Showing results by narrator "David Colacci" in All Categories

After the bursting of the real-estate bubble, the US pushed a monetary and fiscal policy that is, at best, blatantly wrong, and, at worst, carries enormous financial risk. And because Washington knows this, America's greatest weapon - its propaganda machine - has been called into service, diverting attention away from the fact that it was and continues to be government interference in the market economy that's lead us to where we are now, namely at the end of one financial calamity and the beginning of yet another. 

It's a story almost too tawdry to be true—a con woman prostitute who met the descendant of a Founding Father in a brothel, duped him into marriage using an infant purchased from a baby farm, then went to prison for stabbing the couple's baby nurse—all while in a common-law marriage with another man. The scandal surrounding Evangeline and Robert Ray Hamilton, though little known today, was one of the sensations of the Gilded Age. 

Professor Meir Statman, established thought leader in behavioral finance, explores how life well-being, the overarching aim of individuals in the third generation of behavioral finance, is underpinned by financial well-being, and how life well-being extends beyond financial well-being to family, friendship, religion, health, work, and education.

For the past eight decades, we have lived in "the American Century"-a period during which the US has enjoyed unrivaled power-be it political, economic, or military-on the global stage. Born on the cusp of this new era, Joseph S. Nye Jr. has spent a lifetime illuminating our understanding of the changing contours of America power and world affairs. His many books on the nature of power and political leadership have rightly earned him his reputation as one of the most influential international relations scholars in the world today.

Around one a.m. on an early spring morning, two teenage gangs are arrested after clashing violently in one of Venice’s squares. Commissario Claudia Griffoni, on duty that night, perhaps ill-advisedly walks the last of the boys home because his father, Dario Monforte, failed to pick him up at the Questura. Coincidentally, Guido Brunetti is asked by a wealthy friend of Vice-Questore Patta to vet Monforte for a job, triggering Brunetti’s memory that twenty years earlier Monforte had been publicly celebrated as the hero of a devastating bombing of the Italian military compound in Iraq. 

“Smuggling, sexual betrayal, high-class fakery and, of course, mafia money make for a rich brew.” —Sunday Times (London) As Venice braces for a winter tempest, Commissario Guido Brunetti, Donna Leon’s intrepid Italian sleuth, finds out that an old friend has been savagely beaten at the...

“Commissario Guido Brunetti’s fourteenth case may be his best yet.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) On a cold Venetian night shortly before Christmas, a street vendor is killed in a scuffle in Campo San Stefano. The closest witnesses to the event are the tourists who had been browsing...

Late one night, a teenage African American foster child named Tanya Morgan plummets to her death from the overpass above San Francisco's Stockton tunnel. But did she fall...or was she pushed?

The Curtlees are a powerful force in San Francisco, unscrupulous billionaires who’ve lined every important pocket in the Bay Area in pursuit of their own ascent. So when the family’s heir, Ro Curtlee, was convicted of rape and murder a decade ago, the fallout for those who helped to bring him to justice was swift and uncompromising. The jury foreman was fired from his job and blacklisted in his industry. The lead prosecutor was pushed off the fast track, her dreams of becoming district attorney dashed.

'No other person who has flown in space has captured the experience so vividly' - New York Times Book Review In July 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins piloted the Apollo 11 spacecraft to the moon. Fifty years later, it is still one of the greatest achievements in human...

Commissario Guido Brunetti must question his own assumptions about culture, virtue, and class in order to solve a shocking case of rare book theft from a Venetian library. Donna Leon’s critically acclaimed, internationally bestselling Commissario Guido Brunetti series has attracted readers the...

“The ever-incredible Leon’s twenty-fourth stunning entry in her stellar mysteries . . . brings the series full circle.” —Library Journal (starred review) In Death at La Fenice, the first novel in her beloved series, Donna Leon introduced readers to the glamorous and cutthroat world of...

Venetian detective Commissario Guido Brunetti is called to investigate the death of a young cadet. The boy has been found hanged, a presumed suicide, in Venice's elite military academy. Brunetti's sorrow for the boy, so close in age to his own son, is rivaled only by his contempt for a community...

Winner of the CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction, Friends in High Places is the ninth novel in Leon's bestselling and highly acclaimed Commissario Guido Brunetti series. “Leon tells the story as if she loves Venice as much as her detective does, warts and all. The plot and subplots unfold...

On a luminous spring day in Venice, Commissario Guido Brunetti and Inspector Vianello play hooky to help get Vianello’s friend Marco Ribetti—an environmental activist arrested during a protest against toxic waste being dumped into the city’s waters—released from prison. But on the steps...

In the sixteenth novel in Donna Leon’s bestselling Commissario Guido Brunetti series, a mysterious kidnapping leads the Venetian detective into the darkest corners of the medical establishment. “Donna Leon is the undisputed crime fiction queen...[Her] ability to capture the city’s social...

When Father Tibor is then arrested on murder charges, it tears at the very foundation of Demarkian's world. While Gregor has very strict rules about for whom and under what conditions he will consult, all those rules go by the wayside. Demarkian is now a man possessed, and his one goal is to find out what really happened and who is really responsible for the murder Father Tibor is charged with.

Art curator Val Caruso is not a happy camper. His promotion has just been nixed, his divorce has become final, and he’s dug himself into a nice little rut for his fortieth birthday. The uplift? A trip to Milan to help Holocaust survivor Sol Bezzecca recover a pair of cherished sketches by Renoir. They’d once been given to Sol’s family by the artist, looted by the Italian Fascist militia, and now after decades in hiding have turned up for auction. It’s Val’s job to get them back. Unfortunately, his Italian adventure takes a dangerous turn when he becomes trapped in an intricate web.

Fights about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. But despite these arguments' significance to American politics, American Jewish life, and to Israel itself, no one has ever systematically examined their history and explained why they matter. In We Are Not One, historian Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins.

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with E. E. Cummings's Cambridge upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary Decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and other "modern" movements in the arts.