Showing results by narrator "Rob Shapiro" in All Categories

One night during his divorce, after one too many vodkas and a phone-in-therapist's advice to 'journal his feelings', Matthew Fray started a blog. On it, he tried to piece together how his ex-wife went from the college freshman who adored him to the angry woman who thought he was an asshole. It turns out that even though he was a decent guy, he was kind of a shitty husband. As he shared raw, uncomfortable and darkly humorous stories about the lessons he'd learned from his failed marriage, Matthew started to gain a following.

Settled back into the San Francisco singles scene following the implosion of his young marriage just months after the honeymoon, Neill Bassett is going through the motions. His carefully modulated routine, however, is soon disrupted in ways he can't dismiss with his usual nonchalance. When Neill's father committed suicide 10 years ago, he left behind thousands of pages of secret journals, journals that are stunning in their detail, and, it must be said, their complete banality. But their spectacularly quotidian details, were exactly what artificial intelligence company Amiante Systems was looking for,

For only the fourth time in American history, the House of Representatives has conducted an impeachment inquiry into a sitting United States president. This landmark document details the findings of the House Intelligence Committee’s historic investigation of whether President Donald J. Trump committed impeachable offenses when he sought to have Ukraine announce investigations of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The Impeachment Report is necessary listening for every American concerned about the fate of our democracy.

A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of "gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee," the bakery's owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. He's at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman's life take shape—she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union.

It begins in Geneva. There American lawyer Joel Converse meets a man he hasn't seen in 20 years, a covert operative who dies violently at his feet, whispering words that hand Converse a staggering legacy of death: "The generals ... they're back ... Aquitaine!" Suddenly Converse is running for his life, alone with the world's most shattering secret. Pursued by anonymous executioners to the darkest corners of Europe, he is forced to play a game of survival by blood-rules he thought he'd left behind.

William D. Cohan is no knee-jerk advocate for Wall Street and the big banks. He's one of America's most respected financial journalists and the progressive best-selling author of House of Cards. He has long been critical of the bad behavior that plagued much of Wall Street in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, and because he spent 17 years as an investment banker on Wall Street, he is an expert on its inner workings as well.

From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science and its influence on our understanding of time itself. Gleick's story begins at the turn of the 20th century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first novel, international sensation The Time Machine.

The Infodemic lays bare the mechanisms of modern censorship and shows how they were used to undermine the response to the greatest global pandemic in a century. Beginning in China, the book charts the onslaught of COVID censorship through Iran, Russia, India, Egypt, Brazil, India, and inside the Trump White House. Modern censors not only restrict the flow of information but also open the floodgates to overwhelm the public with lies and half truths.

Among the unconventional attitudes of the Beat writers as they rebelled against the conformism of the late 1940s and 1950s was their relaxed stance on sexuality. At a time when gay people were considered mentally ill or criminal, the Beats celebrated spontaneity and freedom in thought, word, and action. They were queer in the fullest sense of the word: their fluid sexuality challenged all sexual and romantic conventions.

Nia Martins believes that a fresh start will help her leave her traumatic past behind. Moving to a different country, she seeks to shake off her demons by doing the one thing that sets her free from her destructive thoughts - teaching dance. But change doesn't come easy, and all Nia really wants is to take the next breath without the perpetual suffocation that follows. Reeves Mitchell has looked death in the eye so many times that it has become habitual. That is, until his best friend's life was on the line.

Daniel and his younger brother grew up in an abusive home. Daniel escaped. Now an established stunt rider, he intends to go back to rescue his brother. But then one jump goes horribly wrong . . . He recovers to find himself in Iowa, unscathed, yet his life has drastically changed. His best friend won’t answer his calls. Even his girlfriend is hiding something. Increasingly terrified, he clings to the one thing he knows: He must pick up his brother in San Francisco. In five days.

Ben Katchor retells the history of where we choose to eat - a history that starts with the first man who was allowed to enter a walled garden and encouraged by the garden's owner to enjoy its fruits. He examines the biblical milk-and-meat taboo, the first vegetarian practices, and the invention of the restaurant. Katchor illuminates the historical confluence of events and ideas that led to the development of a “milekhdike (dairy) personality” and the proliferation of dairy restaurants in America.

When fungi specialist Nobel laureate Liam Connor is found dead at the bottom of one of Ithaca, New York’s famous gorges, his research collaborator, Cornell professor of nanoscience Jake Sterling, refuses to believe it was suicide. Why would one of the world’s most eminent biologists, a eighty-six-year old man in good health who survived some of the darkest days of the Second World War, have chosen to throw himself off a bridge?

This is the story of Digen Farris, Head of the House of Zeor, and descendant of the legendary Klyd Farris, as he struggles to find some kind of balance between the Simes and Gens.

John David Dingell, the longest-serving US Congressman in history and one of the House's most powerful chairmen, offers a unique, unforgettable, and refreshingly candid behind-the-scenes account of government and politics over the past 80 years.

When a Delaware real estate mogul is murdered, Reverend Candice Miller is called to minister to the grieving family. She quickly realizes that the killer has adopted the symbolism of sin eating, a Victorian-era religious ritual, as a calling card. Newspaper journalist Brian Wilder wants the scoop on the killing, including the meaning behind the mysterious loaf of bread left with the corpse.

He's baa-ack! It's a brand new school year for everyone's favorite amoeba! Will Squish finally get to sit with the cool kids at lunch? Will Pod stop the giant asteroid from destroying the world? Will the leeches be the end of Super Amoeba? And what makes cafeteria nachos so delicious anyway? Find out the answers to these questions and more in Squish's second electrifying, fast-paced adventure!

Javier Peña and Steve Murphy risked their lives hunting large and small drug traffickers in the decades they spent working for the US Drug Enforcement Administration. But their biggest challenge was the hunt for Pablo Escobar in Colombia. The partners, who began their careers as small-town cops, have been immortalized in Netflix’s Narcos, a fictionalized account of their hunt for Escobar. Now, for the first time, they tell the real story of how they brought down the world’s first narco-terrorist and ended the reign of terror of the world’s most wanted criminal.

Award-winning journalist Nathan Bomey argues that Trump did not usher the post-truth era into being. He was its inevitable outcome. Bomey points to recent trends that have created the perfect seedbed for spin, distortion, deception, and bald-faced lies: shifting news habits, the rise of social media, the spread of entrenched ideologies, and the failure of schools to teach basic critical-thinking skills.

At 5:58 a.m. on 3rd October 2009, Combat Outpost Keating, located in frighteningly vulnerable terrain in Afghanistan just 14 miles from the Pakistani border, was viciously attacked. Though the 53 soldiers stationed there prevailed against nearly 400 Taliban fighters, their casualties made it the deadliest fight of the war that year. Four months after the battle, a review revealed that there was no reason for the troops at Keating to have been there in the first place.