Books about Stopped from Amazon.com

This edition features 3 audio CDs with actual broadcasts and includes a new afterword from NBC's Brian Williams

"Altogether, the book and CDs are a keeper, offering both valuable history lessons and a dramatic record of the definitive moments for generations of Americans." -Publishers Weekly

"The CDs deliver an exciting, engaging exercise. The events are all hugely memorable. The bits of historic sound are powerfully evocative."
-Baltimore Sun

"Garner has done a masterful job of collecting these moments, and with the accompanying CDs, one can listen over and over to the moments that shaped this century." -Booklist.
Price: $27.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

From the bestselling author of Buffett, When Genius Failed, and Origins of the Crash, a wake-up call to the pension and retirement crisis facing America and the road map for a way out

In While America Aged, bestselling author Roger Lowenstein explains how corporations and governments ran up ruinous pension and health-care promises to workers—promises that are now coming due and that will hit America like a tsunami if nothing is done.

Negotiating high benefits means gambling with future finances—and when the farm gets sold out from underneath major corporations or public institutions, it affects all of us, and in ways we might not imagine. With his trademark narrative panache, Lowenstein unravels the truth about how pensions work in America and illuminates the impending crisis. While America Aged is comprised of three fascinating case studies— each an object lesson and a compelling historical saga. The first goes back to the early days of the United Auto Workers and its crusading leader, Walter Reuther, to tell the story of how pensions and health-care obligations destroyed the American auto industry, in particular General Motors.

Lowenstein then shifts the scene to New York City to tell the story of the rise of public pensions and public sector unions through the vehicle of the Communist-led Transport Workers Union. Once again, justifiable benefits were followed by outrageous ones, such as the right to retire at age fifty. The saga reached a dramatic climax in 2005, when workers responded to proposed pension cutbacks with a massive strike that brought New York’s subways and buses to a screeching halt days before Christmas.

In the concluding episode, Lowenstein visits a metropolis even more reckless in doling out benefits—San Diego. Desperate not to impose higher taxes, city officials in this highly conservative enclave cut a series of deals with unions to short-change the retirement system and use pension funds to run the city. A massive scandal ensued—two mayors resigned, officials were indicted, and San Diego lost its bond rating. Lowenstein warns that the pension wars that erupted in Detroit, New York City, and San Diego are only the first. But he also recognizes that workers are entitled to decent security in their retirement—a critical problem as the country ages. While America Aged explains how we came to this crisis, and it also proposes a way out. Arming readers with knowledge of the consequences of doing nothing, While America Aged, first and foremost, a call to action..
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By the time Pearl Harbor had ripped apart America's peacetime pretensions, the German blitzkrieg had already blasted the Red Army back to the gates of Moscow. Yet, less than four years later, the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flew above the ruins of Berlin, stark symbol of a miraculous comeback that destroyed the German army and shattered Hitler's imperial designs.

Told in swift stirring prose, When Titans Clashed provides the first full account of this epic struggle from the Soviet perspective. David Glantz, one of the world's foremost authorities on the Soviet military, and Jonathan House present a fundamentally new interpretation of what the Russians called the "Great Patriotic War." Based on unprecedented access to formerly classified Soviet sources, they counter the German perspective that has dominated previous accounts and radically revise our understanding of the Soviet experience during World War II.

Placing the war within its wider political, economic, and social contexts, the authors recount how the determined Soviets overcame their initial disasters to defeat the most powerful army ever assembled. As they vividly show, this truly was war waged on a titanic scale, sweeping across a half-million square miles from Moscow to Berlin, featuring monumental offensives and counteroffensives, and ultimately costing both sides combined a staggering forty million casualties.

Their work offers new revelations on Soviet strategy and tactics, Stalin's role as supreme commander of the Red Army, the emergence of innovative and courageous commanders in the crucible of combat, numerous previously concealed or neglected military operations, German miscalculations on the road to the Red capital, the effect of D-Day and the "second front" on the Soviet effort, and the war's devastating impact on the Soviet economy and civilian population.

An essential volume for anyone interested in World War II or Soviet history, When Titans Clashed will change forever how we look at one of the greatest military confrontations in world history.

This book is part of the Modern War Studies series..
Price: $11.09 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Music May Have Stopped, but the Party’s Never Over.

Bar Mitzvah Disco. Everyone's Invited

Pick up your table card and come be our guest on this journey back to a time when style, music, and lust went hand in hand with a Day-Glo necklace, a pair of Z Cavaricci jeans, and Vuarnet shades. In this parallel universe, tall girls slow-danced with short boys at arm’s length, suburban break-dance pioneers vied with Lionel Richie fanatics for dance-floor space, Aunt Edna came ready to mount an assault on the dessert buffet in her best lime-green polyester pantsuit, and the phrase “the higher the hair, the closer to God” took on a whole new meaning.

With special appearances from:

AJ Jacobs, 99 red balloons, Ben Lee, the California Raisins, a well-intentioned Burt Reynolds impersonator, Jessi Klein, Joel Stein, DJ Squeak E. Clean, members of Foreigner (circa the Agent Provocateur tour), Sarah Silverman, OJ Simpson, Noah Tepperberg, Wendy Spero, the cast of Breakin’, Mark Ronson, Steve Fortgang and southern Florida’s number one Bar Mitzvah band

Bar Mitzvah Disco is an irresistible journey, two parts Fantasy Island to one part Vegas, rife with gorgeous girls, piles of cash, and ungracious thank-you notes presented straight from the source..
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November 1, 1950 -- an unseasonably hot afternoon in sleepy Washington, D.C. At 2:00 P.M. at his temporary residence in Blair House, President Harry Truman takes a nap. At 2:20 P.M., two Puerto Rican natives approach from different directions. Oscar Collazo, a respected metal polisher and family man, and Griselio Torresola, an unemployed salesman, don't look dangerous, not in their new suits and hats, not in their calm, purposeful demeanor, not in their slow, unexcited approach. What the three White House policemen and one Secret Service agent guarding the president cannot guess is that under each man's coat is a 9mm German automatic pistol and in each head, a dream of assassin's glory.

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In the last days of World War II a young Swedish architect was sent to Budapest. There he did what no other country or individual was able to do: he saved over 100,000 men women and children from certain death. This dramatic story is based upon interviews with survivors and Wallenberg's family. To this day no one knows his fate but his belief that one person can make a difference endures as a legacy for us all..
Price: $1.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

By the time Hitler declared war on the Soviet Union in 1941, he knew that his military machine was running out of fuel. In response, he launched Operation Blau, a campaign designed to protect Nazi oilfields in Romania while securing new ones in the Caucasus. All that stood in the way was Stalingrad. Here, Joel Hayward chronicles Luftwaffe operations during that campaign, focusing on Hitler's use of the air force as a tactical rather than strategic weapon in close support of ground forces. He details the Luftwaffe's key role as "flying artillery", showing that the army relied on Luftwaffe support to a far greater degree than has been previously revealed and that its successes in the East occurred largely because of the effectiveness of that support. Hayward shows the poorly conceived strategies of Hitler, Goering and others in Berlin doomed the efforts of air commander Wolfram von Richthofen, a resolute leader attempting to come to grips with an increasingly impossible situation. By reconsidering the campaign in the light of a wider body of documentary sources and analyzing many previously ignored events, Hayward offers military historians and general readers a more complete understanding of the Battle of Stalingrad and its impact on World War II..
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