Showing results by narrator "J. L." in All Categories

Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed. Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: "If we lose the war, we'll be tried as war criminals."

Laura Hunt was the ideal modern woman: beautiful, elegant, highly ambitious, and utterly mysterious. No man could resist her charmsnot even the hardboiled NYPD detective sent to find out who turned her into a faceless corpse. As this tough cop probes the mystery of Lauras death, he becomes obsessed with her strange power.

Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the

New York Times best-sellers

Fight Club and

Lullaby, is known for his edgy novels, and

Rant is no exception. Palahniuk presents this fictional biography of Buster "Rant" Casey in a series of vignettes told by the people who knew him best. As intricate as a spider web,

Rant succeeds in recounting the story of one man's life only through the eyes of others. But the question remains, "Who was Rant Casey?"

Kim Hvidkjaer was twenty-nine years old when he became a millionaire. Two years later, after a cluster of disasters, he found himself basically broke. Now, having rebuilt his fortune as the founder of several successful enterprises and studied thousands of failed startups, Hvidkjaer has become an expert in failure: what it means, what it looks like, and the strategies that business owners can use to prevent it. In How to F--k Up Your Startup, he takes us on an entertaining and enlightening journey through the complex patterns of failure in the life cycle of a business.

From the highly acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts comes a collection of alternately playful and exquisite essays—including seven collected here for the first time—borne of a lifetime spent fishing.

At birth, Violet and Rose Flowers were identical, save for a tiny bluish-purple mark gracing Violet’s slender neck. By nineteen, their temperaments distinguish them, as different as the flowers their mother named them for—Violet, wild and outgoing, and Rose, solitary and reserved. Still, they are each other’s world. Then, on a sweltering, terrible August night in 1928, an explosion rocks Lamb’s Dance Hall in Possum Flats, Missouri, engulfing it in flames, leaving one twin among the dozens dead, and her sister’s life forever changed.

Lies Across America is a reality check for anyone who has ever sought to learn about America through the nation's public sites and markers. Entertaining and enlightening, it is destined to change the way American listeners see their country.

How do you find talent with a creative spark? To what extent can you predict human creativity, or is human creativity something irreducible before our eyes, perhaps to be spotted or glimpsed by intuition, but unique each time it appears? Obsessed with these questions, renowned economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist and entrepreneur Daniel Gross set out to study the art and science of finding talent at the highest level: the people with the creativity, drive, and insight to transform an organization and make everyone around them better.

They Were Soldiers showcases the inspiring true stories of forty-eight Vietnam veterans who returned home from the "lost war" to enrich America's present and future. In this groundbreaking new audiobook, Joseph L. Galloway, distinguished war correspondent and New York Times bestselling author of...

William Gibson's dark visions of computer cowboys, bio-enhanced soldiers of fortune, and hi-tech lowlifes have won unprecedented praise. Included here are some of the most famous short fiction and novellas by the author of Count Zero and Neuromancer.

Miss Lonelyhearts is an unnamed male newspaper columnist writing an advice column, which is viewed by the newspaper as a joke. As "Miss Lonelyhearts" reads letters from desperate New Yorkers, he feels terribly burdened and falls into a cycle of deep depression, accompanied by heavy drinking and occasional barfights. The novel is essentially a black comedy and is characterized by an extremely dark but clever sense of humor and irony.

Private eye Eddie Valiant doesn't like Toons - those cartoon characters who live side-by-side with humans. But Eddie will work for a Toon if his cash supply is low enough. So he reluctantly agrees when Roger Rabbit, a Toon who plays straight man (or should that be straight rabbit) in the Baby Herman cartoon series, asks him to find out who's been trying - unsuccessfully - to buy his contract from the DeGreasy Brothers syndicate. Then Rocco DeGreasy is murdered - and Roger is the prime suspect!

Entrepreneurial Leap, Updated and Expanded Edition is an easy-to-use guide that will help you decide if entrepreneurship is right for you—because success as an entrepreneur depends on far more than just a great idea and a generous helping of luck. In this three-part book, Gino Wickman, bestselling author of Traction, reveals the six essential traits that every entrepreneur needs in order to succeed, based on real-world startups. If these traits ring true for you, you'll get a glimpse of what your life would look like as an entrepreneur.

When it first appeared, A Rumor of War brought home to American readers, with terrifying vividness and honesty, the devastating effects of the Vietnam War on the soldiers who fought there. And while it is a memoir of one young man's experiences and therefore deeply personal, it is also a book that speaks powerfully to today's students about the larger themes of human conscience, good and evil, and the desperate extremes men are forced to confront in any war.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon described him as the Beatles' "favorite group," he won Grammy awards, wrote and recorded hit songs, and yet no figure in popular music is as much of a paradox, or as underrated, as Harry Nilsson. In this first ever full-length biography, Alyn Shipton traces Nilsson's life from his Brooklyn childhood to his Los Angeles adolescence and his gradual emergence as a uniquely talented singer-songwriter.

The best-selling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters tells the story of a wild encounter between an American sealing vessel, a shipwrecked British brig, and a British warship in the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812. Fraught with misunderstandings and mistrust, the incident left three British sailors and two Americans including the captain of the sealer, Charles H. Barnard abandoned in the Falklands for eighteen months.

Researchers now have a clear understanding of the key drivers that make meetings successful. In The Surprising Science of Meetings, Steven G. Rogelberg, researcher and consultant to some of the world's most successful companies, draws from extensive research, analytics and data mining, and survey interviews with over 5,000 employees across a range of industries to share the proven practices and techniques that help managers and employees enhance the quality of their meetings.

On a lake deep in the Minnesota woods, Kathy Wade comforts her husband John, a rising political star, after a devastating electoral defeat in which he's been pursued by rumors of the atrocities he committed in Vietnam. But it is clear that something is horribly wrong between them - too much has been hidden. Then Kathy vanishes, along with their boat.

In Outside the Box, Levinson explains that globalization is entering a new era in which moving stuff will matter much less than moving services, information, and ideas.

Matt Ridley, acclaimed author of the classics Genome and Nature via Nurture, turns from investigating human nature to investigating human progress. In The Rational Optimist Ridley offers a counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our age, and proves, however much we like to think to the...