Showing results by narrator "Mel Foster" in All Categories

Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." And Ralph Waldo Emerson found Leaves of Grass "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed," calling it a "combination of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald."

After meeting chef Alice Waters at her legendary restaurant, Chez Panisse, Sydney Finkelstein got to thinking about the dozens of chefs who had come from her establishment to open their own restaurants and gain notoriety as some of the country's most creative culinary figures. Waters, he found, had spawned a family tree of geniuses. Could this pattern exist in other industries?

One of the largest, fastest, and most beautiful ships in the world, the Andrea Doria was en route to New York from Italy. Departing from the United States was the much smaller Stockholm. On the foggy night of July 25, 1956, 53 miles southeast of Nantucket, the Stockholm sliced through the Doria's steel hull. Within minutes, the sea was pouring into the Italian liner. Eleven hours later, she capsized and sank into the ocean.

In the Second World War, the United States, Great Britain, and Germany each produced one land-force commander who stood out from the rest: George Patton, Bernard Montgomery, and Erwin Rommel. All were arrogant, publicity seeking, and personally flawed, yet each possessed a genius for command and an unrivaled enthusiasm for combat.

At first light on Tuesday, May 28th, 1918, waves of American riflemen from the US Army's First Division climbed from their trenches, charged across the shell-scarred French dirt of no-man's-land, and captured the hilltop village of Cantigny from the grip of the German Army. Those who survived the enemy machine-gun fire and hand-to-hand fighting held on for the next two days and nights in shallow foxholes under the sting of mustard gas and crushing steel of artillery fire.

In How to Read the Bible, Harvard professor James Kugel leads the listener chapter by chapter through the "quiet revolution" of recent biblical scholarship, showing time and again how radically the interpretations of today''s researchers differ from what people have always thought.

A true story that few ever believed would come to light, Growing Up bin Laden uncovers startling revelations and hidden secrets carefully guarded by the most wanted terrorist of our lifetime, Osama bin Laden.

The Magical Approach teaches us how to live our lives spontaneously, creatively, and according to our own natural rhythms. It helps us to discover and tune into our natural, instinctive behavior. By applying the principles in this book, listeners will learn to trust their impulses and discover the highest expression of their creativity.

Hollywood’s newest wunderkind is Peter Alan Nelsen, the brilliant, erratic director known as the King of Adventure. His films make billions, but his manners make enemies. What the boy king wants, he gets, and what Nelsen wants is for Elvis to comb the country for the wife and infant child the film-school flunkout dumped en route to becoming the third-biggest filmmaker in America. It’s the kind of case Cole can handle in his sleep - until it turns out to be a nightmare. For when Cole finds Nelsen’s ex-wife in a small Connecticut town, she’s nothing like he expects.

Is there more to Buddhism than sitting in silent meditation? Is modern Buddhism relevant to the problems of daily life? Does it empower individuals to transform their lives? Or has Buddhism become too detached, so still and quiet that the Buddha has fallen asleep? Waking the Buddha tells the story of the Soka Gakkai International, the largest, most dynamic Buddhist movement in the world today - and one that is waking up and shaking up Buddhism so it can truly work in ordinary people's lives.

America’s Conspiracies and Cover-Ups brings together interviews with the bestselling and brightest minds in the alternative history world to create the definitive guide to our country’s biggest secrets. Jim Marrs and G. Edward Griffin, along with scholar Noam Chomsky and others experts, come together to answer questions about your favorite conspiracies: Is the Federal Reserve System unconstitutional? Was the IRS created to bail out Big Banks? Are cancer cures and cheap alternative energy being suppressed? Are elections made fraudulent by hacked voting machines?

In Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, biologist, illustrator, and award-winning author Bernd Heinrich explores his local woods, where he delights in the seemingly infinite feats of animal inventiveness he discovers there. Because winter drastically affects the most elemental component of all life---water---radical changes in a creature's physiology and behavior must take place to match the demands of the environment.

Modern Man is a penetrating psychological portrait of a true genius and constant self-inventor, as well as a sweeping tale filled with exotic locales, sex and celebrity (he was a lover of Josephine Baker), and high-stakes projects. In Flint's telling, Corbusier isn't just the grandfather of modern architecture but a man who sought to remake the world according to his vision, dispelling the Victorian style and replacing it with something never seen before.

Beginning in 1935, in a series of devastating decisions, the Supreme Court's conservative majority left much of Franklin Roosevelt's agenda in ruins. The pillars of the New Deal fell in short succession. It was not just the New Deal but democracy itself that stood on trial. In February 1937, Roosevelt struck back with an audacious plan to expand the Court to fifteen justices - and to "pack" the new seats with liberals who shared his belief in a "living" Constitution.

In a matter of days, Peter McDowell loses everything he has worked so hard for - his wealth, his property, his livelihood as a star investment banker. And then it gets worse. The stock market crash not only plunges Peter into joblessness, it causes a rift in his marriage that he cannot repair. Stripped of everything, he has only one place to retreat to: a lakeside cottage he inherited from his parents, who left most of their modest estate to Peter's twin. With no other choice, the prodigal son goes home.

In A Splendid Exchange, William J. Bernstein tells the extraordinary story of global commerce from its prehistoric origins to the myriad controversies surrounding it today. He transports listeners from ancient sailing ships that brought the silk trade from China to Rome in the second century to the rise and fall of the Portuguese monopoly in spices in the 16th.

L.A. private eye Elvis Cole is hired by popular television star Jodie Taylor to delve into her past and identify the biological parents who gave her up for adoption thirty-six years before. Cole's assignment is to find out their biological history and report back. It seems all too clear cut. But when he gets to Louisiana and begins his search, he finds that there's something much darker going on. Other people are also looking for Taylor's parents, and some are ending up dead.

With the holidays over and the long cold winter looming, January can be a bleak month in Minneapolis. So what better way to bring a little cheer to the good people of the city than by sponsoring an old-fashioned snowman-building contest? In a matter of hours, a local park is filled with the innocent laughter of children and their frosty creations.

With Schwarzkopf is Gus Lee's remembrance of his mentor and friend H. Norman Schwarzkopf, and his firsthand account of how Schwarzkopf shaped his life. In 1966, Lee, a junior-year cadet at West Point, was bright, athletic, and popular. He was also on the verge of getting kicked out. Nearing the bottom of his class due to his penchant for playing poker and reading recreationally instead of studying engineering, he was assigned a new professor: then-Major Norman Schwarzkopf.

Even 150 years later, we are haunted by the Civil War---by its division, its bloodshed, and perhaps, above all, by its origins. Today, many believe that the war was fought over slavery. This answer satisfies our contemporary sense of justice, but as Gary W. Gallagher shows in this brilliant revisionist history, it is an anachronistic judgment.