Showing results by narrator "Gary Roelofs" in All Categories

In The Hidden Power of Everyday Language: How Words Shape Our World, embark on a transformative journey through the unseen forces that language wields in our daily lives. Philosopher and linguist Dr. Elara Monroe illuminates how the words we choose can influence perceptions, mold realities, and forge connections or conflicts.

The world explodes into war as Austro-Hungary declares war on Serbia following the assassination of the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Russia follows suit and mobilizes, while Germany supports its ally and declares war on Russia. France then joins the conflict as it is Russia’s ally.

Echoes of Armageddon: Voices from the Second World War plunges listeners into the heart of history's most devastating conflict through a unique and gripping collection of fictionalized interviews. This is not a typical retelling of battles and dates; it's an exploration of the human experience of war, told through the imagined voices of those who lived it.

Following the myths and legends about Nazis recruited by the French Foreign Legion to fight in Indochina, Eric Meyer's new book is based on the real story of one such former Waffen-SS man who lived to tell the tale.

September 1914: The world is at war, and Europe is in flames. Paris had just fallen to the German forces of Kaiser Wilhelm, and the Entente forces are reeling back in disarray. With the fall of Paris, France is in dire straits, and General Joffre, its commander-in-chief, is relieved of command. The two allies meet in London to see how the war can be prosecuted from that point.

The Gender Knot, Allan Johnson's response to the pain and confusion that men and women experience by living with gender inequality, explains what patriarchy is and isn't, how it works, and what gets in the way of understanding and doing something about it. Johnson's simple yet powerful approach avoids the paralyzing trap of guilt, blame, anger, and defensive denial that often results from conversations about gender.

UFOs. Aliens. Strange crop circles. Giant figures scratched in the desert surface along the coast of Peru. The amazing alignment of the pyramids. Strange lines of clouds in the sky. The paranormal is alive and well in the American cultural landscape.

In Republican Jesus, Tony Keddie explains not only where this right-wing Christ came from and what he stands for, but also why this version of Jesus is a fraud. By restoring Republicans’ cherry-picked gospel texts to their original literary and historical contexts, Keddie dismantles the biblical basis for Republican positions on hot-button issues like Big Government, taxation, abortion, immigration, and climate change.

In this ground-shaking, breath-taking cri de coeur, Bowden delves with love-driven fury for the roots of our brutal history in this once-brave New World. The figures he casts before us - from Pancho Villa to a modern-day drug lord, from General Sherman to a skid-row Sioux named Robert Sundance - trace a story not so much of rapaciousness as of fear and loathing. Bowden twines it with the natural history of the hammer orchid, a carnivore whose deceptive delicacy comes to stand for the terror and hypocrisy that have perverted our love of the land, its peoples, and our very natures.

Most of us give little thought to the hidden systems that bring us water and take it away when we’re done. But these underappreciated marvels of engineering face an array of challenges that cannot be solved without a fundamental change to our relationship with water.

In this illuminating audiobook, Thomas Kidd draws on his expertise in American religious history to retrace the arc of this spiritual movement, illustrating just how historically peculiar that political and ethnic definition (white Republican) of evangelicals is. He examines distortions in the public understanding of evangelicals and shows how a group of “Republican insider evangelicals” aided the politicization of the movement. This book will be a must-listen for those trying to better understand the shifting religious and political landscape of America today.

More than 50 years after the civil rights movement, there are still glaring racial inequities all across the United States. In Rich Thanks to Racism, Jim Freeman, one of the country's leading civil rights lawyers, explains why as he reveals the hidden strategy behind systemic racism. He details how the driving force behind the public policies that continue to devastate communities of color across the United States is a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals who profit mightily from racial inequality.

Are aliens among us? Take a trip straight into the heart of one of humanity’s biggest mysteries: the alien presence on Earth! Here are more than 40 true eyewitness accounts, many never-before published, that describe in detail personal encounters with alien beings and their craft. The stories come from all over the world and from witnesses in all walks of life - people just like you. Every story is analyzed by a commentary that explores our involvement with alien beings - and why.

Surigao Strait in the Philippine Islands was the scene of a major battleship duel during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Because the battle was fought at night and had few survivors on the Japanese side, the events of that naval engagement have been passed down in garbled accounts. Anthony P. Tully pulls together all of the existing documentary material, including newly discovered accounts and a careful analysis of U.S. Navy action reports, to create a new and more detailed description of the action.

For nearly a century, Kellogg, Idaho, was home to America's richest silver mine, Sunshine Mine. Mining there, as everywhere, was not an easy life, but regardless of the risk, there was something about being underground, the lure of hitting a deep vein of silver. The promise of good money and the intense bonds of friendship brought men back year after year. Mining is about being a man and a fighter in a job where tomorrow always brings the hope of a big score.

In Covert Regime Change, Lindsey A. O’Rourke shows us how states really act when trying to overthrow another state. She argues that conventional focus on covert cases misses the basic causes of regime change. O’Rourke provides substantive evidence of types of security interests that drive states to intervene. Covert Regime Change assembles an original dataset of all American regime change operations during the Cold War. This fund of information shows the United States was 10 times more likely to try covert rather than overt regime change during the Cold War.

Mention Woody Guthrie, and people who know the name are likely to think of the “Okie Bard,” dust storms behind him, riding a boxcar or walking a red-dirt road, a battered guitar strapped to his back. But unlock Guthrie from the confines of rural folk and Hollywood mythology, as Will Kaufman does here, and you’ll find a folk singer who was deeply engaged with the art, ideas, and issues of his time.

Cultivated from the fierce ideas seeded in Blood Orchid, Blues for Cannibals is an elegiac reflection on death, pain, and a wavering confidence in humanity’s own abilities for self-preservation. After years of reporting on border violence, sex crimes, and the devastation of the land, Bowden struggles to make sense of the many ways in which we destroy ourselves and whether there is any way to survive.

The war in Vietnam is over. Yet the descendants of those who fought there are pulled into a new war - a war in a country whose name has come to mean unending conflict, unending brutality, and unending killing: Afghanistan. Into this tortured land flies the civilian pilot Max Hoffman. Out of luck and out of money, he is easy prey to the CIA, who recruits him to join its hidden war. Hoffman soon discovers the American intelligence officers have a hidden agenda - personal gain and profit at any cost.

Author Jason E. Pierce argues that since the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the American West has been a racially contested space. The first comprehensive study to examine the construction of White racial identity in the West, Making the White Man’s West shows how two visions of the West - as a racially diverse holding cell and a White refuge - shaped the history of the region and influenced a variety of contemporary social issues in the West today.