Résultats lu par "John Lescault" dans Toutes les catégories

A compelling new biography of America's most powerful speaker of the House, who held the divided nation together for three decades and who was Lincoln's guiding light.

Most of us take for granted that our books are vertical on our shelves with the spines facing out, but Henry Petroski, inveterately curious engineer, didn’t. As a result, listeners are guided along the astonishing evolution from papyrus scrolls boxed at Alexandria to upright books shelved at the Library of Congress. Petroski takes us into the pre-Gutenberg world, when books were so scarce they were chained to lecterns for security.

From the author of the National Book Award-winning An American Requiem and the classic bestseller Constantine’s Sword comes the story of Colman Brady, an Irish farmer who involves himself in the Irish rebellion of the early 1920s and later escapes to Boston where he rises to and falls from political power and seeks a second chance through the life of his son.

In 1980s New York City, young lawyer Nick Coleman meets free spirit Caroline Sedlak in an evening fiction writing course. A vivacious fixture at a Greenwich Village bar, she remains mysterious about her life until their teacher reads her story submission to the class, and Nick realizes that a darker past lurks beneath her happy-go-lucky exterior. Nick must confront demons of his own while struggling to prove himself to his colleagues as a young blind lawyer at an office that handles appeals for indigent convicted felons.

In his perilous journey home after the Trojan War, Odysseus must pass through the land of the Cyclopes, encounter Circe the Enchantress, and face the terrible Charybdis and the six-headed serpent Scylla.

It’s tough being an author these days, and it’s getting harder. But, as Jason Boog shows in a rich mix of history and politics, this is not the first period when writers have struggled to scratch a living. Between accounts of contemporary layoffs and shrinking paychecks for authors and publishing professionals are stories from the 1930s when writers, hard hit by the Great Depression, fought to create unions and New Deal projects like the Federal Writers Project.

Robinson Crusoe flees Britain on a ship after killing his friend over the love of Mary. A fierce ocean storm wrecks his ship and leaves him stranded by himself on an uncharted island. Left to fend for himself, Crusoe seeks out a tentative survival on the island, until he meets Friday, a tribesman whom he saves from being sacrificed. Initially, Crusoe is thrilled to finally have a friend, but he has to defend himself against the tribe who uses the island to sacrifice tribesman to their gods.

In this highly original book, Russell Blackford discusses the intersection of science fiction and humanity’s moral imagination. With the rise of science and technology in the 19th century, and our continually improving understanding of the cosmos, writers and thinkers soon began to imagine futures greatly different from the present. Science fiction was born out of the realization that future techno-scientific advances could dramatically change the world.

No man in Scripture lived more consistently and completely for God than did Joseph, a favorite son of Jacob. In times of adversity and in times of prosperity - both of which offered the temptation to deny God and his lordship - Joseph remained steadfast. Living by Faith is the third and final volume on Genesis. Volume one focused on God’s relationship to the cosmos and to all peoples of the earth. Volume two traced the “new beginning” of God’s plan of redemption. In volume three, Boice follows the complete story of Joseph, a “man for all seasons”.

In this commentary on Genesis 12-36, Boice traces the “new beginning” of God’s plan of redemption, which arose out of God’s relationship with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. By delving into the patriarchs’ lives, Boice demonstrates how much they are like us and how easily we relate to them, both in triumphs and failures. The second of three volumes on the Book of Genesis, A New Beginning shows how God changed the course of history beginning with one less-than-perfect man.

Atomic Bomb Island tells the story of an elite, top-secret team of sailors, airmen, scientists, technicians, and engineers who came to Tinian in the Marianas in the middle of 1945 to prepare the island for delivery of the atomic bombs then being developed in New Mexico, to finalize the designs of the bombs themselves, and to launch the missions that would unleash hell on Japan.

What are the traits, tactics, and strategies of the business world's most transformative leaders...and what can the rest of us learn from them? In What the Best CEOs Know, leadership authority Jeffrey Krames examines the careers of seven of history's most accomplished CEOs - including in-depth interviews with Michael Dell, Lou Gerstner, and Herb Kelleher - to get candid answers to many of today's most compelling business questions.

The first of Homer's epic poems tells of the counsel of Nestor, Achilles' slaying of Hector, and the defeat of the Trojans by the Greeks.

This reunion drew over 55,000 official attendees who descended upon a town of four thousand during the summer of 1913 with the promise of little more than a cot and two blankets, military fare, and the presence of countless adversaries from a horrific war. Most were revisiting a time and place in their personal history that involved acute physical and emotional trauma. Contrary to popular belief, veterans were not motivated to attend by a desire for reconciliation, nor did the Great Reunion produce a general sense of a reunified country.

Small ranchers in Harmony, Oregon, are up against it with the price of cattle down and Skull Ranch, owned by a syndicate, trying to buy them out. Dan Riley spends a month trying to find a bank to help them, but he fails. When the editor of The Clarion is shot, the ranchers blame Black Mike Sand, the manager of Skull, in spite of the circumstances of the shooting. As pressure mounts, Riley is determined to find out who is really in charge of the syndicate, and the only man willing to help him is Andrew Daniels, a former newspaper man whose courage comes from a bottle.

The award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance. With its combination of sharp critical insight, engaging observation, and narrative drive, it represents the kind of masterful cultural history for which David Reynolds is known. Here the major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and others receive striking, original readings set against the rich backdrop of contemporary popular writing.

Washington, DC, gleams with stately columns and neoclassical temples, a pulsing hub of political power and prowess. But for decades it was one of the worst excuses for a capital city the world had ever seen. Empire of Mud unearths and untangles the roots of our capital’s story and explores how the city was tainted from the outset, nearly stifled from becoming the proud citadel of the republic that George Washington and Pierre L’Enfant envisioned more than two centuries ago.

Although American author Bret Harte is most readily associated with stories about the West, it is his skill with characterization that distinguishes him from the hundreds of others who set fictional tales in the region. The miners, soldiers, gamblers, entrepreneurs, and lost souls who populate these pages are limned with Harte's unique combination of dry wit and tender pathos. This charming collection of Harte's short stories focuses on life in old California.

Twins Virginia and Tommy Matthews have been on their own since they were orphaned at the age of five, surviving a merciless foster care system by relying on each other. Twelve years later, the world begins to collapse around them as a deadly contagion steadily wipes out entire populations and a devastating world war rages on for the cure. When Tommy is drafted for the war, the twins are faced with a choice: stay and accept their fate of almost certain death or run. Virginia and Tommy flee into the dark night.

What is the unique and most important feature that distinguishes man from all other living beings? Why is it that, contrary to the instinct of self-preservation, a parent will throw themselves headlong into fire or water to save their child? Why do people get married and why do they get divorced? Why do people have extramarital affairs and why do two people in a couple become jealous of one another? What is love?