Showing results by narrator "Keith Wright" in All Categories

In post-WWII Paris, Madame Claude ran the most exclusive finishing school in the world. The names on her client list were epic - Kennedy, Rothschild, Onassis, Brando, Sinatra, Picasso, the Shah, and that's just for starters. Born Fernande Grudet, a poor Jewish girl, the future Madame led a life of high adventure - resistance fighter, concentration camp survivor, gun moll of the Corsican Mafia, and erstwhile streetwalker - before becoming the ultimate broker between beauty and power. She harnessed the emerging technology of the telephone to create the concept of the call girl.

Central Banking in Turbulent Times examines fundamental questions about the central banking system, asking whether the model of an independent central bank devoted to price stability is the final resting point of a complex development that started centuries ago. It dissects the hypothesis that the Great Recession has prompted a reassessment of that model; a renewed emphasis on financial stability has emerged, possibly vying for first rank in the hierarchy of objectives of central banks.   

After his last two jobs left him broke and in debt, The Human for Hire is looking for a way to make some quick cash. And that's when three Human friends from his past show up, offering him a piece of the action in an upcoming bank robbery. At first, he says no. But then the details come out. It's behind enemy lines . . . and it's a Klin bank they'd be robbing. As Adam Cain says, "This could be the perfect crime." Get ready for Kelly's Heroes in Space, as Adam Cain and friends embark on a hair brain scheme to rob half-a-billion energy credits from a Klin bank.

Abigail Willard first spots her from the back of a New York cab: the spitting image of Abby herself at age 22 - right down to the silver platforms and raspberry coat she wore as a young artist with a taste for wildness. But the real Abby is now 46 and married, with a corporate job and two kids. As the girl vanishes into a rainy night, Abby is left shaken. Was this merely a hallucinatory side effect of working-mom stress? A message of sorts, sent to remind her of passions and dreams tossed aside? Or something more explosive and life-altering?

Sometimes a murder story lingers for years after the event. This one has lingered for more than a century, especially in New England. The setting is winter, 1873 on a small, obscure island 10 miles off the coast of Maine. Three women await the return of their men the following morning. A killer, who learns they are alone for one night, is rowing to their island, across 10 miles of open sea. The next day, a horrific scene is discovered. It stuns the seacoast towns and begins a series of events that are covered nationally in the months that follow.

All favors come with a cost, and after using what little favors he has in the Newark PD to get his private investigator's license, former crime reporter Russell Avery finds himself paying. Keyonna Jackson, a social justice activist, presents him with a troubling video: a made-for-YouTube cell phone snippet chronicling the same kind of questionable use of force that had set New York City, Ferguson, and Cleveland on fire in recent years. The same use of force that he's been covering up for Newark PD.

In April 2014, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter died after a long battle with cancer. David McCallum was exonerated and freed two months later, after serving 29 years in prison. This is the story of how Carter and his friend and coauthor Ken Klonsky worked for 10 years to help free the wrongfully convicted McCallum, along with a group of committed friends and professionals.

The Beatles and Duke Ellington's Orchestra stand as the two greatest examples of collaboration in music history. Duke University musicologist Thomas Brothers delivers a portrait of the creative process at work, demonstrating that the cooperative method at the foundation of these two artist-groups was the primary reason for their unmatched musical success. Help! describes in rich detail the music and mastery of two cultural leaders whose popularity has never dimmed, and the process of collaboration that allowed them to achieve an artistic vision greater than the sum of their parts.

Drunk, angry, abusive, and pathetic, Dan Gurlick exists at the very lowest level of human civilization, sleeping in junkyard cars and scrounging through garbage cans for his dinner. But his last rotting meal contains something unexpected: a spore that originated from a galaxy many light-years away. First, Dan eats the spore, then, the spore eats Dan; and the homeless alcoholic becomes a host for the Medusa. An insatiable alien hive mind, the Medusa has already consumed the life forms of a billion planets. Now, it hungers for the dominant species of Earth.

