Showing results by narrator "J. L." in All Categories

Only four people served at the top echelon of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration from the frightening early months of spring 1933 until he died in April 1945, on the cusp of wartime victory. These lieutenants composed the tough, constrictive, long-term core of government. They built the great institutions being raised against the Depression, implemented the New Deal, and they were pivotal to winning World War II. Yet, in their different ways, each was as wounded as the polio-stricken titan.

In the spring of 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson boarded a train in Concord, Massachusetts, bound for a month-and-a-half-long tour of California—an interlude that became one of the highlights of his life. Based on original research employing newly discovered documents, The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson maps the public story of this trip onto the private story of Emerson's final years. Engaging and compelling, this travelogue makes it clear that Emerson was still capable of wonder, surprise, and friendship, debunking the presumed darkness of his last decade.

Eleven-year-old Tracy Fenton wakes to screams in the night. Bad dreams she’s had since the tragic death of her mother in a mysterious house fire four years earlier, but no real memory of what really happened. Over the past few years, Tracy has bounced from one foster home to the next until finally ending up at Windermere Mental Health, a facility for troubled children. The only good thing about Windermere is that she has made a friend, Mary, a special girl who has Downs syndrome. With the help of psychologist Bonnie Finch, the memories of that horrible night are coming back.

When Jack Knight takes off in his biplane from North Platte, Nebraska, in 1921, hundreds of people crowd the airstrip. Is Jack transporting a famous passenger? Is he ferrying medicine for a sick child? Nope—Jack has six sacks of mail. For the past few years, biplanes like Jack's have been flying the mail only during daylight hours. Flying after dark is risky and crashes are too common, so lawmakers decide to cut funding for the US Air Mail Service. Outraged officials and pilots want to prove that flying the mail is best, so they concoct a plan—a coast-to-coast race.

On the eve of the Sino-American great power competition General Mattis challenged America to move forward at the speed of relevance. To compete effectively America needed to excel in its AI capacity. The call fell on deaf ears—and years later the nation found itself sliding towards a state of irrelevance on the global stage. A series of blunders contributed to what President Biden calls American AI's "failing and falling behind." This is the story of American AI's fall from grace.

Did you know that your morning coffee could be thanks to a herd of energetic goats? Or that a forgotten ingredient is behind the invention of the beloved brownie? Who got the fright of their life discovering corn could pop? And which popular soft drink first started out as a medicinal syrup? In Serendipity, Oscar Farinetti, founder of the high-end global food chain Eataly, shares fifty remarkable stories of how some of the greatest successes and examples of excellence in the food world came about by chance.

Discover the lengths Trinity Thompson will go just to make her dreams a reality. She desperately wants her boss Calvin Bailey, and she will stop at nothing until she finally gets him into her bed. Grab a glass of wine, light some scented candles, and dive into this entrancing novella and discover how dreams can become reality. Or can they? Dream Paramour will leave you at the edge of your seat begging for more, with wet panties and all. This sexy erotic tale belongs on the edge of your nightstand as a way to get the flames roaring in your bedroom.

My name is Collin Frost. I’m a fairly unpopular 17-year-old high school student. This is my story…one that chronicles how my already-dredge-of-a-life went from miserable to totally and irreversibly jacked. I guess I should start at the beginning…right before we were shanghaied-up into that alien spaceship. It all started on the way back from the game. I’m the kicker. We lost. It was because of me. Big surprise. But everything started to really go south when the school bus pulled up at another railroad crossing in just one more hicksville small town in rural Texas.

After pulling off their latest train robbery, outlaw leader C. C. Ellis and his unruly gang of long riders set their sights on a new target—a rich mining operation. There are only two men who can stand in their way: Sheriff Max Boyd, a lawman who doesn’t always play by the rules, and Colonel Randolph Doss, the brutal security chief of the Colorado Western Express R.R. Co. Doss pursues Ellis like Ahab pursued the white whale, while Boyd pursues his aim of keeping the town standing … and even some of C.C.’s gang are secretly pursuing their own agendas.

Unity is the most influential factor in team performance and, although it is frequently discussed, it is often misunderstood. This book explains how disunity is the root cause of all team dysfunctions and provides clear instructions on how to define, measure, and increase unity in your organization. Through entertaining and impactful stories, John Ross divides Team Unity into four components—focus, direction, trust, and conflict—and examines how they are related and measured. Notably, Ross introduces The Unity Formula, a simple equation useful for leaders at all levels.

