Showing results by narrator "Patrick Lawlor" in All Categories

A Schneider Family Book Award Honor Winner! The bestselling Bat returns! Bat and the Business of Ferrets is the fourth title in National Book Award finalist Elana K. Arnold’s heartfelt and widely acclaimed series featuring an unforgettable young boy on the autism spectrum. Bixby Alexander Tam...

Laurence A. Johnson, a supermarket chain owner in Syracuse, New York, wasn't just passionate about fresh produce; he was equally fervent about purging communism from America's airwaves in the early 1950s. Teamed with like-minded anti-communists, Johnson targeted food giants like Borden and Kraft. He threatened to hurt sales of their products if they sponsored TV and radio shows employing anyone blacklisted for alleged communist ties. The Grocer Who Sold McCarthyism explores Johnson's ascent from small-time grocery operator to kingmaker wielding Red Scare hysteria.

In Heart & Soul, Shook takes listeners on heartwarming journeys through some of America's most successful companies. To the employees of these companies, success is measured by the good they accomplish in the world. However, profiting and caring aren't mutually exclusive—these companies demonstrate how any company of any size can do both.

Although Andrew Jackson gained notoriety as a rakish young man, religion's influence on him ebbed and flowed as he established himself as part of the South's planter elite. With his devout wife, Rachel, he attended church and knew his Bible and religious subjects well, and while his determination to preserve his reputation involved him in numerous personal conflicts—including a duel that led to his killing a rival—he blended the principles of the antebellum South's honor-based culture with his belief in a traditional, orthodox version of Christianity. 

The Quaker City and its hospitals were pioneers in the field of mental health. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, its institutions were crowded and patients lived in shocking conditions. The mentally ill were quartered with the dangerously criminal. By 1906, the city had purchased a vast acreage of farmland incorporated into the city, and the Philadelphia Hospital dubbed its new venture Byberry City Farms. From the start, its history was riddled with corruption and committees, investigations and inquests, appropriations and abuse.

The air conditioner is often hailed as one of the modern world's greatest inventions—yet nearly as often blamed for global disaster. It has changed everything from architecture to people's food habits; saved countless lives, and caused countless deaths. First appearing in 1902, when Willis Carrier, an engineer barely out of college, developed the "Apparatus for Treating Air," everyone assumed it would instantly change the world. But the story of air conditioning and its rise to ubiquity is far from simple.