Showing results by narrator "Jeff Cummings" in All Categories

Your reputation defines how people see you and what they will do for you. It determines whether your bank will lend you money to buy a house or car; whether your landlord will accept you as a tenant; which employers will hire you and how much they will pay you. It can even affect your marriage prospects.

In his new book, investment expert Jim Jubak explores the "new normal" of market volatility. With remarkable insights into the zeitgeist of financial markets and the economy, Jubak combines the big macro trends with the more mundane aspects of life to depict why volatility is here to stay, why things are not going to get any calmer soon, and how you can make investing decisions to profit off this new reality.

John Lincoln needs a hot best seller, and finds his salvation in Amy O’Malley, a recent University of Chicago grad who’s worked on the school’s famous sex survey. With Lincoln’s prodding, Amy writes an erotic thriller that draws on her research experience. Her book indeed opens doors for Lincoln — but not in the way he imagined. Meanwhile, Tony Buford, a “professor of happiness studies” at a local college, gently blackmails him into publishing his fantastically mundane poetry.

What do shale gas, Elon Musk’s Tesla, and the global apparel chain Zara share in common? In Resource Revolution, management experts Stefan Heck and Matt Rogers describe how each in its own way exemplifies a resource revolution - a use of natural resources so effective it defies conventional wisdom and enables breakthrough performance where others see only limits and shortcomings.

Detective Michael Gideon is used to being handed L.A.'s oddest cases, but his newest one assigned itself. When Gideon's K-9 partner, Sirius, rescues a lost dog from a pack of coyotes, the duo tries to return her home - only to discover her owner is missing. Heather Moreland has clearly disappeared under suspicious circumstances, and the more Gideon digs into her past, the more he's convinced of her abduction.

Since Andrew Hudgins was a child, he was a compulsive joke teller, so when he sat down to write about jokes, he found that he was writing about himself — what jokes taught him and mistaught him, how they often delighted him but occasionally made him nervous with their delight in chaos and sometimes anger. Because Hudgins’s father, a West Point graduate, served in the US Air Force, his family moved frequently; he learned to relate to other kids by telling jokes and watching how his classmates responded. And jokes opened him up to the serious, taboo subjects that his family didn’t talk about openly — religion, race, sex, and death. Hudgins tells and analyzes the jokes that explore the contradictions in the Baptist religion he was brought up in, the jokes that told him what his parents would not tell him about sex, and the racist jokes that his uncle loved, his father hated, and his mother, caught in the middle, was ambivalent about. This audiobook is both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated, delighted, and occasionally horrified him as he grew.

An inconvenient reassignment has landed Reykjavík crime reporter Einar in the small northern town of Akureyri, where his biggest story to date has been the college stage production of Loftur the Sorcerer, an Icelandic folktale of ambition and greed. But that supposedly ancient history becomes ominously relevant when an unexpected new story lands in Einar’s lap: A local woman dies after falling overboard during a corporate boating retreat. All evidence suggests an accident, but when the victim’s mother cries foul play, kindhearted Einar agrees to investigate.

It's not news that globalization and ever-faster technological innovation have increased the pace of change exponentially. Existing change models were devised to deal with individual changes, one by one, but that's not a luxury leaders have any more. Bill Pasmore, senior vice president at the Center for Creative Leadership and a professor at Columbia University, offers a four-part model that will allow leaders to deal with multiple changes simultaneously without drowning in the churn.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, one economic model emerged triumphant. Capitalism - spanning a spectrum from laissez-faire to authoritarian - shapes the market economies of all the wealthiest and fastest-growing nations. The trouble is cracking its shiny veneer. In the US, economic growth is no longer matched by economic development. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, natural resources are exploited for short-term profits, and good jobs are hard to find.

Sent to live with a wealthy family on a West Indies plantation, Rachel carries with her a past shrouded in mystery. Drawn to her grit and fortitude, charming widower and fanciful inventor Henry is willing to overlook the vague explanations about her history. But after years of marriage, Rachel leaves Henry and their oldest son without explanation and sets off for New York City with their other four children. Is her flight the ultimate act of betrayal or one of extraordinary courage? Using real family letters, Laurel Saville reconstructs the secrets, tensions, and longings surrounding Rachel in this densely layered, poignant novel.

At first, Rachel Vasquez found her new job working for private detective Clayton Guthrie promising. He got her a gun and a license and took her to target practice. But lately she’s just been doing surveillance, and it’s not her idea of an exciting time. She is contemplating quitting when Guthrie lands an intriguing case that will take all their wits and guts to solve.

Camille Bowman, a beautiful blonde Columbia student and Manhattan heiress, is found dead, shot by a gun that belonged to her fiancé, Greg Olsen, an Afghan war veteran. Guthrie is hired to prove Olsen’s innocence, and fortunately he thinks Olsen smells clean.

An attractive sous chef at the famous L’Elfe is murdered and half of the employees are suspect. Lacking confidence in the police to solve the murder, Chef Jean Bouvier seeks a quicker solution. He hires private eyes James Lessor and Skip Moore to go undercover and discreetly investigate his restaurant staff. But their investigation turns up far more than they bargained for. Skip’s girlfriend, Emily, confesses that the murder victim and she had been close friends at one point in their lives and had shared a very dark secret.

Moments after venture capitalist Gloria Baradaran experiences what it's like to be a polar bear - really be a polar bear - she knows she's found something revolutionary. Farley Rutherford and his team - migraine-tortured neurologist "Chopper" Vittori and uber-geek engineer Ringo Hayes - have created sensory saturation, a virtual reality system that drops users into the psyches of endangered animals as they fight for survival, and they believe the profound experience could turn the indifferent masses into avid environmentalists.

Child prodigy Joshua Bland’s life has been anything but bland. Joshua’s father abandons him and his mentally imbalanced mother when he is a young boy, leaving him to be raised by a cynical, hostile, and self-doubting stepfather. When Joshua loses a national knowledge competition, his family’s reaction puts him on the path to becoming a World War II veteran, best-selling author, successful producer, and absentee father.

Berlin detective Jan Tommen expected to wake up with a hangover - not a murder charge. But a well-known judge has been brutally killed and hard evidence places Jan at the crime scene. When disturbing gaps in Jan’s memory make finding an alibi impossible, the case against him looks open and shut. Faced with life on the inside, Jan flees police custody to take refuge with an old friend deeply enmeshed in the capital’s seedy underworld.

It starts with some innocent family fun. Writer Stephen Barrow's divorced wife, involved in a second marriage, has given Barrow custody of their six-year-old daughter, Penny. Father and daughter share a relationship that is tender, poignant, and funny. Their home life in a small upstate New York town is a happy and entirely wholesome one.