Showing results by narrator "Stephen Bowlby" in All Categories

Ben Lopez spends his life travelling the world, bartering with people who value money over life. Working for governments, law enforcement agencies, multinational corporations and private clients, Ben is an expert K&R (Kidnap and Ransom) consultant, supplying professional kidnap-negotiation services. He can be called out to anywhere in the world within 24 hours notice to set up and command the negotiator's cell, bargaining with religious fanatics, hardened criminals, and other desperate people in order to save the lives of their captives.

May Laval was as brilliant as a ten-carat diamond - and just as cold. As the calculating ruler of a social set, she influenced generals, politicians, and big businessmen. Slowly and shrewdly, she learned the intimate details of everyone's life and recorded the seamy facts in a diary so as not to forget a single sordid detail. One day, May Laval threatened to publish her diary. Now it’s up to PR man Jake Harrison to find out who killed May and - while he’s at it - why his wife left him.

We live in a factory-made world: modern life is built on three centuries of advances in factory production, efficiency, and technology. But giant factories have also fueled our fears about the future since their beginnings, when William Blake called them "dark Satanic mills". Many factories that operated over the last two centuries - such as Homestead, River Rouge, and Foxconn - were known for the labor exploitation and class warfare they engendered, not to mention the environmental devastation caused by factory production.

Kenneth Chinran commanded the elite unit assigned to take out an entire planet in a terrible war. Millions died; billions more perished in the aftermath. One doesn't send a sociopath on such a mission. A sociopath might not stop. Chinran did stop, but in the process nearly lost his sanity and his soul. But one of Chinran's men was a sociopath going in. Now he's a trained sociopath with the knowledge and firepower to take out entire tactical teams, evaporate through security cordons and change identity at will.

Amid work, family, ministry, and all the other demands of life, Minute Motivators for Women provides you with the encouragement and inspiration you need to keep serving faithfully. These simple and succinct devotions from the bestselling Minute Motivators series provide powerful insights with uplifting Bible verses that will help you find strength at a moment's notice.

Throughout history, there are some events that stand out as so groundbreaking that they completely change life as we know it. The Apollo moon landing of 1969 was one of those events - the invention of the Apple personal computer was another. In this book, John Sculley - former CEO of both Pepsi and Apple - claims we are in an era that is giving birth to numerous groundbreaking events and inventions - moonshots - that will change the way we live and work for generations to come.

American Political Parties is a core textbook on political parties in the United States that places the US party system into a framework designed around the disagreements between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. White and Kerbel argue that the two-party system in the United States began with a common agreement on the key values of freedom, individual rights, and equality of opportunity, but that Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed—often vehemently—over how to translate these ideals into an acceptable form of governance.

The demands of work and the fast-moving pace of technology wear heavily on employees and entrepreneurs alike. The "hustle and grind" lifestyle that most of us have bought into is simply unsustainable, leading to physical ailments, emotional burnout, and a darkness in the soul. Joel Comm has found a better way. In The Fun Formula, Comm demonstrates that the best path to success - in work and in life - is to focus on our passions, curiosity, and the things that bring us great pleasure.

The year 1942 is a bad time to stage Madame Butterfly. Although Puccini's masterpiece is a perennial favorite of the San Francisco opera crowd, its sympathetic depiction of a Japanese girl causes tension in the dark months following Pearl Harbor. Newspaper editorialists rage against the production, opera buffs picket the theater, and a note appears nailed to the house door, threatening violence against the cast and crew. When the first workman dies, the maestro calls Toby Peters, a Los Angeles detective who works discreetly for Hollywood's rich and famous.

Repentance is a very beautiful biblical concept that suffers from being misunderstood and misapplied. Far more than just remorse, penance, or confession, The 180 Project gives the reader the correct definition of repentance according to God's Word and shows the powerful, life-changing transformation that occurs in a believer when repentance is exercised. Far from being a negative concept, repentance brings positive benefits to the Christian life.

dentist dangles from the window of a swanky Park Avenue hotel, while Toby Peters, a Los Angeles detective who's very far from home, clutches the man by his jacket, which is tearing slowly, stitch by stitch. Across the room, a dead man lies on the bed, his killer pounding on the hotel room door, which sounds like it's going to give way as quickly as the dentist's jacket. Somehow, this entire mess is Albert Einstein's fault. Two nefarious groups have been threatening the great physicist. One is a ring of blackmailers who claim to have evidence that he has been passing nuclear secrets to Russia.

In The Gift of Jesus, beloved pastor and teacher Dr. Charles Stanley takes a deeply personal and inspiring look at how God gave us Himself through the birth of Christ. Discover that Christmas and Advent can be so much more than a busy season to get through and instead a season of joy and renewal.

Showing Up is a revolutionary step-by-step guide - by and for men - to ending toxic masculinity and leveraging men to enact heart-based leadership, increase diversity, bolster the bottom line, and create a culture so everyone in the workplace wins.

Three disparate and suspenseful looks at ourselves in three very different worlds. These engaging short stories by three of the masters of American science fiction literature, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Philip K. Dick, open windows into our psyches, our souls, and our surroundings that presage the world we find ourselves in today. Like episodes of The Twilight Zone, cinematic in their language and characters, the stories connect with our times in surprising ways.

Until two years of age, Craig and Samantha’s son Connor was just like other kids - playful, verbal, and affectionate. Then everything changed. He stopped talking, displayed behavioral problems, and withdrew into his own world. The official diagnosis - autism. Faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, Craig and Samantha refused to believe a meaningful life for Connor was impossible. God confirmed their faith by revealing to Craig that Connor would one day touch the lives of thousands of people around the world.

Pete and Harriet Deison were enjoying a full life of being parents, grandparents, and partners in ministry when deep depression spiraled Harriet into a darkness that caused her to take her own life. Suddenly thrust into unimaginable grief, Pete, a Presbyterian minister, turned to his roots as a student and educator in an attempt to make sense of it all. Visits from Heaven is the love story of a man and his wife of 43 years, which quietly becomes the story of God's love for his children.

This book is a brief guide to Proust's magnum opus in which Joshua Landy invites the listener to view the novel as a single quest-a quest for purpose, enchantment, identity, connection, and belonging-through the novel's fascinating treatments of memory, society, art, same-sex desire, knowledge, self-understanding, self-fashioning, and the unconscious mind.

Jack Zipes has spent decades as a "scholarly scavenger," discovering forgotten fairy tales in libraries, flea markets, used bookstores, and internet searches, and he has introduced countless readers to these remarkable works and their authors. In Buried Treasures, Zipes describes his special passion for uncovering political fairy tales of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offers fascinating profiles of more than a dozen of their writers and illustrators, and shows why they deserve greater attention and appreciation.

Why do we keep returning to Agatha Christie's ingenious puzzles and Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled murder mysteries? What do spy thrillers teach us, and what accounts for the renewed popularity of morally ambiguous noirs? In The Mysterious Romance of Murder, the poet and critic David Lehman explores a wide variety of outstanding books and movies—some famous (The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity), some known mainly to aficionados—with style, wit, and passion.

What makes the dream of self-employment so alluring, so pervasive in today's world? Benjamin C. Waterhouse offers a provocative argument: the modern cult of the hustle is a direct consequence of economic failures—bad jobs, stagnant wages, and inequality—since the 1970s. With original research, Waterhouse traces a new narrative history of business in America, populated with vivid characters—from the activists, academics, and work-from-home gurus who hailed business ownership as our economic salvation to the upstarts who took the plunge. Some flourish; some squeak by. Some fail.