Showing results by narrator "David de Vries" in All Categories

In 1945, the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong, 5,000 nuclear-tipped missiles, and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward, the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the 20th century.

On September 1, 2004, three middle-aged buddies set out on one of the last geographic challenges never before attempted in North America: to hike the Comb Ridge in one continuous push. The Comb is an upthrust ridge of sandstone-virtually a mini-mountain range-that stretches almost unbroken for a hundred miles from just east of Kayenta, Arizona, to some ten miles west of Blanding, Utah. To hike the Comb is to run a gauntlet of up-and-down severities, with the precipice lurking on one hand, the fiendishly convoluted bedrock slab on the other-always at a sideways, ankle-wrenching pitch.

For the first time, once-secret government records and interviews tell the full story of the thousands of Nazis—from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich—who came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. Many gained entry on their own as self-styled war “refugees.” But some had help from the U.S. government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories.

Trapped in a dead-end town, Justin Warren has had his life defined by the suspicious deaths of his grandparents. The unsolved crime happened long before Justin was born, but the ripple effects are still felt after thirty-eight years. Justin always knew he wouldn’t have much of a future. He just never imagined that his life might take him backward.

In full and intricate detail, featuring an amazing cast of characters from the worlds of politics, athletics, entertainment and more, this is the story of how President Theodore Roosevelt helped shepherd in a sports and fitness revolution that forever changed the complexion of the United States.

When former computer-crimes prosecutor Chris Bruen and retired hacktivist Zoey Doucet open their San Francisco law firm, it's the best day of their professional lives. That is, until their first client walks through the door. Ian Ayres is an "ethical hacker" who was hired by a company to test the security of its online systems. On the job, he uncovered some highly classified information: the existence of a top-secret government surveillance agency and its Skeleton Key, a program that can break any form of encryption.

In this challenging work, Christopher Lasch makes an accessible critique of what is wrong with the values and beliefs of America's professional and managerial elites. The distinguished historian argues that democracy today is threatened not by the masses, as Jose Ortega y Gasset ( The Revolt of the Masses) had said, but by the elites. These elites - mobile and increasingly global in outlook - refuse to accept limits or ties to nation and place.

Roman history, from the very foundation of the city, is replete with people and stories that shock our modern sensibilities. Evil Roman Emperors puts the worst of Rome's rulers in one place and offers a review of their lives and a historical context for what made them into what they became.

Public relations has always been an essential part of doing business which is probably why you're shelling out big money to an outside PR firm. But the truth is that you don't need them. You already have all the necessary tools in-house to do as good a job as the so-called experts. Landing public relations coverage for yourself and your company is a powerful tool to help elevate your personal brand. PR is easier to generate, leverage, and is more effective than marketing. In other words, public relations is more critical than ever in growing your brand and your business.

True-crime podcaster Jess Keeler has returned to Deeton County, North Carolina, to pick up where her grandfather left off. Sheriff’s Deputy Big Jim Ballard, her grandfather, was a respected detective—until it all came crashing down during a 1972 murder investigation. For Jim, solving the murders of two teens should have been the highlight of his already storied career. Instead, he battled his own mind, unsure where his hunches ended and the truth began.

On May 14-15, 1905, in the Tsushima Straits near Japan, an entire Russian fleet was annihilated, its ships sunk, scattered, or captured by the Japanese. In the deciding battle of the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese lost only three destroyers but the Russians lost twenty-two ships and thousands of sailors. It was the first modern naval battle, employing all the new technology of destruction.

Chief Warrant Officer Gary O'Neal is no ordinary soldier. For nearly 40 years, he has fought America's enemies, becoming one of the greatest Warriors this nation has ever known. Part Native American, O'Neal was trained in both military combat and the ways of his Native people, combining his commitment to freedom with his respect for the enemy, his technical fighting skills with his fierce warrior spirit.

In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species—or as many could fit on Noah’s Ark?

Gideon Zadok arrives in Israel with every intention to research a new book, mend a broken marriage, and improve his dysfunctional family. But as political tensions escalate and his family is evacuated, Zadok asks to follow Israeli paratroopers to secure Mitla Pass and finds himself in the midst of one of the largest global crises of the twentieth century. A sweeping novel of love, passion, and freedom, Mitla Pass stands as an epic look at modern Middle Eastern history and is quite possibly Uris’s most autobiographical work.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, approximately 160,000 Jews called Berlin home. By 1943 less than 5,000 remained in the nation's capital, the epicenter of Nazism, and by the end of the war, that number had dwindled to 1,000. All the others had died in air raids, starved to death, committed suicide, or been shipped off to the death camps. In this captivating and harrowing book, Leonard Gross details the real-life stories of a dozen Jewish men and women who spent the final 27 months of World War II underground, hiding in plain sight.

With a total of 40 victories, Oswald Boelcke was Germany's first ace in World War I-and a century later he remains a towering figure in the history of air warfare, renowned for his character, inspirational leadership, organizational genius, development of air-to-air tactics, and impact on aerial doctrine. Paving the way for modern air forces across the world with his pioneering strategies, Boelcke had a dramatic effect on his contemporaries. The famed Red Baron's mentor, instructor, squadron commander, and friend, he exerted a tremendous influence upon the German air force.

War comes home to the Sol system when the Drasin track a human ship back to Earth, with devastating consequences. Facing massive force of invading alien ships wielding terrible power, the crew of the NAC spacecraft, their allies, and the people of Earth must mount a desperate effort to stop them. Doomed from the start, but with nowhere to retreat, Captain Eric Weston commits his ship to the defense of the human race even as the human outposts in Sol system fall one by one before the unrelenting Drasin onslaught.

Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil present an unprecedented look into the murky world of Chinese espionage both past and present, enabling a better understanding of how pervasive and important its influence is, both in China and abroad.

Just three days after he was born, Howard Shulman contracted an infection that attacked his face, devouring his nose, lips, lower right eyelid, tear ducts, and palate. Abandoned at the hospital by his parents, he became a ward of New Jersey under the care of a state-employed surgeon who experimentally rebuilt his face.

God, Guns, and Sedition offers the definitive account of the rise of far-right terrorism in the United States-and how to counter it. Leading experts Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware trace the historical trajectory and assess the present-day dangers of this violent extremist movement, along with the harm it poses to United States national security.