William Hughes
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Over the last four decades, debt, bankruptcy, and home foreclosures have risen to epidemic levels, and the personal savings rate has sunk dangerously low. Why, in the richest nation on Earth, can't Americans hold on to their money?First published in 2008, Stuart Vyse's Going Broke described the epidemic of personal debt that existed in the years leading up to the Great Recession, and anticipated the home mortgage crisis that started it. Ten years...
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The vivid, fast-paced account of the siege of Khe Sanh told through the eyes of the men who lived it.
For seventy-seven days in 1968, amid fears that America faced its own disastrous Dien Bien Phu, six thousand US Marines held off thirty thousand North Vietnamese Army regulars at the remote mountain stronghold called Khe Sanh. It was the biggest battle of the Vietnam War, with sharp ground engagements, devastating artillery duels, and massive US...
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A pithy guide to real-world economics, abridged from Sharma's New York Times bestseller The Rise and Fall of Nations.
This slim primer distills Sharma's decades of experience into ten rules for identifying nations that are poised to take off or crash. A wake-up call to economists who failed to foresee every recent crisis, including the cataclysm of 2008, 10 Rules is full of pioneering insights on signs of political, economic, and social change. Sharma...
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One fateful week in June 1967 redrew the map of the Middle East. Many scholars have documented how the Six Day War unfolded, but little has been done to explain why the conflict happened at all. As we approach its fiftieth anniversary, Guy Laron refutes the widely accepted belief that the war was merely the result of regional friction, revealing the crucial roles played by American and Soviet policies in the face of an encroaching global economic...
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A lively, surprising tour of our mental glitches and how they arise With its trillions of connections, the human brain is more beautiful and complex than anything we could ever build, but it's far from perfect: our memory is unreliable; we can't multiply large sums in our heads; advertising manipulates our judgment; we tend to distrust people who are different from us; supernatural beliefs and superstitions are hard to shake; we prefer instant gratification...
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The introduction of new medicines has dramatically improved the quantity and quality of individual and public health while contributing trillions of dollars to the global economy. In spite of these past successes-and indeed because of them-our ability to deliver new medicines may be quickly coming to an end. Moving from the twentieth century to the present, A Prescription for Change reveals how changing business strategies combined with scientific...
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By the time his body hung from the gallows for his crimes at Harper's Ferry, abolitionists had made John Brown a "holy martyr" in the fight against Southern slave owners. But Northern hatred for Southerners had been long in the making. Northern rage was born of the conviction that New England, whose spokesmen and militia had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leader of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern "slavocrats"...
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Known to generations of Americans for his stirring call to arms, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry is all but forgotten today as the first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, the first to call for revolution, and the first to call for a bill of rights. If Washington was the “Sword of the Revolution” and Jefferson, “the Pen,” Patrick Henry more than earned his epithet as “the Trumpet” of the Revolution...
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Americans have come to expect that the nation's presidential campaigns will be characterized by a carnival atmosphere emphasizing style over substance. But this fascinating account of the pivotal 1840 election reveals how the now-unavoidable traditions of big money, big rallies, shameless self-promotion, and carefully manufactured candidate images first took root in presidential politics. Pulitzer Prize-nominated former Wall Street Journal reporter...
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In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular liberal elites for guidance in this...
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A fascinating new angle on presidential history, assessing the performances of all forty-four presidents in their freshman year of the toughest job in the world. Grouped by the issues the new presidents confronted in their first year in office, The President's First Year takes listeners into the history, thought processes, and results on a case-by-case basis, including how the presidents' subsequent actions prove that they learned-or didn't learn-from...
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A National Book Award-winning historian brilliantly portrays Henry Clay's heroic brokering of the Compromise of 1850 with its timely message about bipartisanship in times of crisis. It has been said that if Henry Clay had been alive in 1860, there would have been no Civil War. Based on his performance in 1850, it may well be true. In that year, the United States faced one of the most dangerous crises in its history, having just acquired a huge parcel...
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The Civil War conjures images of blood-soaked battlefields in the United States. Few are aware of the equally important diplomatic and intelligence contest that raged between the North and South in Europe. While the Confederacy sought Great Britain as a strategic ally, the Union utilized diplomacy and espionage to avert both the construction of a Confederate navy and the threat of war with England. At the forefront of the international fray was Thomas...
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On Thursday, December 16, 1773, an estimated seven dozen men, many amateurishly disguised as Indians—then a symbol of freedom—dumped about £10,000 worth of tea in the harbor. Whatever their motives at the time, they unleashed a social, political, and economic firestorm that would culminate in the Declaration of Independence two and a half years later. The Boston Tea Party provoked a reign of terror in Boston and other American cities, with Americans...
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This definitive account of the American experience in Afghanistan is a political history of Afghanistan in the "Age of Terror" from 2001 to 2009, exploring the fundamental tragedy of America's longest war since Vietnam. After the swift defeat of the Taliban in 2001, American optimism has steadily evaporated in the face of mounting violence; a new "war of a thousand cuts" has brought the country to its knees. After a brief survey of the great empires...
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Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933 confronting twenty-five-percent unemployment, bank closings, and a nationwide crisis in confidence. Between March 9 and June 16, FDR sent Congress a record number of bills, all of which passed easily. With reforms ranging from the legalization of alcohol to mortgage relief for millions of Americans, Roosevelt launched the New Deal that conservatives have been working to roll back ever since. Badger...
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We're told that when we vote, when we elect representatives, we're gaining a voice in government and the policies it implements. Then why don't American politics, unlike those of its European counterparts, actually translate our preferences into higher living standards for the majority of us? The answer is that, in America, the wealthy few have built a system that works in their favor and one which maintains the illusion of democracy. The reality...
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Acrimony and hyperpartisanship have seeped into every part of the political process. Congress is deadlocked, and its approval ratings are at record lows. America's two main political parties have given up their traditions of compromise, endangering our very system of constitutional democracy. And one of these parties has taken on the role of insurgent outlier; the Republicans have become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently...
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A fascinating insider's account of a major cancer cover-up
Ralph W. Moss was assistant director of public affairs at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City when he unveiled a cover-up of positive tests with America's most controversial anticancer agent, laetrile. He was ordered by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center officials to falsify reports. He refused. Instead, he organized an underground employee group called Second Opinion...
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The riveting true story of Dudley Buck-American scientist, government agent, and cold war hero-whose pioneering work with computer chips placed him firmly in the sights of the KGBDr. Dudley Allen Buck was a brilliant young scientist on the cusp of fame and fortune when he died suddenly on May 21, 1959, at the age of thirty-two. He was the star professor at MIT and had done stints with the NSA and Lockheed. His latest invention, the Cryotron-an early...