Search:

Results 441 to 450 of 497 | « previous |

Stupid TV, be more funny : how the golden era of the Simpsons changed television--and America--forever / by Siegel, Alan,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."This comprehensive account of the meteoric rise of The Simpsons combines incisive pop culture criticism and interviews with the show's creative team that take readers inside the making of an American phenomenon during its most influential decade, the 1990s. The Simpsons is an American institution. But its status as an occasionally sharp yet ultimately safe sitcom that's still going after 33 years on the air undercuts its revolutionary origins. The early years of the animated series didn't just impact Hollywood, they changed popular culture. It wasn't a watercooler show; it was a show that altered the way we talked around the watercooler, in school hallways, and on the campaign trail, by bridging generations with its comedic sensibility and prescient cultural commentary. In STUPID TV, BE MORE FUNNY, writer Alan Siegel reveals how the first decade of the show laid the groundwork for the series' true influence. He explores how the show's rise from 1990 to 1998 intertwined with the supposedly ascendent post-Cold War America, turning Fox into the juggernaut we know today, simultaneously shaking its head at America's culture wars while finding itself in the middle of them. By packing the book with anecdotes from icons like Conan O'Brien and Yeardley Smith, Siegel also provides readers with an unparalleled look inside the making of the show. Through interviews with the show's legendary staff and whip-smart analysis, Siegel charts how The Simpsons developed its singular sensibility throughout the '90s, one that was at once groundbreakingly subversive for a primetime cartoon and shocking wholesome. The result is a definitive history of The Simpsons' most essential decade"--
Subjects: Television criticism and reviews.; Simpsons (Television program); Simpsons (Television program); Animated television programs; Television comedies;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

New power : how power works in our hyperconnected world- and how to make it work for you / by Heimans, Jeremy,author.; Timms, Henry,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."From two influential and visionary thinkers comes a big idea that is changing the way movements catch fire and ideas spread in our highly connected world. For the vast majority of human history, power has been held by the few. "Old power" is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful spend it carefully, like currency. But the technological revolution of the past two decades has made possible a new form of power, one that operates differently, like a current. "New power" is made by many; it is open, participatory, often leaderless, and peer-driven. Like water or electricity, it is most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it, but to channel it. New power is behind the rise of participatory communities like Facebook and YouTube, sharing services like Uber and Airbnb, and rapid-fire social movements like Brexit and #BlackLivesMatter. It explains the unlikely success of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign and the unlikelier victory of Donald Trump in 2016. And it gives ISIS its power to propagate its brand and distribute its violence. Even old power institutions like the Papacy, NASA, and LEGO have tapped into the strength of the crowd to stage improbable reinventions. In New Power, the business leaders/social visionaries Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms provide the tools for using new power to successfully spread an idea or lead a movement in the twenty-first century. Drawing on examples from business, politics, and social justice, they explain the new world we live in--a world where connectivity has made change shocking and swift and a world in which everyone expects to participate."--
Subjects: Social movements; Internet and activism.; Social media.; Power (Social sciences); Internet; Technology;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Robert B. Parker's Bye bye baby [sound recording] / by Atkins, Ace,author.; Mantegna, Joe,narrator.; Parker, Robert B.,1932-2010,creator.; Random House Audio Publishing,publisher.;
