Showing results by narrator "Kevin Stillwell" in All Categories

Four months into his presidency, at a summit in Prague, Barack Obama pledged to take “concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons.” Yet nearly eight years later, he presides over a program to modernize the entire US nuclear arsenal at a cost of $35 billion a year through the next decade and beyond. To those who accuse him of hypocrisy, Obama has said that he always regarded a nuclear-free world as a long-term goal, unlikely to be met in his lifetime, much less his time in office.

Set in San Francisco and North Carolina, the linked stories in Damn Love introduce us to characters struggling with love in all its complicated forms, including a young doctor getting over a breakup with the help of a patient, a newly married gay man who reconnects with his estranged mother, a trio of physicists caught in a surprising love triangle, and a soldier who takes secrets with her to the Iraqi desert.

Machines are substituting for more types of human labor than ever before. This means that the real winners of the future will be neither the providers of cheap labor nor the owners of ordinary capital, but rather those who can innovate and create new products, services, and business models.

More than 13 years after 9/11, the Afghan war is far from over, even if Washington insists that the U.S. role in it will soon come to an end. Three recent books help explain why, and what Washington needs to do next to protect the gains that have been made.

In Mr.Tall, his first story collection in two decades, Tony Earley brings us seven rueful, bittersweet, riotous studies of characters both ordinary and mythical, seeking to make sense of the world transforming around them. He demonstrates once again the prodigious storytelling gifts that have...

Washington, D.C., 1861: As the United States teeters on the brink of civil war, Colonel Charles P. Rook organizes security in the nation’s capital and monitors the death threats pouring into the White House. He surrounds Abraham Lincoln with bodyguards, covers rooftops with sharpshooters, and investigates rumors of conspiracy fomented by secessionists. Yet amid the chaos and confusion, a mysterious killer slips into the teeming city.

William J. Bennett, former director of the National Drug Control policy under President George H.W. Bush and bestselling author of The Book of Virtues, and co-author Robert White provide strong societal and scientific arguments against the legalization of marijuana. Marijuana, once considered...

As any kid who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s could tell you, reading comics was a guilty pleasure. “Why are you wasting your time reading these silly things?” our parents would ask.

In this slim memoir, Theodor Kallifatides explores the interplay of meaningful living and meaningful work, and the timeless question of how to reconcile oneself to aging. But he also comments on worrying trends in contemporary Europe - from religious intolerance and prejudice against immigrants to housing crises and gentrification - and his sadness at the battered state of his beloved Greece. Kallifatides offers an eloquent, thought-provoking meditation on the writing life, and an author’s place in a changing world.

In assembling an international coalition to combat ISIS, the United States has looked mostly to the Middle East and Europe, regions that it said face a direct threat from the militant Islamist group. But other parts of the world are just as anxious about ISIS - above all, Southeast Asia.

Several developed countries, including the United States, are beginning to slide toward kleptocracy. To turn the tide, reformers need to focus on cultural change.

Ray Slaverson, a world-weary Florida police detective, has his hands full with the murders of two attorneys and a third suspicious death, all within 24 hours. Ray doesn’t believe in coincidences, but he can’t find a single link between the dead men, and he and his partner soon smash into an investigative stonewall.

Most economists agree that the global economy is stagnating and that governments need to stimulate growth, but lowering interest rates still further could spur a damaging cycle of booms and busts. Instead, central banks should hand consumers cash directly.

After a tour of Vietnam and a three-year stint in prison, Jason is back in town and wants to rebuild his relationship with Gibby, the younger brother he hasn't seen for years. Determined to make that connection, he coaxes Gibby into a day at the lake: long hours of sunshine and whisky and older women. But when the four of them encounter a prison transfer bus on a stretch of empty road, one of the women taunts the prisoners, causing a riot on the bus.

Although rumors of the death of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar have circulated for years - rumors that the Afghan National Directorate of Security even confirmed several times, first in classified communications with its allies and then in a December 2014 public statement - it was only on July 29, 2015, that the Afghan and US governments affirmed that he had died.

In a city where a girl can go missing for years, a retired New York cop investigates a gruesome crime. Tank is a retired New York City cop coping with two teenaged problems: one is his recently-orphaned nephew, and the other is a girl whose decomposed body was found in a cooler off the Henry...

We have a problem - not a problem from hell, but one that claims to come from heaven. That problem is sometimes called radical, or fundamentalist, Islam, and the self-styled Islamic State is just its latest iteration.

On March 30, 2008, several hundred people gathered at the waterfront in San Francisco. They had come to witness the unveiling of a monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: 2,800 Americans who joined some 35,000 other volunteers from more than 50 countries to defend the Spanish Republic against fascist forces during Spain’s civil war. The conflict, which raged from 1936 until 1939, led to the deaths of around half a million people, including at least 750 Americans.

Brought to you by Penguin. In this remarkable, ground-breaking new book Sean McMeekin marks a generational shift in our view of Stalin as an ally in the Second World War. Stalin's only difference from Hitler, he argues, was that he was a successful murderous predator. With Hitler dead and the...

A successful right-wing campaign in India to suppress the work of Wendi Doniger, a prominent scholar of Hinduism, suggests that conservative voices are gaining the upper hand in the country’s long struggle between secular liberalism and religious nationalism.