Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Beville" in All Categories

When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and beauty of his discoveries.

When Bernd Heinrich decided to write a memoir of his ultramarathon running experience, he realized that the preparation for the race was as important, if not more so, than the race itself. In Why We Run, Heinrich considers the flight endurance of birds, the antelope's running prowess and limitations, and the ultra-endurance of camels to understand how human physiology can or cannot replicate these adaptations. Heinrich offers an original and provocative work combining the rigors of science with the passion of running.

Brian Evenson's fifth story collection constructs a human landscape as unearthly as it is mundane. Replete with the brutality, primordial waste, and savage blankness familiar to listeners of his earlier works, Evenson's Kafkaesque allegories entice the mind while stubbornly disordering it.

Throughout his storied career, Aswath Damodaran has searched for the universal key to demystify corporate finance and valuation. Now, at last, he offers the groundbreaking answer to listeners everywhere. As the corporate lifecycle touches virtually every aspect of business, this book is for anyone with skin in the corporate finance game—from managers to investors, from novices to seasoned pros. Aswath Damodaran’s The Corporate Life Cycle is the definitive guide to understanding businesses growth, behavior, and value.

It was once a utopian dream. But today’s internet, despite its conveniences and connectivity, is the primary cause of a pervasive unease that has taken hold in the U.S. and other democratic societies. The roots of this crisis, argue Frank McCourt and Michael Casey, lie in the prevailing order of the internet. In plain but forceful language, the authors—a civic entrepreneur and an acclaimed journalist—show how a centralized system controlled by a small group of for-profit entities has set this catastrophe in motion and eroded our personhood.

CIA operative Mark Pierce is a trained killer with a strict moral code—he only targets those who truly deserve to die. So he has no qualms about taking out Victor Vautrin, an international arms dealer supplying fanatical terrorists in West Africa who may soon trigger a brutal civil war. But when he is tasked with other objectives—rescue kidnapped tourists and recover eleven million dollars of stolen CIA money—it quickly becomes clear to Pierce that someone doesn't want him to succeed in his primary mission.

Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other.

USA Today best-selling author Ty Hutchinson and former detective and Wall Street Journal best-selling author Brian Shea deliver a fast-paced mystery series filled with twists, perfect for fans of James Patterson and Michael Connelly.

Ancient Egypt wasn't all pyramids, sphinxes and gold sarcophagi. For your average Egyptian, life was tough, and work was hard, conducted under the burning gaze of the sun god Ra.

After several missing university students turn up dead in Iowa’s cornfields, the police turn to FBI Special Agent Sterling Gray, a rising star at the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit. After painstaking investigative work, Gray thought they had identified the killer. But when Interpol suddenly contacts him about a similar investigation in London, the case takes a shocking turn. Now Gray must follow the chilling trail of a killer known only as the Mirror Man. To catch him, Gray must get inside the killer’s twisted mind—without losing himself in the process.

In 1952, John T. “Jack” Downey, a 23-year-old CIA officer from Connecticut, was shot down over Manchuria during the Korean War. The pilots died in the crash, but Downey and his partner Richard “Dick” Fecteau were captured by the Chinese. For the next 20 years, they were harshly interrogated, put through show trials, held in solitary confinement, placed in reeducation camps, and toured around China as political pawns.

In the aftermath of disaster, China and America vie for control over North Africa and the world, while a band of engineers and mercenaries risk everything to save millions from starvation and forge a better future for all mankind.

A groundbreaking account of Sherman’s March to the Sea—the critical Civil War campaign that destroyed the Confederacy—told for the first time from the perspective of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who fled to the Union lines and transformed Sherman’s march into the biggest liberation event in American history.

Five men drive into an empty Kazakh desert. Four are professional killers. The fifth is their intended victim. This is not the first time someone has underestimated CIA paramilitary operator Mark Pierce. And it won't be the last. Pierce quickly dispatches the assassins, but soon realizes that his problems are only beginning. Someone has deliberately brought him to Kazakhstan so that he can be framed for the theft of Russian nuclear waste.

They set sail from Norway, two swift-moving longships and their handpicked crews, following the route navigated by the legendary Leif Ericson. But for young shipmaster Nils Thorsson and his fellow Norsemen, the real journey begins when they push on into the uncharted continent of Vinland. There the explorers revel in the chance to penetrate a virgin land—until they trespass on the grounds of a primitive people who have seen enough of the light-hairs' cruelty to believe they are too dangerous to ignore.

Dan Stone has a new assignment. In Africa. He's to cripple the Chinese incursions into the continent. The only problem is he might trigger World War III. This high-stakes thriller, set in the wild world of the DRC, pits Dan Stone against a complex array of forces, all vying for power and influence. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC, holds some of the largest coltan deposits in the world. It is the source of two rare Earth metals, niobium and tantalum, vital to modern economies. Now the Chinese are trying to corner the market and hold the western world hostage.

Jim Hampton arrived in New Orleans, eager to escape the stress of quitting a lucrative law practice. Instead, he finds a city on edge as a tropical depression brews in the Gulf. The storm appears to be dredging up the odd and unusual like shells from the ocean floor. Shadowy figures appear in alleyways; mysterious voices seem to come from nowhere. Jim is skeptical of the locals' claims that these are warnings from victims of past storms. He had all but given up on belief in the supernatural. That is until he meets Myriam, who begins to restore the faith of his childhood.

Matt Kearns just needed to get away from it all - to grieve for his father and let the rugged wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula renew him, like it always had. But from the moment he arrives, nothing feels right. Strange happenings shake his confidence and have him questioning his sanity. Even the animals seem to know something is amiss. But each time he tries to leave, something - something truly malicious - violently pulls him back. What could it be? Why him? And what will he have to do to escape with his life?

He is deadly and acts without remorse. He inflicts pain and death in service to his master. Now he's killed someone close to Dan and those he loves. It's become more than a mission for Dan; it's personal now. The assassin may want to lure Dan into his trap to kill him, but Dan has other ideas. One assassin must track another to his lair in a desperate attempt to eliminate him before anyone else dies.

Land a lighthouse deal to catapult your startup over the chasm of early adopters and into the land of new opportunities with trillion-dollar companies. Navigate to the Lighthouse explains how to do that, using strategic business development as a competitive advantage. When you approach the chasm and look at lighthouses shining on potential trajectory-changing deals, two questions likely cross your mind: Should I invest the time and resources to pursue what seem like impossible deals? If so, what’s the path to get there—strategically and tactically? Kurt Davis has the answers.