Showing results by narrator "Stephen McLaughlin" in All Categories

The unheralded story of how salvage helped the Allies win back North Africa. By the time America joined World War II, Edward Ellsberg had already earned his place as one of the world’s great marine salvage engineers, and his best-selling accounts of raising doomed submarines and histories of classic diving operations had made him a literary star.

July 13, 1938: The renowned nuclear physicist Lise Meitner, approaching the age of 60, sits on the train that will take her to the German-Dutch border and then to the safety of exile in Sweden. After months of uncertainty and fear, as a Jew in Nazi Germany, she has abandoned everything: her friends, her career, and her beloved adopted home, the city of Berlin, where she had become a pioneer in the world of nuclear physics.

Edgar Mason is ready to embark upon his new life at Agamemnon Frost's side. But all is not perfect. His Martian overlord, Pandarus, has implanted a dark voice in his mind, a voice that urges betrayal. And though Mason can keep close to Frost, there's little room for romance under the watchful gaze of the engineers from Station X. That changes when Mason and Frost reopen their investigation into their old enemy's whereabouts.

It seems like pretty much everybody - homeowners, students, those who are ill and without health insurance, and, of course, credit card holders - is up to their neck in debt that can never be repaid. 77% of US households are seriously indebted and one in seven Americans has been pursued by debt collectors. The major banks are bigger and more profitable than before the 2008 crash, and legislators are all but powerless to bring them to heel.

Decorated artilleryman Edgar Mason was forced to find new work when the British Empire replaced its foot soldiers with monstrous machines. Agamemnon Frost, however, is far from the foppish man-about-town he appears to be. He's working to protect the Earth from an alien invasion being planned by a face-changing creature known as Pandarus. And on the night he plans to confront the aliens, he enlists Mason to assist him. For a man to love a man is a serious crime in Victorian England. But when Mason meets Frost, his heart thunders and his blood catches fire.

Lazy Rip Van Winkle "would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound", much to the dismay of his wife. After an afternoon in the Catskill Mountains ends in an enchanted, 20-year sleep, Rip discovers that his children have grown up without him. He's even slept through the American Revolutionary War! But does he learn his lesson?

From 19th-century author Washington Irving comes two cautionary tales that will broaden your vocabulary and challenge you to think.

At the close of the Civil War, weary veteran Malcolm Hopeton returns to his home in Western New York State to find his wife and hired man missing and his farm in disrepair. A double murder ensues, the repercussions of which ripple through a community with spiritual roots in the Second Great Awakening. Hopeton has gone from the horrors of war to those far worse, and arrayed around him are a host of other people struggling to make sense of his crime.

Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Davy Crockett are some of the roughest, toughest characters to ever blaze the frontier. Clever as the crack of a whip and strong as a wildcat, these tall-tale heroes each left a legacy of larger-than-life deeds that has captured the American imagination for over a century. Three rib-tickling tracks tell the whole story -- believe it or not.

From the Baltic to the South China Sea, newly assertive authoritarian states sense an opportunity to resurrect old empires or build new ones at America's expense. Hoping that US decline is real, nations such as Russia, Iran, and China are testing Washington's resolve by targeting vulnerable allies at the frontiers of American power. The Unquiet Frontier explains why the United States needs a new grand strategy that uses strong frontier alliance networks to raise the costs of military aggression in the new century.

For most of us, the story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy depicts Lee Harvey Oswald as a convenient cliche or a conspiracy puppet, Lone Gunman or Framed Patsy. Lost among the competing theories of villainy and cover-up is the real Lee Harvey Oswald, a troubled young man from a fractured family, a lonely child born without a future. In this original and dramatic work, Steven Beschloss draws on a rich but relatively unmined public record, key interviews with Marguerite and other family members, and Lee's own writing.

In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.

E. Fuller Torrey's audiobook provides an inside perspective on the birth of the federal mental health program. On staff at the National Institute of Mental Health when the program was being developed and implemented, Torrey draws on his own first-hand account of the creation and launch of the program, extensive research, one-on-one interviews with people involved, and recently unearthed audiotapes of interviews with major figures involved in the legislation. As such, this book provides historical material previously unavailable to the public.

With what Graham Greene once called her "devilish cunning," Vera Caspary offers one of her most suspenseful thrillers in this tale of love, jealousy, guilt, and hate. When Fletcher marries Elaine, his second wife nineteen years his junior, he can't imagine a more passionate union. Then an illness destroys his confidence, and all he can picture is her next affair. He keeps a secret diary of his fantasized suspicions, making his impending suicide look like murder.

Author Stephen Birmingham, who chronicled the rise of Jewish immigrants to extraordinary wealth and success in Our Crowd, now turns his attention to the Irish. Real Lace tells the colorful and fascinating true stories of America’s most renowned Irish-Catholic families. Scions of courageous, driven, and resilient men and women who escaped starvation during Ireland’s terrible potato famine in the mid-19th century, they battled their way out of the slums of Boston and New York, overcoming prejudice and poverty to achieve great wealth, fame, and political power.

The Ways to New gives you a blueprint for innovation, helping you dig your organization out of the quicksand and get on the fast track to growth. Author Jean-Marie Dru is the originator of the disruption methodology, which he shares here; he is also an international authority on breaking the mold and leading the market, and this audiobook is his guide to making it happen. Too many companies are too slow with innovation. They lag behind, creating at a snail's pace, and thus miss out on any kind of organic growth.

It may be America's game, but no one seems to know how or when baseball really started. Theories abound, myths proliferate, but reliable information has been in short supply - until now, when Baseball before We Knew It brings fresh new evidence of baseball's origins into play. David Block looks into the early history of the game and of the 150-year-old debate about its beginnings.

From the author of The Wind in the Willows comes this story of a boy who befriends a lazy, but quite pleasant dragon that takes up residence nearby. When the townspeople call in St. George, the eminent dragon-slayer, to do battle, it's up to the boy to sort things out - and stick up for his newfound friend. It's a hilarious story that will have you cheering for the dragon and his pal.

In Cracking the Aging Code, theoretical biologist Josh Mitteldorf and award-winning writer and ecological philosopher Dorion Sagan reveal that evolution and aging are even more complex and breathtaking than we originally thought. Using meticulous multidisciplinary science as well as reviewing the history of our understanding about evolution, this book makes the case that aging is not something that "just happens", nor is it the result of wear and tear or a genetic inevitability.

As one of oncology's leading figures, DeVita knows what cancer looks like from the lab bench and the bedside. The Death of Cancer is his illuminating and deeply personal look at the science and the history of one of the world's most formidable diseases. In DeVita's hands, even the most complex medical concepts are comprehensible.

Doug Kass on the Market: A Life on the Street provides investment advice and guidance from one of the most renowned traders in the world. Author Doug Kass distills his years of experience as a hedge fund manager and infamous short seller to share the theory, technique, and intuition that built his reputation and his portfolio.