Read by Joe Mantegna."Boston PI Spenser takes on a new case in this next installment in Robert B. Parker's iconic New York Times bestselling series. Carolina Garcia-Ramirez is a rising star in national politics, taking on the establishment with her progressive agenda. Tough, outspoken, and driven, the young congresswoman has ignited a new conversation in Boston about race, poverty, health care, and the environment. Now facing her second campaign, she finds herself not only fighting a tight primary with an old guard challenger but also contending with numerous death threats coming from hundreds of suspects. When her chief of staff reaches out to Spenser for security and help finding the culprits of what he believes to be the most credible threats, Garcia-Ramirez is less than thrilled. Since her first grassroots run, she's used to the antipathy and intimidation women of color often face when seeking power. To her, it's all noise. But it turns out an FBI agent disagrees, warning Spenser that Garcia-Ramirez might be in real danger this time. It doesn't take long for Spenser to cross paths with an extremist group called The Minutemen, led by a wealthy Harvard grad named Bishop Graves. Although Graves is a social media sensation, pushing an agenda of white supremacy and toxic masculinity, he denies he's behind the attacks. As the primary nears and threats become a deadly plot, it's up to Spenser, Hawk, and a surprise trusted ally to ensure the congresswoman is safe. This is Spenser doing what he does best, living by a personal code and moral compass that can't ever be broken"--
Subjects: Audiobooks.; Detective and mystery fiction.; Spenser (Fictitious character); Private investigators; Women legislators;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Everything there is : a novel / by Vassanji, M. G.,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."From two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji, one of Canada's finest and most celebrated writers, comes a brilliant new novel that vividly examines the seemingly incongruous worlds of science, religion and desire. Nurul Islam is a world-renowned physicist, professor at Imperial College, London, and one half of the Islam-Rosenfeld theory, the first step in a grand unification of forces and a Theory of Everything. A sensitive character, from a small town in undivided India, a family man profoundly influenced by his pious father, Nurul is happily married to Sakina Begum by an arranged marriage. They have three children. But when Nurul travels to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to give a public lecture at Harvard, he falls in love with a graduate student, Hilary Chase. At the same time Nurul Islam's outspoken, philosophical views about the nature of physics and God have earned him the ire of fundamentalist preachers in Pakistan. When approached to contribute to Pakistan's nuclear weapons project, he declines, recalling the catastrophe of India's Partition, thus making enemies of the political and military establishments. Meanwhile, a contingent of physicists begins a smear campaign, claiming that Nurul Islams's contribution to the unification theory was plagiarized from Rosenfeld. All these events link together and converge upon Sakina Begum who, smarting from her husband's betrayal, unwittingly commits a betrayal of her own. Everything that had worked together as though preordained since his childhood to take him to the pinnacle of scientific achievement suddenly falls apart. An intimate and intelligent account of love, honour, guilt and genius, Everything There Is gives us an engaging portrait of a traditional, spiritual man facing the onslaught of inescapable forces."--
Subjects: Psychological fiction.; Novels.; Betrayal; College teachers; Man-woman relationships; Married people; Physicists; Revenge;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The passionate Tudor : a novel of Queen Mary I / by Weir, Alison,1951-author.;
"The New York Times bestselling author of the Six Tudor Queens series explores the dramatic and poignant life of King Henry VIII's daughter-infamously known as Bloody Mary-who ruled England for five violent years. Born from young King Henry's first marriage, his elder daughter, Princess Mary, is raised to be queen once it becomes clear that her mother, Katherine of Aragon, will bear no more surviving children. However, Henry's restless eye has a devastating influence on the young princess's future when he declares her a bastard and his marriage to her mother unlawful. In hopes of a male heir, he marries Anne Boleyn and banishes Katherine and Mary from the royal court. But when Anne too fails to produce a son, she is beheaded and Mary is allowed to return to court as the default heir. At age twenty, she hopes in vain for her own marriage and children, but who will marry her, bastard that she is? Yet Mary eventually triumphs and becomes queen, after first putting down a seventeen-year-old usurper, Lady Jane Grey, and ordering her beheading. Any hopes that as the first female queen to rule Britain Mary will show more compassion are dashed when she embarks on a ruthless campaign to force Catholicism on the English by burning hundreds of Protestants at the stake. But while her brutality will forever earn her the name Bloody Mary, at heart she is an insecure and vulnerable woman, her character forged by the unhappiness of her early years. In Alison Weir's masterful novel, the drama of Mary I's life and five-year reign-from her abusive childhood, marriage, and mysterious pregnancies to the cruelty that marks her legacy-comes to vivid life"--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Biographical fiction.; Novels.; Mary I, Queen of England, 1516-1558; Queens;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Empress of the Nile : the daredevil archaeologist who saved Egypt's ancient temples from destruction / by Olson, Lynne,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."In the 1960s, the world's attention was focused on a nail-biting race against time--an international campaign to save over a dozen ancient Egyptian temples, built during the height of the pharaohs' rule, from drowning in the floodwaters of the gigantic new Aswan High Dam. But the massive press coverage of this unprecedented rescue effort completely overlooked the feisty French archaeologist who made it all happen. Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples--including the Met Museum's Temple of Dendur--would now be at the bottom of a gigantic reservoir. It was a project of unimaginable size and complexity that required the fragile sandstone temples to be dismantled, stone by stone, and rebuilt on higher ground. A willful, real-life version of Indiana Jones, Desroches-Noblecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. As a brave member of the French Resistance in WWII she had survived imprisonment by the Nazis; in her fight to save the temples she had to face down two of the most daunting leaders of the postwar world, Egyptian President Abdel Nasser and French President Charles de Gaulle. As she told one reporter, "You don't get anywhere without a fight, you know." Yet Desroches-Noblecourt was not the only woman who played a crucial role in the endeavor. The other one was Jacqueline Kennedy, America's new First Lady, who persuaded her husband to call on Congress to help fund the rescue effort. After a century and a half of Western plunder of Egypt's ancient monuments, Desroches-Noblecourt had done the opposite. She had helped preserve a crucial part of its cultural heritage and, just as important, made sure it remained in its homeland"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Desroches-Noblecourt, Christiane, 1913-2011.; Archaeologists; Egyptologists;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The bomb maker / by Perry, Thomas,1947-author.;
"A bomb is more than a weapon. A bomb is an expression of the bomber's thoughts about you, his predictions of your behavior--a performance designed to fool you into making one fatally wrong move. In The Bomb Maker, Edgar Award-winning author Thomas Perry introduces us to the dark corners of a mind intent on transforming a simple machine into an act of murder--and to those committed to preventing that outcome at any cost. A threat is called into the LAPD Bomb Squad, a team dispatched to a house whose owner is away, and a bomb disguised inside photography equipment exploded in the kitchen. But it is a second bomb hidden in the basement that has devastating consequences--half of the entire Bomb Squad is obliterated within seconds. The fragmented unit turns to Dick Stahl, a former Bomb Squad commander who now operates his own private security company. Having just returned from a grueling job in Mexico, Stahl is reluctant to accept the offer, but senior technicians he had trained were among those killed. On his first day back at the head of the squad, Stahl's team is dispatched to a suspected car bomb outside a gas station. It quickly becomes clear to him that they are dealing with the same mastermind behind the weapon that killed fourteen highly trained men and women barely twenty-four hours before--and that the intended target may be the Bomb Squad itself. As the shadowy organization sponsoring this campaign of terror puts increasing pressure on the bomb maker, and Stahl becomes dangerously entangled with a member of his own team, the fuse on this high-stakes plot only burns faster. The Bomb Maker is Thomas Perry's biggest, most unstoppable thriller yet"--
Subjects: Thrillers (Fiction); Los Angeles (Calif.). Police Department; Bomb squads; Bombers (Terrorists); Bombings; Bombs;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The secret history of the rape kit : a true crime story / by Kennedy, Pagan,1962-author.;
Includes bibliographical references."A thrilling, novelistic work of journalism that uncovers the remarkable and hidden story of Marty Goddard, the woman who invented the rape kit, changed the course of how we treat sexual assault forever, and then vanished from the record. The idea came to Marty Goddard in 1971. She was working at a crisis hotline, haunted by the stories of survivors and plagued by two principle questions: Why were so many predators getting away with crimes? And, how do we stop them? In the coming years, Marty set off a massive campaign that lobbied to have sexual assault treated and investigated as the crime that it is. By creating the first rape kit, she revolutionized forensics. The kit would live on as one of the most powerful and effective tools for bringing perpetrators to justice. Marty, however, and any record of her, simply disappeared. The Secret History of the Rape Kit chronicles the story of one journalist's mission to uncover the story and woman behind an invention that transformed the lives of women the country over. As Pagan Kennedy peels back the layers behind the