Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Yen" in All Categories

David Parrish was in disbelief when he learned that 19-year-old Jon Bowie's body had been found hanged from a backstop at the local high school's baseball field and the death declared a suicide. David had known Jon and his twin brother since they were boys. He had coached them on the baseball field and welcomed them into his home for sleepovers with his own sons. However, when David learned how Jon's body was found, he felt compelled to find the facts behind this incomprehensible tragedy. 

The art world can appear impenetrable to the beginner. This classic book, in print since 1990, is an invaluable primer that will help anyone to penetrate the thickets of inscrutable 'insider info' and esoteric jargon. Updated for today's art market, including online buying, The Art of Buying Art is without a doubt the most accessible book on how to research, evaluate, price, and buy artworks—for anyone who wants to buy art. No previous knowledge of art or the art business is necessary.

Flowers, and the fruits that follow, feed, clothe, sustain, and inspire all humanity. Flowers are used to celebrate all-important occasions, to express love, and are also the basis of global industries. Americans buy 10 million flowers a day, and perfumes are a worldwide industry worth $30 billion annually. Stephen Buchmann takes us along on an exploratory journey of the roles flowers play in the production of our foods, spices, medicines, and perfumes while simultaneously bringing joy and health.

Markos is an officer on a ship sent from Earth to investigate probe reports of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Markos is killed by the commander of this mission, and is then resurrected in an alien body by a race of aliens who need him to stop an interstellar war. But will he ever become human again?

Drawing upon the author's two decades teaching medical ethics, as well as his work as a practicing psychiatrist, this profound and addictive little book offers up challenging ethical dilemmas and asks listeners, What would you do? ● A daughter gets tested to see if she's a match to donate a...

In Obsessed: The Compulsions and Creations of Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, author Steve Volk ventures deep into the mind of Jeffrey Schwartz, a controversial, often combative psychiatrist and expert on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Considered a pariah among his academic peers, Schwartz’s unconventional treatment methods draw on his fascination with the Holocaust, his experience with Buddhist meditation and his pioneering work documenting the neural circuitry of OCD.

Advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) have created a new class of computer systems that exhibit astonishing proficiency on a wide variety of tasks with superhuman performance, producing novel text, images, music, and software by analyzing enormous collections of digitized information. Soon, these systems will provide expert medical care; offer legal advice; draft documents; write computer programs; tutor our children; and generate music and art. These advances will accelerate progress in science, art, and human knowledge, but they will also bring new dangers.

Slow systems are frustrating. They waste time and money. But making consistently great decisions about performance can be easy, if you understand what's going on. This book explains in a clear and thoughtful voice why systems perform the way they do. It's for anybody who's curious about how computer programs and other processes use their time and about what you can do to improve them. Through a mix of personal vignettes and technical use cases, Cary Millsap reviews the process of improving performance and provides best practices for optimizing systems efficiently.

Whether you're eyeing a specific leadership role, hoping to advance your skills, or simply looking to broaden your professional network, you need to find someone who can help. Wait for a senior manager to come looking for you—and you'll probably be waiting forever. Instead, you need to find the mentoring that will help you achieve your goals. Managed correctly, mentoring is a powerful and efficient tool for moving up.

An Abundance of Caution is a devastating account of the decision-making process behind one of the worst American policy failures in a century—the extended closures of public schools during the pandemic. David Zweig shows how some of the most trusted members of society repeatedly made fundamental errors in their assessment and presentation of evidence.

From morpho butterflies in the rain forest to the blue jay flitting past your window, vanishingly few living things are blue. Yet this hard-to-spot accent color in our surroundings looms large in our affections. Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been fascinated by blue since childhood. His quest to find and understand his favorite color and its hallowed place in our culture takes him to a gene-splicing laboratory in Japan, a volcanic lake in Oregon, and to Brandenburg, Germany - home of the last Spix's macaws.

The Apathy of Empire reveals just how significant Cambodia was to U.S. policy in Indochina during the Vietnam War, broadening the lens to include more than the often-cited incursion in 1970 or the illegal bombing after the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. This theoretically informed and thoroughly documented case study argues that U.S. military intervention in Cambodia revealed America's efforts to construct a hegemonic spatial world order.

Step into the Alpine Regions of Austria for a complete introduction to the local traditions, beliefs, and folklore surrounding the dark half of the year. Within these pages you will come face-to-face with the ghostly procession of otherworldly beings called the Wild Hunt, the goddess Percht who...

We are a nation founded on the ideals of coming together across differences to forge a common future. Yet over the past 50 years, our economy has been pulling us apart at unprecedented rates. By allowing top income earners and the wealthiest Americans to hoard wealth like almost never before, we belie what makes our country great. This is a threat to our wellbeing, our democracy, and our values.

On July 17, 2018, starting an unjust war became a prosecutable international crime alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The Crime of Aggression is Noah Weisbord's riveting insider's account of the high-stakes legal fight to enact this historic legislation and hold politicians accountable for the wars they start. Weisbord, a key drafter of the law for the International Criminal Court, takes listeners behind the scenes of one of the most consequential legal dramas in modern international diplomacy.

Over the past decade neuroscience has uncovered a wealth of new information about our senses and how they serve as our gateway to the world. This splendidly accessible book explores the most intriguing findings of this research. With infectious enthusiasm, Rob DeSalle illuminates not only how we see, hear, smell, touch, taste, maintain balance, feel pain, and rely on other less familiar senses, but also how these senses shape our perception of the world aesthetically, artistically, and musically.

The Battle of Chickamauga was the third bloodiest of the American Civil War and the only major Confederate victory in the conflict's western theater. It pitted Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee against William S. Rosecrans's Army of the Cumberland and resulted in more than 34,500 casualties. In this first volume of an authoritative two-volume history of the Chickamauga Campaign, William Glenn Robertson provides a richly detailed narrative of military operations in southeastern and eastern Tennessee as two armies prepared to meet along the "River of Death."

In Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know Nolan McCarty takes listeners through what scholars know and don't know about the origins, development, and implications of our rising political conflicts, delving into social, economic, and geographic determinants of polarization in the United States. While the current political climate seems to suggest that extreme views are becoming more popular, McCarty also argues that, contrary to popular belief, the 2016 election was a natural outgrowth of 40 years of polarized politics, rather than a significant break with the past. 

Weird, wonderful, and sometimes disgusting, figuring out "what's for dinner on Mars" is far from trivial. If we can figure out how to sustain ourselves on Mars, we will know how to do it on Earth too. In Dinner on Mars, authors Fraser and Newman show how setting the table off-planet will supercharge efforts to produce food sustainably here at home. For futurists, sci-fi geeks, tech nuts, business leaders, and anyone interested in the future of food, Dinner on Mars puts sustainability and adaptability on the menu in the face of our climate crisis.

In a world dominated by things, we must work hard to account for one another's personhood. We need to cultivate relational structures that honor every human's dignity in vital interpersonal community. The theological and philosophical framework known as personalism can help guide us toward such a culture. Drawing from a wide range of thought leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Pope John Paul II, Paul Louis Metzger presents a personalist moral vision founded on the Christian ideals of faith, hope, and love.