Showing results by narrator "Christopher Ragland"

Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”. It went viral. After a million online views in 17 different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.  

An anonymous young woman murdered in a run-down hotel, all identifying characteristics dissolved by acid. A father publicly beheaded in the blistering heat of a Saudi Arabian public square. A notorious Syrian biotech expert found eyeless in a Damascus junkyard. Smoldering human remains on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan. A flawless plot to commit an appalling crime against humanity.

Should you cook with coconut oil or vegetable oil? Eat butter, cream, or olive oil? Supplement with fish oil or flax oil? Sometimes it seems as if everyone has a different opinion on these crucial questions - but this audiobook holds real answers. Best-selling author and teacher Dr. Joseph Mercola teams up with cardiovascular expert Dr. James DiNicolantonio to cut through the confusion about how dietary fats affect our bodies and set the record straight on how to eat for optimal well-being.

The ultimate guide to building an app-based business - now revised and updated. Apps have changed the way we communicate, shop, play, interact and travel, and their phenomenal popularity has presented possibly the biggest business opportunity in history. In How to Build a Billion Dollar App, serial tech entrepreneur George Berkowski gives you exclusive access to the secrets behind the success of the select group of apps that have achieved billion-dollar success.

A boy vanishes on his way home from school. His frantic mother receives a ransom call: pay or else. It’s only hours before the deadline, and the police have no leads. Enter Timothy Blake, an FBI consultant with a knack for solving impossible cases but whose expertise comes at a price. Every time he saves a life, he takes one, trying to satisfy an urge he fears he can only control for so long. And this time Blake may have met his match. The kidnapper is more cunning and ruthless than any he’s faced before.

Chicago, 1928. In the stifling summer heat, three disturbing events take place: a clique of city leaders is poisoned, a white gangster is found mutilated and a famous heiress vanishes without a trace. Detectives Michael Talbot and Ida Davis are hired to find the missing heiress, but it proves harder than expected, and so Ida must elicit the help of her friend Louis Armstrong. But will any of them find the answers they need in the capital of jazz, booze and corruption?

1997. Seventeen-year-old Laura Bow has invented a rudimentary artificial intelligence and named it Organon. At first it's intended to be a sounding board for her teenage frustrations, a surrogate best friend; but as she grows older, Organon grows with her. As the world becomes a very different place, technology changes the way we live, love and die; massive corporations develop rival intelligences to Laura's, ones without safety barriers or morals; and Laura is forced to decide whether to share her creation with the world.   

A terrifying new collection of short stories from the master of zombie fiction, Max Brooks, best-selling author of World War Z, The Zombie Survival Guide and Recorded Attacks.

For more than 50 years, NASA's Mission Control has been known for two things: perfect decision-making in extreme situations and producing generations of steely-eyed missile men and women who continue that tradition. A key to that legacy of brilliant performance is a particular brand of leadership, especially at the working level in Mission Control. Take the ultimate insider's look at the leadership values and culture that created the best team on this planet.

Rumor has it that the abandoned house by the cemetery is haunted by the ghost of a witch. But rumors won’t stop carpenter Mike Kostner from rehabbing the place as a haunted house attraction. Soon he’ll learn that fresh wood and nails can’t keep decades of rumors down. There are noises in the walls, and fresh blood on the floor: secrets that would be better not to discover. And behind the rumors is a real ghost who will do whatever it takes to ensure the house reopens. She needs people to fill her house on Halloween. There’s a dark, horrible ritual to fulfill. Because while the witch may have been dead...she doesn’t intend to stay that way. 

When F. W. Murnau brought Nosferatu to the screen in 1922, he ushered in the bloody reign of cinema’s most venerable villain - the vampire. Nocturnal, fanged and insatiable for human blood, the vampire has infected the public consciousness like no other movie monster. In this illustrated pocket guide, Charles Bramesco goes vampire hunting across a century of cinema, stalking around lonely Transylvanian castles, dusty New York apartments and rain-soaked Washington woods to discover why the vampire has become cinema’s most enduring villain.

From the critically acclaimed screenwriter of Doctor Strange and author of Sea of Rust and Queen of the Dark Things comes a hair-raising collection of short fiction that illuminates the strange, humorous, fantastical and downright diabolical that tantalise and terrorise us: demons, monsters, zombie dinosaurs and Death itself.

From master storyteller Michael Morpurgo comes a surprising, charming and uplifting twist on The Wizard of Oz, told by a very special and unforgettable character: Dorothy's pet dog, Toto.

Five years ago, three-year-old Dillon disappeared. For his father Harry - who left him alone for ten crucial minutes - it was an unforgivable lapse. Yet Dillon's mother Robyn has never blamed her husband: Her own secret guilt is burden enough. Now they're trying to move on, returning home to Dublin to make a fresh start. But their lives are turned upside down the day Harry sees an eight-year-old boy in the crowd. A boy Harry is convinced is Dillon. But the boy vanishes before he can do anything about it.

Metamorphosis: Three stories, each one involving a man who discovers that he has come to dwell, for an hour or for a lifetime, in a house and in a mind not quite his own. Each one opens doors onto rooms of illusion, radiance, regret, and dark enchantment. Welcome to the stories of three young writers, stories written in collaboration with James P. Blaylock. Welcome to the borderland of illusion and reality.

Jim Rook gets the shock of his life when he returns for a new semester to find something more than unpleasant in his classroom. Jim Rook, remedial English teacher and psychic, knows it’s going to be a bad day. He nearly runs over someone dressed entirely in black – but why did they walk right in the middle of the college driveway? And who just walks off into the fog after nearly being run over? But when a splash of blood appears on a questionnaire Jim realizes that his day isn’t going to be merely bad: it’s going to be the day from hell. Perhaps quite literally...

New Orleans, 1919. As a dark serial killer - The Axeman - stalks the city, three individuals set out to unmask him. As Michael, Luca, and Ida all draw closer to discovering the killer's identity, the Axeman himself will issue a challenge to the people of New Orleans: play jazz or risk becoming the next victim. And as the case builds to its crescendo, the sky will darken, and a great storm will loom over the city....

The seventh Jim Rook novel from the master of supernatural horror - Remedial English teacher and psychic Jim Rook has been feeling out of sorts all summer, and on the first day of the Fall semester he runs over and kills his pet cat, Tiddles. But halfway through his first class, enigmatic new Korean student Kim Dong Wook arrives... with a gift: a basket containing Tiddles, alive once more. The Korean spirit Kwisin, Jim is told, is saying “thank you” in advance. But what for? Jim can’t help but feel deeply uneasy...

Southern California - sunny days, blue skies, neighbours on flying bicycles ... ghostly submarines ... mermen off the Catalina coast ... and a vast underground sea stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Inland Empire where Chinese junks ply an illicit trade and enormous creatures from ages past still survive. It is a place of wonder... and dark conspiracies. A place rife with adventure - if one knows where to look for it. Two such seekers are the teenagers Jim Hastings and his friend, Giles Peach.

In the Los Angeles ghetto of Necroville, the yearly celebration of the Night of the Dead - where the dead are resurrected through the miracle of nanotechnology and live their second lives as non-citizens - becomes a journey of discovery and revelation for five individuals on the run from their pasts. With his customary flair for making the bizarre both credible and fascinating, McDonald tosses aside the line of demarcation between living and dead in a story that confronts the central quandary of human existence: the essence of non-being.