Showing results by narrator "Shawn Compton" in All Categories

I commanded an infantry company during the Vietnam Tet Offensive of 1968. I got to see the magnificence of the human spirit as my men triumphed over incredible adversity. This is a story that must be told. We are a special country with a special destiny. My men showed me the way.

The Freedom Shield brings together stories of veterans of the 191st Assault Helicopter Company, who were tasked with carrying troops into battle, attacking enemy positions, and evacuating the wounded in their UH-1 Iroquois "Huey" helicopters. The unit was assembled from a hodgepodge of hand-me-down aircraft, used equipment, and overlooked personnel-its appearance belied the invaluable work the crews of the 191st would undertake during the Vietnam War.

It is 2056. Mathematics professor Elisabeth Gabai is fascinated by multi-dimensional forms that have no equivalent in reality. Then, her boss sends her to the site of an artifact that might have come straight from her theories—or from the technology of an advanced civilization. Twenty-eight years earlier, physicist Max Webber is hell-bent on improving Einstein’s theories of relativity. His latest concept seems flawless, except it predicts the end of humanity. The extinction of Earth can only be prevented if Max can locate a multi-dimensional object.

Michael Danvers’ life of self-imposed seclusion is interrupted when he receives a strange invitation: the unique opportunity to move into and beta-test a fully automated, state-of-the-art smart home.

For years, America has been plagued by slow economic growth and increasing inequality. In The Captured Economy, Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles identify a common factor behind these twin ills: breakdowns in democratic governance that allow wealthy special interests to capture the policymaking process for their own benefit.

The Blaze are getting their direction and technology from those who had driven the Progenitors from the galaxy. The Vestrall. Leviathan takes his select humans to the frontlines in Earth's war with the Blaze Collective to collect intelligence on where to find the Vestrall. The Blaze aren't forthcoming. They go farther, a thousand light-years behind enemy lines to a planet that used to be important. It's no longer the home of the Vestrall, but of a biomechanical race that is little more than drones.

After Evan’s latest case ends in disaster, he’s at the end of his tether — until fate throws him headlong into Linda Clayton's desperate world and a long-dead investigation that everybody wants to stay that way. But Evan never does what everybody wants, and he vows to find answers for her that he can’t find for himself. As the suspense ratchets up, he’s caught in a desperate fight for his life with a stone-cold killer who will stop at nothing to protect his secrets....

God’s work with the human race in time and space has been, and continues to be, a series of new beginnings. At every point, the Trinity is central, for God’s relationship to his Son and his Spirit stands behind everything about his relationship to us. Starting from before time began, Donald Fairbairn leads us through these beginnings, shedding fresh light on the Trinity at each stage. He offers clues and questions along the way, inviting us to join in the discovery process.

Jim Hardman was a mediocre Atlanta cop until he was wrongly accused of corruption and thrown off the force. Now he works as an unlicensed PI, trouble-shooter, and bodyguard...often partnered with his drinking buddy Hump Evans, a black ex-NFL player. Hardman is hired by The Man, a black mobster, to investigate the murder of his white girlfriend, a college student. It’s a case that plunges Hardman and Evans into the center of a violent street war that stretches from Atlanta’s seedy back alleys to the marbled corridors of power.

At the close of 1917, the Germans introduced a new type of gas, T-Leiche - "corpse gas" - a revolutionary weapon that changed the war. Instead of killing the living, T-Leiche resurrected the bodies of the dead. For those who survived the killing fields of France, the danger has only just begun. Veteran Michael "Madman" Burke and his company have just been assigned a daring new mission by the president himself: rescue the members of the British royal family.

As Mark Zuckerberg once put it, "the Age of Privacy is over." But Zuckerberg and others who say "privacy is dead" are wrong. In Why Privacy Matters, Neil Richards explains that privacy isn't dead, but rather up for grabs. Richards shows how the fight for privacy is a fight for power. If we want to preserve our commitments to these precious yet fragile values, we will need privacy rules. Pithy and forceful, this is a must-listen for anyone interested in a topic that sits at the center of so many current problems.

