Showing results for "The Dead" in United States

Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II, set in 1911 and 1899, are the most-played American history video games since The Oregon Trail. Beloved by millions, they’ve been widely acclaimed for their realism and attention to detail. But how do they fare as re-creations of history? In this engaging audiobook, award-winning American history professor Tore Olsson takes up that question and more.

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly 30-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X - including siblings, classmates, friends, cellmates, FBI moles and cops and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to transform what would become hundreds of hours of interviews into a portrait that would separate fact from fiction.

While the Western was dying a slow death across the cultural landscape, it was blazing back to life as a video game in the early twenty-first century. Rockstar Games' Red Dead franchise, beginning with Red Dead Revolver in 2004, has grown into one of the most critically acclaimed video game franchises of the twenty-first century. Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the Video Game West offers a critical, interdisciplinary look at this cultural phenomenon at the intersection of game studies and American history.

The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to hour upon hour of pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a rich story the place told of his town and its history. Thus was born Melville’s lifelong curiosity with how, where, and why we bury and commemorate our dead. Melville’s Over My Dead Body is a lively (pun intended) and wide-ranging history of cemeteries, places that have mirrored the passing eras in history but have also shaped it.

In 1974, the US East Coast was whipped up into a frenzy of fear. Locking their windows and doors, everyone was terrified of becoming the next victim of the strikingly handsome but deadly “Casanova Killer”. And he was on the move.

Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America uncovers a hidden history of the biggest psychedelic distribution and belief system the world has ever known. Through a collection of fast-paced interlocking narratives, it animates the tale of an alternate America and its wide-eyed citizens.

1 Dead in Attic is a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first harrowing year and a half of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Celebrated as a local treasure and heaped with national praise, Rose provides a rollercoaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor - in a way that only he could find in a devastated wasteland. They are stories of the dead and the living, stories of survivors and believers, stories of hope and despair.

Dead Wrong is a study of the scientific and forensic facts of four assassinations of the 1960s (President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Black Panther leader Fred Hampton), as well as an examination of new and incriminating evidence indicative of murder, not suicide, in the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, White House Counsel Vincent Foster, U.N. Weapons Inspector Dr. David C. Kelly and bioweapons expert Frank Olson.

The obituary page of The New York Times is a celebration of extraordinary lives. This groundbreaking package includes 300 obits in the audiobook with exclusive online access to 10,000 more of the most important and fascinating obituaries the Times has ever published. The obituary page is the section many readers first turn to not only see who died, but to read some of the most inspiring, insightful, often funny, and elegantly written stories celebrating the lives of the men and women who have influenced on our world.

As author Gayden Metcalfe asserts, people in the Delta have a strong sense of community, and being dead is no impediment to belonging to it. Down south, they don't forget you when you've up and died - they may even like you better and visit you more often! But just as there is an appropriate way to live your life in the South, there is an equally essentially tasteful way of departing it - and the funeral is the final social event of your existence, so it must be handled flawlessly. Metcalfe portrays this slice of American culture.

The Dead Hand is the suspense-filled story of the people who sought to brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race, then rushed to secure the nuclear and biological weapons left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union - a dangerous legacy that haunts us even today. The Cold War was an epoch of massive overkill. In the last half of the 20th century the two superpowers had perfected the science of mass destruction and possessed nuclear weapons with the combined power of a million Hiroshimas.

There is no single theory of what caused the Great Depression and never will be, Morris argues. Macreconomics is a social science, and such a massive event always takes its shape from a terrible confluence of factors. The mismanagement of the gold standard, the growth in consumer credit, the insistence on deflation, and the inability of the major European belligerents of World War I to agree on a reconstruction agenda are just a few of the shocks that pushed the world into an economic Armageddon.

Mama Might Be Better Off Dead immerses listeners in the lives of four generations of a poor, African-American family in the neighborhood, who are beset with the devastating illnesses that are all too common in America's inner-cities. Headed by Jackie Banes, who oversees the care of a diabetic grandmother, a husband on kidney dialysis, an ailing father, and three children, the Banes family contends with countless medical crises.

In 1902, on a prairie in southwest Louisiana, six members of a farming family are found murdered. Albert Edwin Batson, a white, itinerant farm worker, rapidly descends from likely suspect to likely lynching victim as people in the surrounding countryside lusted for vengeance. In a territory where the locals were coping with the opening of the prairies by the railroad and the disruptive advances of the rice and oil industries into what was predominantly cattle country, Batson, an outsider, made an ideal scapegoat.

Who reminds you of Donald Trump more? John F. Kennedy or Richard Nixon? Keep that thought to yourself for a second as I remind you that JFK and Nixon ran against each other in 1960. A member of a popular two-term administration ran against a phenom running without permission. The race saw a revolutionary use of new media. The side that lost tells anyone who will listen that nefarious outside help tipped the election.

After three years as a killing-field slave, seventeen-year-old Bun Yom escaped from the Khmer Rouge and became a freedom fighter. Using his wisdom, courage, and infinite compassion, Bun rescued thousands of Cambodian people and soon became the Cambodian Freedom Fighters’ greatest soldier. Tomorrow I’m Dead is the only known first-person account of the freedom fighter’s heroic liberation of slaves from the Khmer Rouge killing fields.

What begins as yet another assignment for a reporter, a young millennial who relies happily on email and texting as the primary means of communication, develops into a heartfelt mission to tell the story of the people and places in the letters. Dead Letters is an intimate portrait of small-town America and the people who, at times, risked everything in pursuit of economic prosperity, religious freedom, and social equity.

Coleridge Taylor is searching for his next scoop on the police beat. A source sends Taylor down to Alphabet City, where he finds two dead bodies: a punk named Johnny Mort and a cop named Robert Dodd. Each looks too messed up to have killed the other, so Taylor starts asking around. The punk was a good kid, the peace-loving guardian angel of the neighborhood's stray dogs. What led him to mug a woman at gunpoint? And why is officer Samantha Callahan being accused of leaving her partner to die?

Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces.

In the 1820s, two families, unknown to each other, worked on farms in the American wilderness. It seemed unlikely that the families would ever meet—and yet, they did. The son of one family, the famed actor John Wilkes Booth, killed the son of the other, President Abraham Lincoln, in the most significant assassination in American history. The murder, however, did not come without warning—in fact, it had been foretold. In the Houses of Their Dead is the first book of the many thousands written about Lincoln to focus on the president's fascination with Spiritualism.