Showing results by narrator "Arthur Morey" in All Categories

With the publication of her first book of poems in her sixty-third year, Amy Clampitt rose meteorically to fame, launching herself from obscurity to the upper ranks of American poetry all but overnight, and living a whirlwind eleven years, until her death in 1994. Years later, as renowned poetry scholar Willard Spiegelman wades into her papers and poems, he discovers a woman of dazzling intellect, staunch progressive politics, and an inexhaustible sense of wonder for the world and the words we’ve invented to describe it.

When the United States was young, importing luxury goods from China was a secretive, glamorous, often brutal business - one where teas and silks and porcelain were purchased with profits from the opium trade. But the journey by sea to New York from Canton could take six agonizing months, and so the most pressing technological challenge of the day became ensuring one’s goods arrived first to market. Barons of the Sea tells the story of a handful of cutthroat competitors who raced to build the fastest, finest, most profitable clipper ships to carry their precious cargo to American shores.

Darin Strauss's extraordinary novel is set in a world turned upside down - where doctors try to save babies from their parents, police use the law to tear families apart, and the people you know the best end up surprising you the most.

The Tender Heart demands a true and honest reflection of faith. While so many seek only to soothe the superficial issues of the heart and mind, Richard Sibbes dives into the true core of one’s behavior and into the real heart of Christianity. Those who truly love God do not feel called to follow him under a sense of guilt-ridden commitment or burdened duty. Sibbes discusses how truly loving the Lord is the only way to enjoy communion with God and to be driven farther from sin.

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.

How often have you heard someone with a commanding presence deliver a bold vision that turned out to be nothing more than rhetoric and hot air? All too often we mistake the appearance of leadership for the real deal. Without a doubt, intelligence, vision, and the ability to communicate are important. But something big is missing: the know-how of running a business—the capacity to take it in the right direction, do the right things, make the right decisions, deliver results, and leave the people and the business better off than they were before.

John Piper challenges fellow baby boomers to forego the American dream of retirement and live out their golden years with a far greater purpose in mind. They say it's a person's reward for all those years of labor. "Turn in your time card and trade in your IRAs. Let travel plans and golf-course leisure lead the way." But is retirement really the ideal? Or is it a series of poor options that ignore a greater purpose-and will kill a person more quickly than old age? John Piper responds,"Lord, spare me this curse!"

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.

Nearly 100,000 years after first contact with the machines that dominate the universe, only a few hundred humans survive. Trapped on Snowglade, a barren world near the center of the galaxy, Killeen and his child, Toby, of the Bishop Tribe, are primitive scavengers, homeless and hunted by the ruling “mechs”. Then suddenly, a strange cosmic entity – neither organic nor cybernetic or living matter – reaches out from a black hole to speak with Killeen.

Winn Van Meter is heading for his family's retreat on the pristine New England island of Waskeke. Normally a haven of calm, for the next three days this sanctuary will be overrun by tipsy revelers as Winn prepares for the marriage of his daughter Daphne to the affable young scion Greyson Duff. Winn's wife, Biddy, has planned the wedding with military precision, but arrangements are sideswept by a storm of salacious misbehavior and intractable lust: Daphne's sister, Livia, who has recently had her heart broken by Teddy Fenn.

Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s; Ágost Lippay Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary’s different political regimes for decades; and András Rott, who has his own dark record of mysterious activities abroad. The web of extended and interconnected dramas reaches from 1989 back to the spring of 1939, when Europe trembled on the edge of war.

In James Madison and the Making of America, historian Kevin Gutzman looks beyond the way James Madison is traditionally seen - as "The Father of the Constitution” - to find a more complex and sometimes contradictory portrait of this influential Founding Father and the ways in which he influenced the spirit of today's United States.

Long known for his range and supple prose (he is the only writer elected to membership in both the Baseball Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters), Angell won the 2015 American Society of Magazine Editors’ Best Essay award for “This Old Man,” which forms a centerpiece for this book. This deeply personal account is a survey of the limitations and discoveries of great age, with abundant life, poignant loss, jokes, retrieved moments, and fresh love, set down in an informal and moving fashion.

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.

Originally published anonymously, The Federalist Papers first appeared in 1787 as a series of letters to New York newspapers exhorting voters to ratify the proposed Constitution of the United States. Still hotly debated and open to often controversial interpretations, the arguments first presented here by three of America's greatest patriots and political theorists were created during a critical moment in our nation's history.

Chosen from the Gospels, these 365 readings encourage us to remove ourselves from our hectic, day-to-day pace and pray with the natural, comforting rhythms of Jesus’ own teachings. Accompanied by reflections and prayer from bestselling Christian author Eugene Peterson, this book will be a welcome companion to those looking for daily wisdom.

Over thirty years, from 1890 to 1921, 2.5 million Jews, fleeing discrimination and violence in their homelands of Eastern Europe, arrived in the United States. Moving from the shtetls of Russia and the ports of Hamburg to the mansions of New York’s Upper East Side and the picket lines outside of the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, The Last Ships from Hamburg is a history that unfolds on both an intimate and epic scale. Ujifusa’s story offers original insight into the American experience, and delivers crucial insight into the burgeoning refugee crisis of our own time.

I’ve made a mess of things again. Not that anybody is surprised. After I’m politely asked to withdraw from college for my antics, I return home to my family’s cattle ranch. The sweeping views, the towering pine trees, and the whisper of the wind remind me I belong on this land. My heart is in the alpine air, my soul mixed into the soil. All I’ve ever wanted is to run the ranch alongside my oldest brother, but my family refuses to see me as anything but a walking disaster.

A magical transformation takes place in Danielle Steel’s luminous new novel: strangers become roommates, roommates become friends, and friends become a family in a turn of the century house in Manhattan’s West Village, at 44 Charles Street.

Erich von Däniken claims to have never seen a UFO. But in the fall of 1987, on a desert ride, he experienced a close encounter of a very different kind. A being materialized before his eyes, and since the "thing" had no name, von Däniken called it "Tomy". This book is the story of Tomy. Some say that Tomy is a scientific impossibility. Yet Tomy was there, science or not. After all, Tomy had for a few weeks lived among us, and that was enough for plenty of interpersonal relationships.