The diplomatic mission has arrived at Viktorkinde. Palmutter is getting more unstable and unreliable each day. On Sarkovie, Anders Eindride learns that the people responsible for the tragedy on Novalis III are planning something big, a real game changer. He's unable to warn his Commonwealth contacts before being put on a ship back to Viktorkinde, where the factions among the Kelk are splintering.

George Kingsley has more money than sense, and when he’s in trouble, he turns to the infamous gunslinger Dan Karr for protection. Dan reluctantly accepts, and he kills every would-be assassin without hesitation or remorse. He’s superstitious, not sentimental, but Kingsley has kids, and Dan doesn’t want to see any child grow up without a father. As the killers keep coming and the bodies stack up, it becomes clear that something is very wrong. Luck favors the prepared, and Dan starts to realize just how little he knows about the family he’s risking his neck for.

After John and Nikaela are rescued from the rogue warship Sycorax, Katrine Primatov has only a lone hunter-killer to back her in the remote Sarkovie system, and she is faced with a Kelk force of overwhelming firepower superiority. The Kelk decide to take John and Nikaela back to Viktorkinde, whether Katrine likes it or not, and everyone is pretending they're not prisoners. But the Kelk are quietly at war among themselves, fighting their own battle against superstition and irrationality. John and Katrine begin to learn the roots of the Kelk hatred of the Blacksword.

It's the first and greatest command - the most important thing. But even if we want to love God that way, most of us don't. Are we doomed? Absolutely not. Drawing from psychology, Shakespeare, loads of Scripture, and her personal experience falling in love at 13 (and staying in love for 26 years), Gerhardt makes a story-rich case for a surefire way to fall in love and stay in love with God. Inspiring, warm, genuine, and practical, Look to Love is both convincing and comforting. This isn’t a book to shame you into reading your Bible. It’s an invitation and a help.

Beer is and has always been more than an intoxicating beverage. Its invention 13,000 years ago was one of the fundamental motivations for the domestication of grains around the world. In early states, the control over the technological knowledge and resources to produce beer contributed to social hierarchies. Beer even likely provided the capital to motivate laborers to construct the ancient pyramids and other large-scale public works. Beer is a social lubricant that brings people together.

Nikaela Vreekande joins Kristdokar's clandestine operation to identify those responsible for the tragedy on Novalis III and the incident on Reisenar. Lieutenant Colonel Katrine Primatov meets with Thordahl and Brynjar on Norandyne to establish covert lines of communication between the Kelk Supremacy and the Commonwealth. John Mathius travels to Trafalgar to attend O-School. All seems well, but there are those in the Commonwealth and the Supremacy who would prefer that John and Nikaela fail, or barring that, they would see them dead.

In a world of online drama and screen interactions, Wahida Clark Presents is keepin’ it old-school with this brand-new collection of Thug Letters. This spin-off series of vignettes is taken from Wahida Clark’s Thug series, now compiled into one box set so you can get all the dramatic back-and-forth in one place! Dive into the heated correspondence between Trae, Tasha, Kyron, and Charli, where you’ll get all the devastating heartbreaks and steamy make-ups uninterrupted. This set includes “The Letter”, “The Response”, and much more! Get your collection today!

For generations of Americans, the word Antietam - the name of a bucolic stream in western Maryland - held the same sense of horror and carnage that the date 9/11 does for Americans today. But Antietam eclipses even this modern tragedy as America's single bloodiest day, on which 22,000 men became casualties in a war to determine our nation's future.

This book is a clear and informative introduction to cryptography and data protection - subjects of considerable social and political importance. It explains what algorithms do, how they are used, the risks associated with using them, and why governments should be concerned. Important areas are highlighted, such as Stream Ciphers, block ciphers, public key algorithms, digital signatures, and applications such as e-commerce.

Martial arts master Lin Su Yoshimura is a force to be reckoned with. Now in the US after being shunned as a mixed-race Chinese-Japanese girl, then kidnapped as a teen and sold into the sex-trafficking trade, Lin Su is rescued from an abusive New York pimp by one of the city’s top-level cocaine dealers. Navigating both back alleys and opulent venues with lethal grace, Lin Su finds her way forward through the underbelly of the city, as she wrestles with the horrors of her past.