Showing results by narrator "Keith Sellon-Wright" in All Categories

Fun, bright, and playful, power pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, power pop has meant many things to many people. In Go All the Way, today's best and brightest writers go deep on what certain power pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go All the Way is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

In How the Laser Happened, Nobel laureate Charles Townes provides a highly personal look at some of the leading events in 20th-century physics. This lively memoir, packed with firsthand accounts and historical anecdotes, is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of science and an inspiring example for students considering scientific careers.

As the story of the REVs continue, the forces at work - either to destroy these enhanced super-warriors or to promote them - come together in a fight for the destiny of human evolution. And while the powers-that-be are tearing themselves apart with this internal struggle, mankind also faces the continuing threat of the alien Antaere...plus something new from outside the Grid. Just when the Humans thought they had the war won, this new threat appears on the scene and messes up everything.

The pitch went like this: Chris Butler, a retired cop, ran a private investigator firm in Concord, California. His business had a fascinating angle - his firm was staffed entirely by soccer moms. In fact, Butler employed PI Super Moms: attractive, organized, smart, and trained in investigative techniques, self-defense, and weaponry. This American Life host Ira Glass described them as "MILF: Charlie's Angels." When this story came across Pete Crooks's desk when he was working at Diablo magazine in 2010, he was instantly hooked.

One cannot turn on the news today without a report on an extreme-weather event or the latest update on Antarctica. But while our politicians argue, the truth is that climate change is already here. Nobody knows this better than Indigenous peoples, who, having developed an intimate relationship with ecosystems over generations, have observed these changes for decades. For them, climate change is not an abstract concept or policy issue, but the reality of daily life.

In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was—and is—a world-class lab, and its reactor was the cornerstone of US materials science. But its discovery triggered a media and political firestorm that resulted in the reactor's shutdown, and even attempts to close the entire laboratory. A quarter century later, the episode reveals the dynamics of today's controversies in which fears and the dismissal of science disrupt serious discussion and research of vital issues.

C. P. Ellis grew up in the poor white section of Durham, North Carolina, and as a young man joined the Ku Klux Klan. Ann Atwater, a single mother from the poor black part of town, quit her job as a household domestic to join the civil rights fight. During the 1960s, as the country struggled with the explosive issue of race, Atwater and Ellis met on opposite sides of the public school integration issue. Their encounters were charged with hatred and suspicion.

The alien with an attitude is back! But this time it's the new and improved Adam Cain, the cloned version in his revitalized twenty-two year old body. Even so, will it be enough to defeat the Klin, who have already conquered three-quarters of the galaxy and are only months away from destroying Earth? With the help of the mutants, Panur and Lila, Adam and his team are the last hope for the galaxy. Can the genius of the mutants and the "attitude" of Adam Cain save the day? Now they launch a multi-prong attack to stop the Klin, with only minutes to spare before Armageddon.

Zac Murphy and Angus Price are the two most famous and formidable REVs in the Corps. Supermen in nearly every way, they are legends, both among the growing REV population, as well as the billions of normal Humans on Earth. And now they will be called upon to quell the festering tensions between normal Humans and the REVs. But then a new threat appears on the horizon, a threat that requires the REV—once again—to become the sharp end of the spear.

On the afternoon of April 4, 1977, Georgia housewife Sadie Burkhalter Hurst looked out her front door to see a frantic stranger running toward her, his clothes ablaze, and, behind him, the mangled fuselage of a passenger plane that had just crashed in her yard. The plane, a Southern Airways DC-9-31, had been carrying 81 passengers and four crew members en route to Atlanta when it entered a massive thunderstorm cell that turned into a dangerous cocktail of rain, hail, and lightning. Forced down onto a highway, the plane cut a swath of devastation through the small town of New Hope.

Almost a century ago, the first flights to Hawaii required a nerve-racking and uncertain 26-hour journey to isolated and elusive islands located in the middle of the world's largest ocean. Pilots prayed they would encounter land after flying a full day and night across 2,400 miles of the open Pacific. Race to Hawaii chronicles the thrilling first flights to Hawaii in the 1920s, during the Golden Age of Aviation.

The Beatles and Duke Ellington's Orchestra stand as the two greatest examples of collaboration in music history. Duke University musicologist Thomas Brothers delivers a portrait of the creative process at work, demonstrating that the cooperative method at the foundation of these two artist-groups was the primary reason for their unmatched musical success. Help! describes in rich detail the music and mastery of two cultural leaders whose popularity has never dimmed, and the process of collaboration that allowed them to achieve an artistic vision greater than the sum of their parts.

In A Decent Life, May leads listeners through the traditional philosophical bases of a number of arguments about what ethics asks of us, then he develops a more reasonable and achievable way of thinking about them, one that shows us how we can use philosophical insights to participate in the complicated world around us. He explores how we should approach the many relationships in our lives - with friends, family, animals, people in need - through the use of a more forgiving, if no less fundamentally serious, moral compass.

For better or worse - be it militarily, politically, economically, technologically, or culturally - Americans have had a profound role in shaping the wider world beyond them. The United States has been a savior to some, a curse to others, but either way such views are often based on a caricature of American actions and intentions. American foreign relations, then, is a subject of immense global importance that provokes strong emotions and much debate, but often based on deep misunderstanding.

The alien with an attitude is BACK! And he's not the only one. Kracion, the Mad Aris, is also back, and working with the allies to stop the Klin from destroying the universe. As the Klin build and deploy thousands of trans-dimensional starships, they refuse to accept the danger the space engines represent. Kracion has spent years repairing the damage to the space/time continuum caused by these drives, and now the Klin are literally tearing the fabric of space apart even worse than before.

Hit the jackpot with stories from Michael Connelly, Laura Lippman, Walter Mosley, Alexander McCall Smith, and more superstars of mystery.

Many weapons and inventions were credited with winning World War II, most famously in the assertion that the atomic bomb "ended the war, but radar won the war." What is less well known is that both airborne radar and the atomic bomb were invented in British laboratories, but built by Americans. The same holds true for many other American weapons credited with the Allied victory: the P-51 Mustang fighter, the Liberty ship, the proximity fuze, the Sherman tank, and even penicillin all began with British scientists and planners.

The alien with an attitude is back! But for how long? After the tragic events at the end of Secondary Protocol, the truth is finally revealed to Adam and his friends. Now, he's living on borrowed time as his resurrected body is rapidly deteriorating. To save Adam, the mutants—Panur and Lila—must take him to the Sol-Kor universe. But in doing so, they awaken the wrath of Queen J'nae, who will use all her resources to destroy Panur—along with any hope of Adam surviving. And to add insult to injury, the New Klin from Kracion's universe have invaded the Milky Way.

In post-WWII Paris, Madame Claude ran the most exclusive finishing school in the world. The names on her client list were epic - Kennedy, Rothschild, Onassis, Brando, Sinatra, Picasso, the Shah, and that's just for starters. Born Fernande Grudet, a poor Jewish girl, the future Madame led a life of high adventure - resistance fighter, concentration camp survivor, gun moll of the Corsican Mafia, and erstwhile streetwalker - before becoming the ultimate broker between beauty and power. She harnessed the emerging technology of the telephone to create the concept of the call girl.

Americans spend more money on health than people anywhere else in the world. And what do they get for it? Statistically, not much. Americans today live shorter, less healthy lives than citizens of other rich countries. The problem, Sandro Galea argues, is that Americans focus on the wrong things. Well is a radical examination of the subtle and not-so-subtle factors that determine who gets to be healthy in America.