Showing results by narrator "Jeff Cummings" in All Categories

In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that sounds like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer.

Adjustment Team is the second installment of a uniform, five-volume edition of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. This wide-ranging collection contains 26 stories and novellas from the extraordinarily productive years of 1952 and 1953, along with extensive story notes.

Nathan McCann thought he didn't want a family. But when he finds an abandoned newborn in the woods, he feels an inexplicable bond with the boy and starts to make plans to raise the child as his own - until the baby's grandmother steps forward to claim him. Nathan makes a request of her, though: to one day bring the boy to meet his rescuer.

Advice about food can be confusing. There's usually only one thing experts can agree on: some ingredients - often the most enjoyable ones - are bad for you, full stop. But as Aaron Carroll explains, these oversimplifications are both wrong and dangerous: if we stop consuming some of our most demonized ingredients altogether, it may actually hurt us.

For many marketing professionals, "science" is a four-letter word. They see brand-building as an unteachable art guided by their intuition and experience. But at its core, marketing aims to seed ideas into people's minds, make them feel a certain way, and, ultimately, get them to act. In Brand Seduction, Daryl reveals the latest psychological and neuroscientific discoveries about how our minds process brand information and make decisions, and the important roles our emotions and unconscious play in our selections.

The collapse of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme led to the instant evaporation of $65 billion of wealth. The effects of Madoff's brazen fraud were felt most closely in New York and Palm Beach but the story was, and continues to be, front page news across the country.

It was the election that would ultimately give America "Camelot" and its tragic aftermath. 1960 is a stunning recreation of the bare-knuckle politics of the primaries, the party conventions' backroom dealings, the unprecedented television debates, along with hot-button issues of race, religion, and foreign policy. And, at the center of it all, three future presidents - Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon. In this essential work of history, David Pietrusza chronicles 1960's struggle for power by bringing to life its towering events and personalities, unlocking its secrets, and turning expert scholarship into rich, human storytelling.

A cold case dating from the 1960s draws forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver to the Channel Islands decades later to shine a light on the mysterious connection between two men who died there on the same night.

We've all read about the experts: the artists, the scientists, the engineers - that special group of people known as Imagineers for The Walt Disney Company. But who are they? How did they join the team? What is it like to spend a day in their shoes?

Common sense and prudence have long been among the guiding tenets of society, but in today's economy they have been completely abandoned in the interest of blindly maximizing profits. Common-Sense Business shows that this current economic model is both detrimental and unsustainable, and that we must transform the global economy along the lines of common sense toward the common good.

In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed then too controversial to publish), Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of “evil-doers?”

Virtually Human explores what the not-too-distant future will look like when cyberconsciousness - simulation of the human brain via software and computer technology - becomes part of our daily lives. Meet Bina48, the world's most sentient robot, commissioned by Martine Rothblatt and created by Hanson Robotics.

Tichy draws on decades of hands-on experience working with CEOs and boards to provide a framework for building a smart, effective transition pipeline, whether for a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, a family business, a small start-up, or a non-profit. Through revealing case studies like Hewlett Packard, IBM, Yahoo, P&G, Intel, and J.C. Penney, he examines why some companies fail and others succeed in training and sustaining the next generation of senior leaders.

The Leadership Campaign is a playbook for winning in the reality of today's competitive global business environment. Each of the 10 steps it offers was learned on the most intensely competitive global battlefields. Thirty years ago, the authors were top-tier political consultants who could boast of a dozen presidential wins around the world. Candidates hired the authors' company to apply to their political campaigns what the authors knew about business communication and marketing strategy.

Police Sergeant Lou Boldt heads a special task force within Seattle’s Homicide bureau. His job: find and stop the Cross Killer, a twisted, perverse serial murderer who has eluded police for six months and paralyzed the city. But when a body washes up on the shore of Puget Sound, Boldt thinks the killer has finally made a mistake. This body shows some of the work of the Cross Killer - but a job badly botched. Did this woman die while trying to escape? Did she knowingly jump in the water to preserve a clue? And is she now desperately trying to tell Boldt something?

In Breaking van Gogh, James Grundvig investigates the history and authenticity of van Gogh's iconic Wheat Field with Cypresses. Relying on a vast array of techniques from the study of the painter's biography and personal correspondence to the examination of the painting's style and technical characteristics, Grundvig proves that the "most expensive purchase" housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a fake.

In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson documents how every technological innovation - from the printing press to the telegraph - has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But as in the past, we adapt, learning to use the new and retaining what’s good of the old.

Gore Vidal has been described as the last “noble defender” of the American republic. In Imperial America, Vidal steals the thunder of a right wing America - those who have camouflaged their extremist rhetoric in the Old Glory and the Red, White, and Blue - by demonstrating that those whose protest arbitrary and secret government, those who defend the bill of rights, those who seek to restrain America’s international power, are the true patriots.

In The Glass Cage, bestselling author Nicholas Carr digs behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, as he explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure. Even as they bring ease to our lives, these programs are stealing something essential from us.

Since he was disfigured in a fire sixteen years ago, recluse Louis Malone has remained hidden from the prying eyes of his neighbors in the small town of Waverly. Across town, Iris Shula, a lonely and unlovely nurse knows, at thirty-seven, it is unlikely that her Prince Charming will ever appear. But Iris is about to learn how wrong she is. When Louis accidently falls out of his second story window these two kindred souls are brought together. What unfolds is a most unlikely love story.