally a terrifying sexual epidemic.

Harold S. Kushner turns to the experience of Moses to find the requisite lessons of strength and faith. Moses towers over all others in the Old Testament; he is the man on the mountaintop to whom God speaks with unparalleled intimacy, and he leads his people out of bondage. But he is also deeply human, someone whose soaring triumphs are offset by frustration and longing; his people ignore his teachings, he is denied entrance to the Promised Land, his family suffers. But he overcomes.

Few things illustrate the magnetism of the Kennedy era like Marilyn Monroe co-headlining the President's massive birthday fundraiser, and suggestively crooning "Happy Birthday." But only a privileged few know what happened months earlier, when the two icons spent a weekend at a private summit hosted by Bing Crosby, and later, after the New York extravaganza, at the top secret, invitation-only midnight affair at a millionaire's Manhattan town house.