Showing results by author "Kaplan" in All Categories

The words you use say a lot about who you are and where you're headed. Whether you want to express yourself clearly to impress a prospective employer during a job interview, or just brush up on those pesky words you encounter every so often reading the newspaper, Kaplan Word Power is the essential tool to help you expand your daily vocabulary.

There are times in this life when our beautiful brains become so chemically involved with the likeness of another that the extent of which we would go for them overwhelms all rationale. We call this love.

This book provides a fascinating insider's look at how China is changing rapidly today, how these changes pose grave risks to the rest of the world, and how the US and its allies can best address these challenges. Trade wars and US presidents may come and go, but the fundamental dynamics of the US-China relationship will remain in place for years to come.

[Contains explicit content] Join comedian and host Michelle Buteau in a deep food coma as she hosts a comedic journey through the underbelly of American cuisine. You'll hear stories about comedians' favorite snacks, guilty pleasures (McRib) and food fantasies. The comedy in this episode was recorded at live venues all around the country.

America's power is in decline, its foreign policy adrift, its allies alienated, its soldiers trapped in a war that even generals regard as unwinnable. What has happened these past eight years is well known. Why it happened continues to puzzle. Daydream Believers combines in-depth reporting and analysis to explain how George W. Bush and his aides got so far off track - and why much of the nation followed.

The photograph in the CIA vault shows four men relaxing in the jungle, green berets draped over their rifles, enjoying a break from combat. On the day after the picture was taken, their friendship was torn apart forever. Now, 10 years after the United States pulled out of Vietnam, the CIA has sent one of the men, Parker, to Thailand to track a troop's movement across the Cambodian border, which is about to explode, luring the Americans back into another disastrous ground war.

The Art of the Infinite takes infinity, in its countless guises, as a touchstone for understanding mathematical thinking. Robert and Ellen Kaplan guide us through the “Republic of Numbers,” where we meet both its upstanding citizens and its more shadowy dwellers; and transport us across the plane of geometry into the unlikely realm where parallel lines meet.

These essays—moving, engaging, and deeply personal—explore the themes of family responsibility, growing up, and growing older. As the author, a divorced single mother beginning a new life and career in her forties, delves into the details of her own situation, she illuminates universal truths about what matters most: love, fulfillment, and the pain and necessity of huge change. These pieces about a woman in midlife struggling to come into her own in a complicated world are rich in insight and written with warmth, humour, and clear-eyed, sometimes devastating, honesty.

In the quaint but frigid Chicago suburb of Lake Park Villa, grumpy food critic Josie Tucker is on the trail of a would-be killer. Is wealthy cough drop heiress Lynetta Downes about to lose her life? Or is she simply losing her marbles?

The U.S. Department of Defense founded a kind of startup in Silicon Valley to accelerate the development and acquisition of new technologies useful to the military. But will it survive President Trump?

An Argentine playboy races down the darkened alleys of Buenos Aires, a German on his tail. He darts into a steamy tango hall and begs one of the dancers for refuge, but his pursuer is unshakable. The German leaves with the scrap of information that had been destined for the Americans. The playboy was a spy for the Allies, known as Raven.

Lincoln, who in afterlife became mythologized as the Great Emancipator, was shaped by the values of the White America into which he was born. While he viewed slavery as a moral crime abhorrent to American principles, he disapproved of antislavery activists. Until the last year of his life, he advocated "voluntary deportation", concerned that free Blacks in a White society would result in centuries of conflict.

Ella never leaves work early. She loves her copy of Strunk & White. She buttons her shirt up to the top. She buys beige furniture. She pays her bills on time and always says hello to her neighbors. If she were a superhero, her alter-ego would be SuperPoliteGirl. She doesn’t have any vices—as long as swearing in Italian doesn’t count.

Washington’s foreign policy elites have been left just as disoriented by the rise of presidential hopefuls, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, as everyone else. In signaling the rise of populism as a dominant strain in US politics, Trump and Sanders challenge the basic assumptions on which decades of US foreign and domestic policy have been built.

As China asserts itself in its nearby seas and Russia wages war in Syria and Ukraine, it is easy to assume that Eurasia’s two great land powers are showing signs of newfound strength. But the opposite is true: increasingly, China and Russia flex their muscles not because they are powerful but because they are weak. Unlike Nazi Germany, whose power at home in the 1930s fueled its military aggression abroad, today’s revisionist powers are experiencing the reverse phenomenon.

Weekly Parsha

Studying Sha’ar HaBitachon, Rabbeinu Bachaya's "Gate of Trust", the timeless Torah classic that teaches how to live with certainty and discover tranquility!

Josie Tucker is in a pickle. She's a rising food critic in the blogosphere, but she can't eat. Her testy stomach is always in knots - is it anxiety, a food allergy, or something else? With a Boston blueblood matron funding her adventures, and a trio of loyal friends, Josie finds herself in scrape after bizarre scrape, barely escaping by the skin of her neck.

Ken Olson's world is shattered by a corporate crime which his company must cover up at any cost. Stripped of everything but his passion for justice, Olson discovers the dark and dangerous world behind the corporate jets, the hired killers who secretly do the corporation's dirtiest work, the clandestine offshore bank accounts, and the greedy machinations of the lucky few at the top.

In Does Santa Exist?, Kaplan shows how philosophy giants Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein strove to smooth over this uncomfortable meeting of the real and unreal - and failed. From there he turns to mysticism's attempts to resolve such paradoxes. Finally, he alights on comedy as the ultimate resolution of the fundamental paradoxes of life. Kaplan delves deeper into what this means, from how our physical brains work to his own personal confrontations with life's biggest questions.