history of the kit and Marty's life, she falls into a deeper and deeper obsession. As she pursues this overlooked but critical story from our past, she dives into the inequities built into our patent system and our understanding of technological progress, the problematic and gendered history of forensics, and sexual forensics in particular, the misogyny that runs rampant in police departments, the legacy of Marty's invention and the failings that persist in how we prosecute rape. And, as Pagan unearths who Marty really was, and what happened to her, she reflects on her own experiences with sexual assault, and how one forgotten woman's legacy could have saved her, as it has so many"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; True crime stories.; Goddard, Marty, 1941-2015.; Forensic sciences; Rape kits; Rape;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The world as it is : a memoir of the Obama White House / by Rhodes, Benjamin J.,1977-author.;
For nearly ten years, Ben Rhodes saw almost everything that happened at the center of the Obama administration--first as a speechwriter, then as deputy national security advisor, and finally as a multipurpose aide and close collaborator. He started every morning in the Oval Office with the President's Daily Brief, traveled the world with Obama, and was at the center of some of the most consequential and controversial moments of the presidency. Now he tells the full story of his partnership--and, ultimately, friendship--with a man who also happened to be a historic president of the United States. Rhodes was not your typical presidential confidant, and this is not your typical White House memoir. Rendered in vivid, novelistic detail by someone who was a writer before he was a staffer, this is a rare look inside the most poignant, tense, and consequential moments of the Obama presidency--waiting out the bin Laden raid in the Situation Room, responding to the Arab Spring, reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran, leading secret negotiations with the Cuban government to normalize relations, and confronting the resurgence of nationalism and nativism that culminated in the election of Donald Trump. In The World as It Is, Rhodes shows what it was like to be there--from the early days of the Obama campaign to the final hours of the presidency. It is a story populated by such characters as Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates, and--above all--Barack Obama, who comes to life on the page in moments of great urgency and disarming intimacy. This is the most vivid portrayal yet of Obama's worldview and presidency, a chronicle of a political education by a writer of enormous talent, and an essential record of the forces that shaped the last decade.
Subjects: Biographies.; Obama, Barack.; Rhodes, Benjamin J., 1977-; Presidents;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Lucky loser : how Donald Trump squandered his father's fortune and created the illusion of success / by Buettner, Russ,author.; Craig, Susanne,author.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 457-500) and index."Soon after announcing his first campaign for the US presidency, Donald J. Trump [said] ... that life 'has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me.' Building on a narrative he had been telling for decades, he spun a hardscrabble fable of how he parlayed a small loan from his father into a multi-billion-dollar business and real estate empire. This feat, he argued, made him singularly qualified to lead the country. Except: None of it was true. Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of his own highly lucrative investments, Trump received the equivalent of more than $500 million today via means that required no business expertise whatsoever. Drawing on over twenty years' worth of Trump's confidential tax information -- including the tax returns he tried to conceal -- alongside business records and interviews with Trump insiders, New York Times investigative reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig track Trump's financial rise and fall, and rise and fall again. For decades, he squanders his fortunes on money-losing businesses, only to be saved yet again by financial serendipity. He tacks his name above the door of every building, while taking out huge loans he'll never repay. He obsesses over appearances, while ignoring threats to the bottom line and mounting costly lawsuits against city officials. He tarnishes the value of his name by allowing anyone with a big enough check to use it, and cheats the television producer who not only rescues him from bankruptcy but casts him as a business savant -- the public image that will carry him to the White House"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Trump, Donald, 1946-; Trump, Donald, 1946-; Trump, Donald, 1946-; Trump, Donald, 1946-; Trump family.; Trump Organization (New York, N.Y.); Businesspeople; Corporations; Fathers and sons; Presidents; Presidents; Wealth;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Results 441 to 450 of 497 | « previous |