Fun, bright, and playful, power pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, power pop has meant many things to many people. In Go All the Way, today's best and brightest writers go deep on what certain power pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go All the Way is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

Known for his New York Times best-selling alternate history novels, Flint is equally a master of shorter forms, and this second large volume gathers more of Flint's shorter works. Including several stories and a short novel set in Flint's celebrated Ring of Fire alternate history series. A commemorative novelette set in Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos universe. A story with Dave Freer, set in his and Flint's popular Rats, Bats, and Vats series. Several humorous short stories addressing Biblical literalism. A long novella in a Martian steampunk setting.

Black Tulip locates the ambiguous truth about Erich Hartmann and so much of the German Wehrmacht in general: that many of these men were neither full-blown Nazis nor impeccable knights. They were complex, contradictory, and elusive. This book portrays a complex human rather than the heroic caricature we're used to, and it argues that the tidy, polished hero stories we've inherited about men like Hartmann say as much about those who've crafted them as they do about the heroes themselves.

How does Einstein’s description of space and time compare with Doctor Who? Can James Bond really escape from an armor-plated railroad car by cutting through the floor with a laser concealed in a wristwatch? What would it take to create a fully intelligent android, such as Star Trek’s Commander Data? Exploring Science Through Science Fiction addresses these and other intriguing questions, using science fiction as a springboard for discussing fundamental science concepts and cutting-edge science research.

Look at a map of the world and you'll see a neat patchwork of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. From the 1990s onwards, globalization has shattered the map, leading to an explosion of new legal entities: tax havens, free ports, city-states, gated enclaves and special economic zones. These new spaces are freed from ordinary forms of regulation, taxation and mutual obligation—and with them, ultracapitalists believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether.

The alien with an attitude is back! But for how long? After the tragic events at the end of Secondary Protocol, the truth is finally revealed to Adam and his friends. Now, he's living on borrowed time as his resurrected body is rapidly deteriorating. To save Adam, the mutants—Panur and Lila—must take him to the Sol-Kor universe. But in doing so, they awaken the wrath of Queen J'nae, who will use all her resources to destroy Panur—along with any hope of Adam surviving. And to add insult to injury, the New Klin from Kracion's universe have invaded the Milky Way.

On August 26, 2015, Emmy Award-winning 24-year-old reporter Alison Parker was murdered on live television, along with her colleague, photojournalist Adam Ward. Their interviewee was also shot but survived. In the wake of his daughter's murder, Andy Parker became a national advocate for commonsense gun safety legislation. The night of the murder, with his emotions still raw, he went on Fox News and vowed to do "whatever it takes" to end gun violence in America.

Copernicus Smith, everyone's favorite starship repairman, scoundrel and deep-cover spy, has stumbled upon a conspiracy of galactic proportions. It has also gotten him beat up, near death and a captive of the secretive Ryness Cartel. And they will continue to torture him until he reveals what he knows. The problem: He knows nothing. Now Adam Cain, Sherri Valentine and Riyad Tarazi are on the hunt for their friend and on-again, off-again teammate. But just when our heroes think they have the mystery figured out, something new jumps up that throws all their assumptions into a tailspin.

In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was—and is—a world-class lab, and its reactor was the cornerstone of US materials science. But its discovery triggered a media and political firestorm that resulted in the reactor's shutdown, and even attempts to close the entire laboratory. A quarter century later, the episode reveals the dynamics of today's controversies in which fears and the dismissal of science disrupt serious discussion and research of vital issues.

According to The 108 Skills of Natural Born Leaders, no one is born a leader. But everyone has the natural born capacity to lead. We label people "natural born leaders" because they consistently and frequently model qualities that inspire others to commit to their direction. This book identifies the skill set that causes others to see people as natural born leaders, helps listeners assess their current level of these skills, and coaches listeners to master their weak areas.

For the past 20 years, humanity - along with its ultimate weapon, the superhuman warriors known as REVs - has been at war with the more powerful and technologically advanced Antaere race. As latecomers to the galactic community, the humans have been playing catch-up, proving that their innate skill at waging war can help skip a lot of steps on the way to galactic domination. That was until two years ago. Now nearly all the civilizations within the local Grid of colonized planets have turned against the humans.