In Only Humans Need Apply, Thomas Hayes Davenport and Julia Kirby reframe the conversation about automation, arguing that the future of increased productivity and business success isn't either human or machine. It's both. The key is augmentation, utilizing technology to help humans work better, smarter, and faster. Instead of viewing these machines as competitive interlopers, we can see them as partners and collaborators in creative problem solving as we move into the next era.

The celebrated author of The Making of Second Life and Game Design Secrets Wagner, James Au, delivers an engrossing exploration of how nascent metaverse platforms have already captured the imagination of millions. Featuring powerful stories and dozens of incisive interviews with insiders including Metaverse creator Neal Stephenson himself, the author uses his unique, grassroots-level perspective as the first reporter embedded in a metaverse platform.

Although he took command of the Army of the Potomac only three days before the first shots were fired at Gettysburg, Union general George G. Meade guided his forces to victory in the Civil War's most pivotal battle. Commentators often dismiss Meade when discussing the great leaders of the Civil War. But in this long-anticipated book, Kent Masterson Brown draws on an expansive archive to reappraise Meade's leadership during the Battle of Gettysburg.

In a near-future New York City, where self-driving cars roam the city streets, rival entrepreneurs Brandon and Tyler compete to produce the smartest AIs, training them in a virtual game world. As the two rivals struggle to dominate the market, their personal enmity pushes them to attack each other's reputations, hack each other's cars, and develop ever more sophisticated algorithms to keep their customers safe. The result? Intelligent computers that excel at using all available data to determine which humans should live, and which should die.

Propulsion scientist Dr. Todd Cunningham was an astronaut headed for outer space until budget cuts killed the mission—and his lifelong dream. Now, he's just an obscure expert in fusion-powered space travel, a professor buried in an ever-increasing pile of work. But when a daring mission is approved to travel to Europa, Jupiter's frozen moon, Cunningham is thrust back into the spotlight by the very man he blames for ending his NASA career, and he finds himself joining the ranks of NASA astronauts on a groundbreaking journey to challenge humanity's understanding of life in the universe.

The story of America's astounding industrial mobilization during World War II has been told. But what has never been chronicled before Paul Dickson's The Rise of the G. I. Army, 1940-1941 is the extraordinary transformation of America's military from a disparate collection of camps with dilapidated equipment into a well-trained and spirited army 10 times its prior size in little more than 18 months.

At 28 years old, Eli "Berg" Koenigsberg has never encountered a challenge he couldn't push through, until a head injury leaves him with lingering headaches and a weakness for opiates. Berg moves to a remote Northern California town, seeking space and time to recover, but soon finds himself breaking into homes in search of pills. Addled by addiction and chronic pain, Berg meets Alejandro, a reclusive, master boatbuilder, and begins to see a path forward. Alejandro offers Berg honest labor, but more than this, he offers him a new approach to his suffering, a template for survival amid intense pain. Nurtured by his friendship with Alejandro and aided, too, by the comradeship of many in Talinas, Berg begins to return to himself.

After fastball phenom Prospero Stark's baseball career craters in a Mexican jail, he retreats to a trailer park in the scorching Arizona desert. He lives in peaceful anonymity with a collection of colorful outcasts until someone leaves his former catcher's severed hand on his doorstep. Beautiful, hard-living reporter Roxanne Santa Cruz, who keeps a .380 Colt and a bottle of Chivas in her car, joins Stark to help him uncover his friend's fate, a dangerous pursuit that pits them against a ruthless gang of drug-dealing killers.

The dust had barely settled after my skirmish at Galloway Asylum, and there I was looking forward to some downtime, maybe even a promotion. What I got instead was a covert assignment and an urgent warning from on high: Get out of the city. So I did. And after a quick, or should I say bad, trip down the wrong side of memory lane, I found myself holing up in a sleepy rural town on a strictly cloak and dagger mission: Copperwood Falls, a haunted town where the woods whisper at night, and demons come calling. A place where the shadows are restless, and almost nothing is as it seems.