No institution, government, or country is "too big to fail." A behind-the-scenes account of what led to the 2008 crisis—and may soon lead to a bigger one.Written by two bank executives with firsthand experience of several financial crises, Nothing is Too Big to Fail holds a stiff warning about the future of finance and social justice—revealing how the US government's fiscal and monetary policies are creating asset and debt bubbles that could burst at any t...

When they first began working on this book, the authors thought they would simply write the story of Linda Killinger’s grandparents who, with seven of their thirteen kids, took a fifteen-month trip across the country visiting relatives and the national parks, in their brand new 1930 Model A Ford.Very quickly, they realized this was not just a simple story. Instead, they began to see it as a reveal of how this moment of history affected not only their grandparents’ family, but the g...

In 2008, the American economy collapsed, taking with it millions of Americans' jobs, homes, and life savings. The impending financial crisis was devastating, and many are still feeling its effects today.Though the crisis was debilitating, the US government has yet to implement policies that would prevent a repeat of the Great Recession. The middle class continues to shrink, escalations in racial injustices prevail, and distrust of the government grows by the day. And with the count...

A major literary figure tells “a searching tale of loss, recovery, and déja vu that is part memoir and what-if speculation, part polemic and exposé” (The Washington Post) about two generations of one family—civil rights martyr Emmett Till and his father, Louis—shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.Emmett Till took a train from his home in Chicago to visit family in Money, Mississippi; a few weeks later he returned home dead. Murdered becau...

The collected memoirs of a 1913 San Francisco sex worker, their effect on society at the time, and where they fit in today’s worldIn 1913 the San Francisco Bulletin published a serialized, ghostwritten memoir of a prostitute who went by Alice Smith. “A Voice from the Underworld” detailed Alice’s humble Midwestern upbringing and her struggle to find aboveboard work, and candidly related the harrowing events she endured after entering “the life.”Whil...

The untold story of an eccentric Wall Street tycoon and the circle of scientific geniuses he assembled before World War II to develop the science for radar and the atomic bomb. Together they changed the course of history.Legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the twentieth century—Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and others—at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Par...

Philosophical esotericsim—the practice of communicating one's unorthodox thoughts "between the lines"—was a common practice until the end of the eighteenth century. The famous Encyclopédie of Diderot, for instance, not only discusses this practice in over twenty different articles, but admits to employing it itself. The history of Western thought contains hundreds of such statements by major philosophers testifying to the use of esoteric writing in their own work or others'. Despi...

"Sean Patrick Hopkins offers exactly the kind of narration this audiobook deserves...He makes this story of America's first significant overseas aid effort and the two people most responsible--a sea captain and a Catholic priest--come alive." -- AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award WinnerThe remarkable story of the mission that inspired a nation to donate massive relief to Ireland during the potato famine and began America's tradition of providing h...

At the end of the First World War, Britain, and to a much lesser extent France, created the modern Middle East. The possessions of the former Ottoman Empire were carved up with scant regard for the wishes of those who lived there. From the outset, the project was destined to fail.Conflicting and ambiguous promises had been made to the Arabs during the war but were not honored. Brief hopes for Arab unity were dashed, and a harsh belief in western perfidy persists to the present day....

This is the story of a woman who wielded imagination and hope in the face of intolerance and who transformed everything she touched into art. In this compelling biography, author Marilyn Chase brings Ruth Asawa's story to vivid life. She draws on Asawa's extensive archives and weaves together many voices to offer a complex and fascinating portrait of the artist.Born in California in 1926, Ruth Asawa grew from a farmer's daughter to a celebrated sculptor. She surviv...

A generation before Brown v. Board of Education struck down America’s “separate but equal” doctrine, one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawyer fought for desegregation in one of the greatest legal battles never toldOn September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese American and considered by the school to be “colored”; the school was for whites....

The long-buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the barriers to women covering warKate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign r...