Showing results by narrator "Gary Roelofs" in All Categories

In this historically accurate work of fiction, listeners follow the journey of Afrika, an African man descended from an emperor who is first enslaved and then given his freedom by white men.Captured in Africa and transported across the ocean to the Americas, Afrika's captors sell him to a German-born plantation owner in Georgia who becomes a father figure to him. A learned man, he teaches Afrika the value and power of an education, instilling in him a love of learning and starting him on a path toward intellectual freedom even before he gains his physical freedom.

In Liquid Asset, Barton H. Thompson, Jr. examines the growing position of the private sector in the "business of water." Thompson seeks to understand the private sector's involvement in meeting the water needs of both humans and the environment, looks at the potential risks that growing private involvement poses to the public interest in water, and considers the obstacles that private organizations face in trying to participate in a traditionally governmental sector.

This serves as an entry level approach to popular topics such as amnesia, artificial intelligence, and language use. The audiobook is created in simple language. It uses examples from the media and pop culture that the listener can easily relate and understand the concepts and topics.

The third book in Charles Bowden’s “accidental trilogy” that began with Blood Orchid and Blues for Cannibals, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing attempts to resolve the overarching question: How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death? As humanity moves further into the 21st century, Bowden continues to interrogate our roles in creating the ravaged landscapes and accumulated death that still surround us, as well as his own childhood isolation, his lust for alcohol and women, and his waning hope for a future.

Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes examines the relationship between affect, narrative, and violence surrounding three historical archetypes—social bandits (often associated with the drug trade), cowboys, and desperadoes—and how these narratives create affective loops that recreate violent structures in the Mexican American frontier.

By now it's a safe bet that you have at least heard of Scientology. Nine times out of ten what you have heard is negative. Very rarely do you ever hear something positive about the Church of Scientology or Scientologists. This often leads to a greater misunderstanding of Scientology, Scientologists and what the mission of the Church of Scientology actually is. Scientology is arguably the most controversial of all the religions.

As the first decade of the 21st century has made brutally clear, the very definitions of war and the enemy have changed almost beyond recognition. Threats to security are now as likely to come from armed propagandists, popular militias, or mercenary organizations as they are from conventional armies backed by nation-states. In this timely book, national security expert Max G. Manwaring explores a little-understood actor on the stage of irregular warfare - the gang.

The leader of a gang of high end thieves is trying to outwit the Russian mob, the FBI and stay ahead of his new girlfriend in this fast paced crime thriller. The trail leads from New York, to London, Dubai and Luxembourg as the Thief in Law evades his enemies and pulls off some daring heists.

Climate change is with us, and we need to think about the next big disturbing idea - the potentially disastrous consequences of massive numbers of environmental refugees at large on the planet. In 2020, the United Nations projects that we will have 50 million environmental refugees mostly from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. How will people be relocated and settled? Is it possible to offer environmental refugees temporary or permanent asylum? Will these refugees have any collective rights in the new areas they inhabit?

In Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity, Scott Balcerzak reads the performances of notable comedians such as W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello through humor and queer theory to expose a problematic history of maleness in their personas.

In the popular imagination the picture of slavery, frozen in time, is one of huge cotton plantations and opulent mansions. However, in over a hundred years of history detailed in this book, the hard reality of slavery in Mississippi's antebellum world is strikingly different from the one of popular myth. It shows that Mississippi's past was never frozen, but always fluid. It shows too that slavery took a number of shapes before its form in the late antebellum mold became crystalized for popular culture.

As American interests assumed global proportions after 1945, policy makers were faced with the challenge of prioritizing various regions and determining the extent to which the United States was prepared to defend and support them. Superpowers and developing nations soon became inextricably linked and decolonizing states such as Vietnam, India, and Egypt assumed a central role in the ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.

In a dramatic unveiling of the little-known world of contracted military logistics, Adam Moore examines the lives of the global army of laborers who support US overseas wars. Empire's Labor brings us the experience of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who perform jobs such as truck drivers and administrative assistants at bases located in warzones in the Middle East and Africa. He highlights the changes the US military has undergone since the Vietnam War.

A single secret begets a layer of lies. Anna Nesmith believes she has it all: a great marriage, a dream job, and a home of her own. But when a State Department investigator begins asking questions, Anna's ordered world implodes. Frank Caburn is man to the bone and manufactures testosterone like Frito Lay does chips. Instantly attracted to Anna, he is determined to make her his own - if only she can pick through the emotional rubble to find her bruised heart can love once again.

Embracing Disillusionment: Achieving Liberation Through the Demystification of Suffering employs a multidisciplinary examination of the relationship between oppression and suffering. Written for professionals as well as the general public, a framework is provided for understanding the causes and forms of oppression and why these constitute injustice, the dynamics of self-deception, and how ideology utilizes these to portray the social causes of suffering as individual and intrapsychic maladies.

From Benjamin Franklin's newspaper hoax that faked the death of his rival to Abbie Hoffman's attempt to levitate the Pentagon - pranksters, hoaxers, and con artists have caused confusion, disorder, and laughter in Western society for centuries. Profiling the most notorious mischief-makers from the 1600s to the present day, Pranksters explores how "pranks" are part of a long tradition of speaking truth to power and social critique.

Are aliens among us? Take a trip straight into the heart of one of humanity’s biggest mysteries: the alien presence on Earth! Here are more than 40 true eyewitness accounts, many never-before published, that describe in detail personal encounters with alien beings and their craft. The stories come from all over the world and from witnesses in all walks of life - people just like you. Every story is analyzed by a commentary that explores our involvement with alien beings - and why.

Osama bin Laden is dead, and the sensational mission to the compound in Abbottabad is rightly hailed as a heroic Navy Seal operation. But is Al-Qaeda now stronger or weaker? A chance raid into Pakistani bandit country, Waziristan, throws up fresh intel that points to a new threat. Another warlord has emerged, a man who claims to be the brother of Osama bin Laden. Although unheard of in the West, murderous terrorists are about to follow his banner and launch a new jihad in their fanatical and never-ending religious wars. A conflict that threatens the peace and security of the world.

In the wake of the coronavirus and George Floyd killing, many of the issues dividing us as a nation - race, politics, class, gender, climate change, globalism, and religion - have only been magnified, and although the US surgeon general has called for an end to bickering and partisanship, it is unclear to what extent this will take effect. What is clear, however, is that safe, mindfully structured dialogues are imperative if we are to salvage our republic and the democratic principles on which it is built.

In Far-Right Vanguard, John Huntington shows how, for almost a century, the far right has forced so-called "respectable" conservatives to grapple with their concerns, thereby intensifying right-wing thought and forecasting the trajectory of American politics. Ultraconservatives of the 20th century were the vanguard of modern conservatism as it exists in the Republican Party of today.