Academic Life

It's What Makes Me... Me is an extraordinarily candid journey through what it means to be human. Amazon's bestselling and award-winning author Mark Shaiken unlocks his most personal thoughts, observations, and introspections through the highs and lows, youth and aging, and beauty and messiness of life. Laugh, reflect, and take in all the ins and outs that have uniquely combined to make Mark... Mark, and maybe, find a little of what makes you . . . you.

A visionary carpenter shares meditations on work, creativity, and design, revealing powerful lessons on building a meaningful life through his experience constructing some of New York’s most iconic spaces.

When George McCullagh bought The Globe and The Mail and Empire and merged them into the Globe and Mail, the charismatic 31-year-old high school dropout had already made millions on the stock market. It was just the beginning of the meteoric rise of a man widely expected to one day be prime minister of Canada. But the charismatic McCullagh had a dark side. Dogged by the bipolar disorder that destroyed his political ambitions and eventually killed him, he was all but written out of history.

How Can I Help? portrays a week in the life of Dr. David Goldbloom as he treats patients, communicates with families, and trains staff at CAMH, the largest psychiatric facility in Canada. This highly listenable and touching behind-the-scenes account of his daily encounters with a wide range of psychiatric concerns - from his own patients and their families to Emergency Department arrivals - puts a human face on an often misunderstood area of medical expertise.

When it opened a decade ago, the acclaimed Los Angeles speakeasy The Varnish - owned, designed, and managed by award-winning cocktail aficionado Eric Alperin - quickly became the stylish standard bearer for modern bars. Unvarnished is a candid, voice-driven, no-holds-barred look at the workings of a bar, and the foundation of The Varnish’s success: attention to hospitality and an abiding belief in the nobility of service.

Informational and positive look on the hard diagnosis. Lifting the stigma, finding that you are not alone in all this. The audiobook is a personal journey, finding what the disease is all about, managing the difficult moments of depressions and hypo-mania episodes until a stable effect is reached, the so-called remission. The author also shares her successes, talents and everything she has learned in an optimistic and positive way.

The Five Solas series offers a look back to the five rallying cries of the Reformation - the five solas - while seeking to apply them in a fresh way to the contemporary church. In God's Glory Alone: Audio Lectures, renowned scholar David VanDrunen explores the majestic heart of Christian faith and life.

Vincent Di Maio, MD, son of a famous New York City medical examiner, is one of the lions of forensic science. In this clear, gritty, and enthralling narrative, Di Maio himself guides us into the inner sanctum, through the cases that have made him famous, from the exhumation of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the racially charged shooting of Florida teen Trayvon Martin to the unmasking of a serial baby killer and the mysterious death of troubled genius Vincent van Gogh.

The inside story of the founding and growth of Taylor Guitars, one of the world's most successful guitar manufacturers. Bob Taylor mixes the details of his experience as a tradesman and cofounder of Taylor Guitars, a world-famous acoustic and electric guitar manufacturer, with philosophical life lessons that have practical application for building a business. From the "a-ha" moment in junior high school that inspired his very first guitar, Taylor has been living the American dream.

Conversations with RBG is a remarkable and unique audiobook, an informal portrait of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, drawing on a series of her conversations with Jeffrey Rosen, starting in the 1990s and continuing through the Trump era. Rosen, a veteran legal journalist, scholar, and president of the National Constitution Center, shares with us the justice’s observations on a variety of topics, and her intellect, compassion, sense of humor, and humanity shine through.

From the OR to the ICU, Dr. David Alfery brings you into a hidden world of medicine that has never before been seen. You will witness the exhilaration a physician feels when a life is miraculously saved, the terror when a life is on the line, the shock of an unexpected demise, the grace patients evidence when facing the end of life, the anguish one suffers when a family member is perilously close to dying, and much more.

The trajectory of Zahra Al-harazi’s life defies expectations. In this electrifying book that travels from a small village in Yemen to a small town in Minnesota to a Calgary suburb, Al-harazi describes surviving two civil wars; her years as a young, stay-at-home immigrant mother with little education; and how she became one of Canada’s most successful businesswomen. Navigating two worlds, Al-harazi has struggled to find her own way between East and West, religion and belief, freedom and obligation, family and desire, love and honor, despair and gratitude, war and war again.

Considered by many to be the most important philosopher ever, Plato was born into a well-to-do family in wartime Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE. He finally decided to go into politics, but became disillusioned, especially after the Athenians condemned his teacher, Socrates, to death. He began teaching in his twenties and later founded the Academy, the world's first higher-educational research and teaching establishment. Eventually, he returned to practical politics and spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to create a constitution for Syracuse in Sicily.

What do Hedy Lamarr, avant-garde composer George Antheil, and your cell phone have in common? The answer is spread-spectrum radio: a revolutionary inven­tion based on the rapid switching of communications sig­nals among a spread of different frequencies. Without this technology, we would not have the digital comforts that we take for granted today. Only a writer of Richard Rhodes’s caliber could do justice to this remarkable story. Unhappily married to a Nazi arms dealer, Lamarr fled to America at the start of World War II; she brought with her not only her theatrical talent....

When you are told that you have leukemia, your world stops. Your brain can't function. You are asked to make decisions about treatment almost immediately, when you are not in your right mind. And yet you pull yourself together and start asking questions. Beside you is your doctor, whose job it is to solve the awful puzzle of bone marrow gone wrong. The two of you are in it together. In When Blood Breaks Down, Mikkael Sekeres, a leading cancer specialist, takes listeners on the journey that patient and doctor travel together.

Author Paul Teutul Jr. is arguably the most creative builder of custom "chopper" motorcycles in the world. His talents were revealed to millions of TV viewers worldwide on American Chopper as well as later in a spinoff series, American Chopper Senior vs. Junior. The Build gives the listener a glimpse at Paul Jr.'s life behind the camera, which included volcanic conflict with his father and business mentor, Paul Sr. Using his own story of improbable success as an illustration, Paul Jr. offers insights on how anyone can find and activate hidden talents.

Humanity is on an astronomical trajectory and according to aerospace professional and popular science communicator Kellie Gerardi, that future doesn’t rest solely on the shoulders of rocket scientists. Gerardi’s non-traditional path in the space industry shows us that humanity’s next giant leap will require the contributions of artists, engineers, and everyone in between. Gerardi takes us on a tour of this unique window in history and offers encouragement and advice for anyone who has ever dreamed of the stars and galaxies far, far away.

Actor Jim Beaver (Supernatural, Deadwood, Justified) and his wife Cecily Adams (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Moogie) were at the peaks of their careers and happily raising a beautiful two-year old daughter, Madeline. Then tragedy struck, not once, but twice. What followed was laid down by Jim in a moving, poignant, and uplifting journal of the following year, a year filled with heartbreak as well as enormous gifts and invaluable lessons, not just for Jim and his family but for listeners who traveled along with him on his journey.

The world we live in today, where everything is tracked by corporations and governments, originates with one manic, elusive, utterly unique man—as prone to bullying as he was to fits of surpassing generosity and surprising genius. His name was Hank Asher, and his life was a strange and spectacular show that changed the course of the future. In The Hank Show, critically acclaimed author and journalist McKenzie Funk relates Asher's stranger-than-fiction story.

While free markets have brought positive change, traditional capitalism cannot solve problems of inequality and poverty because of its view of people as solely profit-driven. In fact, humans have other drives and passions, including spiritual, social, and altruistic.