Showing results by narrator "Joe Barrett" in All Categories

Many scientific and philosophical ideas are so powerful that they can be applied to our lives at home, work, and school to help us think smarter and more effectively about our behavior and the world around us. Surprisingly, many of these ideas remain unknown to most of us. In Mindware, the world-renowned psychologist Richard Nisbett presents these ideas in clear and accessible detail, offering a tool kit for better thinking and wiser decisions.

Captain Cleve Connell has already made a name for himself among pilots when he arrives in Korea during the war there to fly the newly operational F-86 fighters against the Soviet MIGs. His goal, like that of every fighter pilot, is to chalk up enough kills to become an ace. But things do not turn out as expected.

Throughout much of human history, our most important stories were passed down orally - including the stories about Jesus before they became written down in the Gospels. In this fascinating and deeply researched work, leading Bible scholar Bart D. Erhman investigates the role oral history has played in the New Testament - how the telling of these stories not only spread Jesus' message but helped shape it.

Forty years ago, a majority of Americans were highly engaged in issues of war and peace. Whether to go to war or keep out of conflicts was a vital question at the heart of the country's vibrant, if fractious, democracy. But American political consciousness has drifted. In the last decade, America has gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, while pursuing a new kind of warfare in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Pakistan.

Frederick the Great is one of history's most important leaders. Famed for his military successes and domestic reforms, his campaigns were a watershed in the history of Europe, securing Prussia's place as a continental power and inaugurating a new pattern of total war that was to endure until 1916. However, much myth surrounds this enigmatic man's personality and his role as politician, warrior, and king.

In the early 23rd century, one of very few ways to rise above your caste is to become a player in the extreme martial arts game known as the Musashi Flex. Lazlo Mourn, a battle-scarred veteran, is ready to hang up his blades when his moves suddenly evolve toward a form of fighting unlike any the galaxy has seen. Journalist Cayne Sola wants the big story on the games, and not even the fiercest warrior will stop her.

George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated, the country faced a crossroads: Could it pursue Manifest Destiny without destroying its natural bounty and beauty? The alarm that Grinnell sounded would spark America's conservation movement. Yet today his name has been forgotten - an omission that John Taliaferro's commanding biography now sets right with historical care and narrative flair.

From the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the subject of the 2007-08 financial crisis has been well covered. However, the story central to the crisis - that of AIG - has until now remained largely untold. Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG's Corporate Suicide tells the inside story of what really went on inside AIG that caused it to choke on risk and nearly bring down the entire economic system.

All of Jimmy's wishes come true, including arguing his friend's case before the highest court in this galaxy, but there are prices to pay and Jimmy's life hangs in the balance. Love is tested and irrevocable choices are made.

A mysterious alien presence unexpectedly bursts out of sacred sites all over the world and begins to rip human souls from their bodies, plunging the world into a chaos it has never before known. Courage meets cowardice; loyalty meets betrayal as an entire world struggles to survive this incredible end-all war. Heroes emerge, villains reveal themselves, and in the end, something completely new and unexpected happens that at once lifts the fictional characters into a new life and sounds a haunting real-world warning for the future.

They are icons of the literary world whose soaring works have been discussed and analyzed in countless classrooms, homes, and pubs. Yet for most readers, the living, breathing human beings behind the classics have remained unknown - until now. In this utterly captivating book, Dr. Elliot Engel, a leading authority on the lives of great authors, illuminates the fascinating and flawed members of literature’s elite. In lieu of stuffy biographical sketches, Engel provides fascinating anecdotes.

Robert Pendleton is a chemical genius with a fertilizer worth a fortune to whoever controls the formula. Not surprisingly, the Bank, his notoriously exclusive backer, wants to keep an eye on its investment. But so does the CIA. And the Chinese government. And a few shadier organizations. So when Pendleton disappears from a conference in San Francisco, along with all of his research, Neal Carey enters the picture.

Matthew Scudder is about to face every cop's worst nightmare: James Leo Motley, psychopath extraordinaire. Twelve years ago Matthew Scudder lied to a jury to put James Leo Motley behind bars. Now the ingenious psychopath is free, and the alcoholic ex-cop turned private investigator must pay dearly for his sins. Friends and former lovers - even strangers unfortunate enough to share Scudder's name - are turning up dead because a vengeful maniac is determined not to rest until he's driven his nemesis back to the bottle…and then to the boneyard.

Dan Buettner, the New York Times best-selling author of The Blue Zones, lays out a proven plan to maximize your health based on the practices of the world's healthiest people. For the first time, Buettner reveals how to transform your health using smart eating and lifestyle habits gleaned from new research on the diets, eating habits, and lifestyle practices of the communities he's identified as "Blue Zones"—those places with the world's longest-lived and thus healthiest people.

Tristan Lyons, Mel Stokes, and their fellow outcasts from the Department of Diachronic Operations (D.O.D.O.) fight to stop the powerful Irish witch Gráinne from using time travel to reverse the evolution of all modern technology. Chief amongst Gráinne’s plots: to encrypt cataclysmic spells into Shakespeare’s “cursed” play, Macbeth. When her fellow rogue agents fall victim to Gráinne’s schemes, Melisande Stokes is forced to send Tristan’s untested, wayward sister Robin back in time to 1606 London.

Jonathan Stride and Serena Dial are both investigating high-profile murders in Las Vegas. A celebrity is assassinated during a fling with a prostitute, and a young boy is killed in a brutal hit-and-run incident. When the cases converge, Jonathan and Serena find themselves racing the clock against a determined serial killer and searching for a connection to the unsolved murder of a showgirl years earlier.

In late 1971, the People's Army of Vietnam launched Campaign "Z" into northern Laos, escalating the war in Laos with the aim of defeating the last Royal Lao Army troops. The NVA troops numbered 27,000 and brought with them 130mm field guns and T-34 tanks, while the North Vietnamese air force launched MiG-21s into Lao air space. General Giap's specific orders to this task force were to kill the CIA army under command of the Hmong war lord Vang Pao and occupy its field headquarters in the Long Tieng valley of northeast Laos.

Neal Carey’s three-year confinement in a Chinese monastery is finally over—but his troubles are just beginning. The elusive financial benefactors who have bought his freedom expect a return on their investment. They want him to find Cody McCall, a two-year-old boy recently abducted by his father in a bitter Hollywood custody battle—a task that will propel Neal from the glittering Hollywood hills to the remote wilds of Nevada.

Norco '80 tells the story of how five heavily armed young men - led by an apocalyptic born-again Christian - attempted a bank robbery that turned into one of the most violent criminal events in US history, forever changing the face of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama, Norco '80 transports the listener back to the Southern California of the 1970s, an era of predatory evangelical gurus, doomsday predictions, megachurches, and soaring crime rates, with the threat of nuclear obliteration looming over it all.

As historian Mark Essig reveals in Lesser Beasts, swine have such a bad reputation for precisely the same reasons they are so valuable as a source of food: they are intelligent, self-sufficient, and omnivorous. What's more, he argues, we ignore our historic partnership with these astonishing animals at our peril.