Other books that might interest you

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  At Mt Vernon remembering the...

  PBS NewsHour

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  A tour guide at George Washington's Mt. Vernon, who is also a distant relation of a person who was enslaved at the Virginia estate, offers his perspective about American history, slavery and the founding fathers. This story was produced by as part of the NewsHour's Student Reporting Labs program.

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  The Watchdog That Didn't Bark -...

  Dean Starkman

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  The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter details “how the U.S. business press could miss the most important economic implosion of the past eighty years” (Eric Alterman, media columnist for The Nation).   In this sweeping, incisive post-mortem, Dean Starkman exposes the critical shortcomings that softened coverage in the business press during the mortgage era and the years leading up to the financial collapse of 2008. He examines the deep cultural and structural shifts—some unavoidable, some self-inflicted—that eroded journalism’s appetite for its role as watchdog. The result was a deafening silence about systemic corruption in the financial industry. Tragically, this silence grew only more profound as the mortgage madness reached its terrible apogee from 2004 through 2006. Starkman frames his analysis in a broad argument about journalism itself, dividing the profession into two competing approaches—access reporting and accountability reporting—which rely on entirely different sources and produce radically different representations of reality. As Starkman explains, access journalism came to dominate business reporting in the 1990s, a process he calls “CNBCization,” and rather than examining risky, even corrupt, corporate behavior, mainstream reporters focused on profiling executives and informing investors. Starkman concludes with a critique of the digital-news ideology and corporate influence, which threaten to further undermine investigative reporting, and he shows how financial coverage, and journalism as a whole, can reclaim its bite.   “Can stand as a potentially enduring case study of what went wrong and why.”—Alec Klein, national bestselling author of Aftermath   “With detailed statistics, Starkman provides keen analysis of how the media failed in its mission at a crucial time for the U.S. economy.”—Booklist

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  The Battery - How Portable Power...

  Henry Schlesinger

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  In the tradition of Mark Kurlansky's Cod and David Bodanis's E=MC2, The Battery is the first popular history of the technology that harnessed electricity and powered the greatest scientific and technological advances of our time.What began as a long-running dispute in biology, involving a dead frog's twitching leg, a scalpel, and a metal plate, would become an invention that transformed the history of the world: the battery. From Alessandro Volta's first copper-and-zinc model in 1800 to twenty-first-century technological breakthroughs, science journalist Henry Schlesinger traces the history of this essential power source and demonstrates its impact on our lives.Volta's first battery not only settled the frog's leg question, it also unleashed a field of scientific research that led to the discovery of new elements and new inventions, from Samuel Morse's telegraph to Alexander Graham Bell's telephone to Thomas Edison's incandescent lightbulb. And recent advances like nanotechnology are poised to create a new generation of paradigm-shifting energy sources.Schlesinger introduces the charlatans and geniuses, paupers and magnates, attracted to the power of the battery, including Michael Faraday, Guglielmo Marconi, Gaylord Wilshire, and Hugo Gernsback, the publisher and would-be inventor who coined the term "science fiction." A kaleidoscopic tour of an ingenious invention that helped usher in the modern world, The Battery is as entertaining as it is enlightening.

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  Like Sodium in Water - A memoir...

  Hayden Eastwood

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  Dad thinks lots of things are right-wing. He even thinks He-Man is right-wing. I ask Dad who we are and he says left-wing. Left is opposite to right. If right is bad, then we’re the opposite of that, which means we’re good. 
  It’s post-independence Zimbabwe and an atmosphere of nostalgia hangs over much of Harare’s remaining white community. Hayden Eastwood grows up in a family that sets itself apart, distinguishing themselves from Rhodie-Rhodies through their politics: left is good; right is bad. 
  Within the family’s free and easy approach to life, Hayden and his younger brother, Dan, make a pact to never grow up, to play hide and seek and build forts forever, and to never, ever be interested in girls. But as Hayden and Dan develop as teenagers, and the chemicals of adolescence begin to stir, their childhood pact starts to unravel. And with the arrival of Sarah in their lives, the two brothers find themselves embroiled in an unspoken love triangle. While Sarah and Hayden spend increasing amounts of time together, Dan is left alone to deal with feelings of rejection and the burden of hidden passion, and the demise of a youthful promise brings with it a wave of destruction. 
  Laced with humour, anger and sadness, Like Sodium in Water is an account of a family in crisis and an exploration of how we only abandon the lies we tell ourselves when we have no other option.

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  When The Moon Rises

  Tony Davies

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  When the Moon RisesTowards the end of the Second World War and Italy’s release from Fascism and Mussolini three young British POW’s are liberated.   Their mission now is to join up with their comrades.   The only hurdle is the 700 miles of German occupied territory between them and safety.This true story is a real adventure of nail biting escapes and escalating tension.  Written by Tony Davies it is superbly read by William Franklyn. Schhh…you know who.

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  Heart of Glass

  Wendy Lawless

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  Before downtown Manhattan was scrubbed clean, gentrified and overrun with designer boutiques and trendy eateries and bars, it was the center of a burgeoning art scene-both exciting and dangerous. Running from the shipwreck of her glamorous and unstable childhood with a volatile mother, Wendy Lawless landed in the center of it all. With an open heart and a thrift store wardrobe, Wendy navigated this demimonde of jaded punk rockers, desperate actors, pulsing parties, and unexpected run-ins with her own past as she made every mistake of youth, looked for love in all the wrong places, and eventually learned how to grow up on her own.With the same "biting humor" (People) that made her New York Times bestseller Chanel Bonfire so captivating, Wendy turns her brutally honest and often hilarious spotlight on herself, recounting her tumultuous and giddy twenties trying to make it in the creative underbelly of New York City, all the while searching for love, a paying job, and occasionally, a free meal.

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