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  A Country of Vast Designs -...

  Robert W. Merry

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  When James K. Polk was elected president in 1844, the United States was locked in a bitter diplomatic struggle with Britain over the rich lands of the Oregon Territory, which included what is now Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Texas, not yet part of the Union, was threatened by a more powerful Mexico. And the territories north and west of Texas-what would become California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and part of Colorado-belonged to Mexico. When Polk relinquished office four years later, the country had grown by more than a third as all these lands were added. The continental United States as we know it today was established-facing two oceans and positioned to dominate both.In a one-term presidency, Polk completed the story of America's Manifest Destiny-extending its territory across the continent, from sea to sea, by threatening England and manufacturing a controversial and unpopular two-year war with Mexico that Abraham Lincoln, in Congress at the time, opposed as preemptive.Robert W. Merry tells this story through powerful debates and towering figures-the outgoing President John Tyler and Polk's great mentor, Andrew Jackson; his defeated Whig opponent, Henry Clay; two famous generals, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott; Secretary of State James Buchanan (who would precede Lincoln as president); Senate giants Thomas Hart Benton and Lewis Cass; Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun; and ex-president Martin Van Buren, like Polk a Jackson protégé but now a Polk rival.This was a time of tremendous clashing forces. A surging antislavery sentiment was at the center of the territorial fight. The struggle between a slave-owning South and an opposing North was leading inexorably to Civil War. In a gripping narrative, Merry illuminates a crucial epoch in U.S. history.

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  King of Capital - The Remarkable...

  David Carey, John E. Morris

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  The financial establishment-banks and investment bankers, such as Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Lehman, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley-were the cowboys, recklessly assuming risks, leveraging up to astronomical levels, and driving the economy to the brink of disaster. In King of Capital, David Carey and John E. Morris show how Blackstone (and other private equity firms) transformed themselves from gamblers, hostile-takeover artists, and "barbarians at the gate" into disciplined, risk-conscious investors. This is the greatest untold success story on Wall Street. Not only have Blackstone and a small coterie of competitors wrested control of corporations around the globe, but they have emerged as a major force on Wall Street, challenging the likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for dominance. And since it is sitting on billions of dollars that can be invested at a time when the market is starved for capital, Blackstone is now ready to break out once again. Insightful and hard-hitting, King of Capital is filled with never-before-revealed details about the workings of a heretofore secretive company that was the personal fiefdom of Steve Schwarzman and Peter Peterson. A great human interest story, as well, it tells how Blackstone went from two guys and a secretary to being one of Wall Street's most powerful institutions-far outgrowing its much older rival KKR-and how Schwarzman, with a pay packet one year of $398 million and $684 million from the Blackstone IPO, came to epitomize the spectacular new financial fortunes amassed in the 2000s.

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  Hear & Beyond - Live Skillfully...

  Shari Eberts, Gael Hannan

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  Hearing loss doesn't come with an operating manual—until now. If you have hearing loss, you already know that the conventional approach to treatment is focused on hearing-aid technology. Without a handbook to help you figure out how to actually live with it, you've likely been getting by on information pieced together from various sources—and yet, communication often seems incomplete and unsatisfying.What's missing from this hearing care model is the big picture—a real-life illustration of how hearing loss, its emotions, and its barriers affect every corner of your life. Now, hearing-health advocates, consultants, and speakers Shari Eberts and Gael Hannan offer a new skills-based approach to hearing loss that is centered not on hearing better, but on communicating better.With honesty and humor, they share their own hearing loss journeys, and outline invaluable insights, strategies, and workarounds to help you engage with the world and be heard. You'll gain tips for navigating all areas impacted by hearing loss, including relationships, work, technology; strategies for adopting a new, empowering mindset towards your hearing loss; and communication behaviors that can make almost any listening situation manageable. Hearing loss is just one aspect of who you are. You may have hearing loss, but it doesn't have to have you.

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  The Good Captain - A Personal...

  R.D. Hooker

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  The veteran soldier, Pentagon advisor and White House staffer recounts his long and distinguished military career in this acclaimed memoir. 
   
  A combat soldier and leader in five wars, R. D. Hooker also served as a White House staff member in four different administrations. He retired in 2010 as the most decorated colonel in the US Army. Beginning with his enlistment at 18 in 1975, this memoir chronicles his experiences in the post-Vietnam Army as a young paratrooper, West Point cadet, and combatant in the many military conflicts which followed.  
   
  Hooker served in Grenada, Somalia. Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo. He played a key role in the response to 9/11 and returned to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. He commanded a paratroop company, battalion and brigade and served in the continental US, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Southwest Asia. When not deployed, he taught at West Point and served in several high-level Pentagon assignments and in the White House in the administrations of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump. 
   
  In The Good Captain, Hooker recounts his storied career with insights and lessons learned through five different conflicts. He also describes each of these campaigns from a strategic and policy perspective informed by his White House and Pentagon experiences as well as years of academic training.

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  Parallel Lives of the Noble...

  Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus

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  Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings. The surviving lives contain twenty-three pairs of biographies, each pair consisting of one Greek and one Roman, as well as four unpaired, single lives.Plutarch was not concerned with writing histories, as such, but in exploring the influence of character, good or bad, on the lives and destinies of famous men. The first pair of lives the Epaminondas-Scipio Africanus no longer exists, and many of the remaining lives are truncated, contain obvious lacunae and/or have been tampered with by later writers.His Life of Alexander is one of the five surviving secondary or tertiary sources about Alexander the Great and it includes anecdotes and descriptions of incidents that appear in no other source. Likewise, his portrait of Numa Pompilius, an early Roman king, also contains unique information about the early Roman calendar.In this copy-right expired 11-volume translation from the Loeb Classical library, the order of the paired lives is rearranged to present the Greek lives in chronological order. Vol 2 presents the paired lives of Themistocles and Camillus, Aristides and Cato Major, and Cimon and Lucullus. (Summary adapted from Wikipedia by Karen Merline.)

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  The Girl and the Bombardier - A...

  Susan Tate Ankeny

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  Susan Tate Ankeny was sorting through the belongings of her late father—a World War II bombardier who had bailed from a burning B-17 over Nazi-occupied France in 1944—when she found two boxes. One contained her dad's Air Force uniform, and the other an unfinished memoir, stacks of envelopes, black-and-white photographs, mission reports, dog tags, and the fake identity cards he used in his escape. Ankeny spent more than a decade from that moment tracking down letter writers, their loved ones, and anyone who had played a role in her father's story, culminating in a trip to France where she retraced his path with the same people who had guided him more than sixty years ago.A remarkable hero emerged—Godelieve Van Laere—just a teenaged girl when she saved the fallen Lieutenant Dean Tate, risking her life and forging a friendship that would last into a new century.The result is an amazing, multifaceted World War II tale that traces the transformation of a small-town American boy into a bombardier, the thrill and chaos of an air war, and the horror of bailing from a flaming aircraft over enemy territory. It distinguishes the actions of a little-known French resistance network for Allied airmen known as Shelburne. And it shines a light on the courage and cunning of a young woman who put her life on the line to save another's.

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