Showing results by narrator "Alan Sklar" in All Categories

Amid a rising tide of despair comes a trusted voice of hope and reason. Not since the 1970s have Americans faced such a perfect storm of economic, moral and cultural crises. In the face of that intensifying gale, many Christians have succumbed to a paralyzing blend of dismay and resignation. Enter Charles Colson, one of the faith’s most respected statesmen and formidable defenders. In The Sky Is Not Falling, this New York Times best-selling author delivers much more than a tour of our nation’s cultural landscape. He offers a road map for living confidently in these turbulent times....

We've all read or heard the "how I did it" success stories, and yes, there's good advice to be found in them. But nowhere is the advice as pure, as simple, as elegant, as it is in The Obvious. Former CEO James Dale shares ways in which any businessperson can carry out these simple lessons and achieve success.

Everyone manages someone or something: your own life and career, an administrative assistant, hundreds or thousands of people. How well or poorly you manage has a profound impact on your personal success. Mark Stevens makes the compelling point that, at any given time, everyone's management sucks. It can, however, be improved and rethought so you can move away from patterns and habits that you can easily fall victim to.

Brilliantly exploring today's cutting edge brain research, Mind Wide Open allows readers to understand themselves and the people in their lives as never before. Using a mix of experiential reportage, personal storytelling, and fresh scientific discovery, Steven Johnson describes how the brain works and how its systems connect to the day-to-day realities of individual lives.

In his explosive new book, New York Times best-selling author Bill Gertz uncovers the most significant threat to U.S. national security today: America's enemies, including radical terrorist groups, are arming themselves with the world's most dangerous weapons. And they're doing it with the help of America's supposed allies. Worst of all, the United States has let it happen.

After 22 years with the same company, George Breal is out of work for the first time in his life. He must confront the unpleasant task of reinventing his career at an age when many are winding down their ambitions and looking forward to retirement. A skilled manager, he finally finds work at the slowly failing Electronic Technologies (ETI), which has come face-to-face with a modern German competitor. ETI is owned by the cantankerous, obsessive, and dictatorial entrepreneur John Lowell, who is starting to realize, as he closes out his 70s, that his shortcomings are a direct result of his misguided actions from the past.

Ben Cowper, an attending psychiatrist at the prestigious New York-Episcopal Hospital, is stunned to learn the identity of the emergency patient he’s just been assigned to treat: Harry Shapiro, a Wall Street colossus and one of Episcopal’s most prominent donors. But a high-profile reversal of fortune has left the once powerful investment banker jobless, bitter, and possibly desperate - judging by the handgun his wife finds him clutching. In Ben’s expert opinion, Shapiro is a suicide waiting to happen.

She was every man's dream - and one man's nightmare. Johnny Hayden and Doug Rance had a scheme to take real estate entrepreneur Wallace Gunderman for all he was worth. But they needed a girl on the inside to make it work. Enter Evelyn Stone: Gunderman's secretary, his lover - and his worst enemy. Gunderman had promised to marry her, but never came through. Now she's ready to make him pay...

Based on a wealth of documents long buried in the Vatican archives, Prisoner of the Vatican tells the story of the Church's secret attempt to block the unification of Italy and seize control, not in ancient times, but in the late 19th century. For more than 50 years, the pope was a self-imposed prisoner within the Vatican walls, planning to flee Italy, to return only as the restored ruler of Rome and the Papal States.

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald got their start in Black Mask. The urban crime stories that appeared in Black Mask helped to shape American culture.

Con man Joe Berlin was used to scoring easy cash off of gullible women. But that was before he met Mona Brassard - and found himself holding a stolen stash of raw heroin. Now that Joe has fallen hard for Mona, he's got to pull off the most dangerous con of his career: one that will leave him either a killer - or a corpse. Block's debut novel under his own name is a classic example of prime pulp fiction, with an ending that will astonish even the most jaded crime-fiction fan.

China today is visible everywhere: In the news, in the economic pressures battering America, in the workplace, and in every trip to the store. Provocative, timely, and essential, this dramatic account of China's growing dominance as an industrial super-power by journalist Ted C. Fishman explains how the profound shift in the global economic order has occurred, and why it already affects us all.

No ordinary Washington memoir, Facing Down Evil is an unprecedented look behind the scenes of our nation's most powerful law-enforcement agency. As the FBI's premier hostage negotiator, Clint Van Zandt worked or consulted on some of recent U.S. history's most unsettling and high-profile conflicts, including the Waco, Oklahoma City, and Unabomber cases.

In this new age of networked intelligence, businesses and communities are bypassing crumbling institutions. We are altering the way our financial institutions and governments operate; how we educate our children; and how the health care, newspaper, and energy industries serve their customers. Once again backed by original research, Tapscott and Williams provide vivid, new examples of organizations that are successfully embracing the principles of wikinomics.

In this shocking and groundbreaking new book, economic historian Burton Folsom, Jr., exposes the idyllic legend of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a myth of epic proportions. With questionable moral character and a vendetta against the business elite, Roosevelt created New Deal programs marked by inconsistent planning, wasteful spending, and opportunity for political gain---ultimately elevating public opinion of his administration but falling flat in achieving the economic revitalization that America needed.

Most employees feel invisible to their leadership, and many times prefer to stay hidden in the corporate shadow lands. The Invisible Employee, part fable, part business advice, teaches managers how to actively engage employees, and find the way to bring out the best in them.

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the burgeoning growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success.

At 5:12 a.m. on the morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco was struck by one of the worst earthquakes in history, instantly killing hundreds. This watershed event in American history has never before been told with the richness of historical detail and insight that our foremost historian of fire, Dennis Smith, brings to it in San Francisco Is Burning. Smith cinematically recounts this terrible tragedy through the stories of the people who lived through those terrible days...

Sam Tanenhaus's essay "Conservatism Is Dead" prompted intense discussion and debate when it was published in the New Republic in the first days of Barack Obama's presidency. Now Tanenhaus, a leading authority on modern politics, has expanded his argument into a sweeping history of the American conservative movement.

In 1784, Thomas Jefferson struck a deal with one of his slaves, 19-year-old James Hemings. The founding father was traveling to Paris and wanted to bring James along for a particular purpose - to master the art of French cooking. In exchange for James's cooperation, Jefferson would grant his freedom. Thus began one of the strangest partnerships in United States history