It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible that America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing...

A riveting history of how the cataclysmic Lisbon earthquake shook the religious and intellectual foundations of Enlightenment Europe.Along with the volcanic destruction of Pompeii and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Lisbon quake of 1755 is one of the most destructive natural disasters ever recorded. After being jolted by a massive quake, Lisbon was then pounded by a succession of tidal waves and finally reduced to ash by a fire that raged for...

"If you ever think customers are a pain in the butt, try to do business without them." In his audio book, The How of Wow!, award-winning author John J. Murphy challenges you to differentiate your organization from the pack with his 10 secrets behind world class service. When was the last time you were "wowed" by the service you received? Maybe you were "wowed" while buying groceries, resolving a problem with your bank, checking into a hotel or flying...

Opening the X-Files ...Meet Mulder and Scully, FBI-the agency maverick and the female agent assigned to keep him in line.Their job is to investigate the eeriest unsolved mysteries in modern America, from pyro-psychics to death row demonics, from rampaging Sasquatches to alien invasions. These are the cases the Bureau wants handled quietly, but quickly, before the public finds out what's really out there ... and panics-the cases filed under "X."

Humans have always been fascinated by the possibility of extraterrestrial life, often wondering if we are alone in the universe. Drawing on nearly fifty years as a leader in planetary exploration, Louis Friedman brings into focus the subject of extraterrestrial life, separating knowledge from conjecture, fact from fiction, to draw scientific and technical conclusions that answer this enduring question. Friedman argues that intelligent life is probably...

Long before their first Super Bowl victory in 2003, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers did something no NFL team had ever done before and that none will ever likely do again: They lost twenty-six games in a row. It started in 1976, in their first season as an expansion team, and it lasted until the penultimate game of the 1977 season, when they defeated Archie Manning and the New Orleans Saints on the road. It was the beginning of a new streak for a team that...

Serial killers come in all shapes and sizes, but this one is particularly puzzling. There's no pattern to the mutilated bodies that have been showing up in Albuquerque: the victims have been both sexes and all races, ages, and ethnic groups. There is no evidence of rape or ritual. Only one thing connects the victims: they were the victims of a natural disaster-one of the most unnatural natural disasters imaginable-leading to a most painful, most certain,...

When moonlighting medical students harvesting skin from a corpse for temporary use accidentally take it from the wrong donor, the results are catastrophic: a New York City hospital ward is destroyed in a bloodbath, and an elderly professor, admitted for a routine skin graft, is suddenly the city's most wanted fugitive. Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are the only ones to suspect something more ominous than a medical procedure gone awry. As the FBI...

Ryan D'Agostino wanted to know how the extremely wealthy in America got that way. So he asked. Knocking on 500 doors in twenty neighborhoods in the most affluent ZIP codes in America, D'Agostino met with fifty regular (but very rich) men and women who welcomed him in and shared some of their most difficult financial decisions, toughest setbacks, greatest strategies, most triumphant moments, and deepest insights into what it means to have money. D'Agostino...

By turns tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of "the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks." Deer Hunting with Jesus is Joe Bageant's report on what he learned when he moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia. Like countless American small towns, it is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent...