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

The Craing War is now over, the enemy defeated. As planetary systems around the galaxy try to bring normalcy back to their existence, one thing becomes crystal clear: Without the Craing around to keep everyone in line, space has become a far more dangerous place. As more requests for prompt Allied assistance come in from the farthest reaches of outer space, Admiral Perry Reynolds is compelled to introduce a new stellar over-watch program. With his own career winding down, one of his final directives will be in the formation of a special intergalactic marshaling service…Star Watch.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kate McCall's husband has been killed by her teenage son, Luke, in a tragic bow-hunting accident. In the aftermath, Jack, a charismatic but troubled ex-con from Kate's past, shows up. When Luke takes off on his own for their rural cabin, Kate and Jack follow, but they're not the only ones hot on his heels. Two-time losers Teddy and Celeste, along with hitman DeJuan, are all looking to cash in on the money left to Kate.

Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat, is having a record-breaking season in his first year as a New York Yankee. Larger than life on the field and off, Ruth is about to discover what the Chicago White Sox players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series are learning - baseball heroes are not invulnerable to scandal. With suspicion in the air, Ruth's 1918 World Series win for the Boston Red Sox is now being questioned. Under scrutiny by the new baseball commissioner and enmeshed with gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein, Ruth turns for help to Speed Cook, now a promoter of Negro baseball.

From Major General Jeffrey Schloesser - former commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division and Regional Command-East - comes a revealing memoir of leadership in the chaos and fog of the Afghanistan War.

Historians tell the stories of tragic and untimely presidential deaths, but often forgotten are the near misses. JFK and his fellow servicemen spent six days on a desert island with only coconuts to eat after a deadly attack during WWII. Abe Lincoln was forced to take a train trip in disguise while America's first female detective worked to foil an early assassination attempt. And when Andrew Jackson was attacked by an upset citizen who had been stalking him for months, frontiersman Davey Crockett was the one to save him.

Shale gas extraction - commonly known as fracking - is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is personal. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet - whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the land beneath our feet - is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent.

US Special Operations Command trains and equips units to undertake select military activities, frequently high-risk missions, often for the purposes of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. Since 9/11, impelled by an attack on US soil, these forces have been a central instrument of America's military campaign - operating in about 100 countries on any given day. This fight - neither hot war nor cold peace - was launched and executed as a new type of global war in 2001 and has since splintered into a spectrum of regional conflicts.

Drawing from a vast array of creation myths - Babylonian, Greek, Aztec, Maya, Inca, Chinese, Hindu, Navajo, Polynesian, African, Norse, Inuit, and more - this concise book uncovers both the similarities and differences in our attempts to explain the universe. Anthony Aveni, an award-winning author and professor of astronomy and anthropology, examines the ways various cultures around the world have attempted to explain our origins, and what roles the natural environment plays in shaping these narratives. The book also celebrates the audacity of the human imagination.

The birth of a hero is never easy. Clumsy as an elephant in high heels, he is nothing like his legendary scout father. But inside that bull-moose-of-a-body lies the heart of a hero whose moment has arrived! Next, a boy survives alien invasion - but must learn to think and act like his reptilian enemy to exact retribution for slaughter. These and two other tales of coming-of-age-through-peril from the writer who invented the genre, Andre Norton.

The world is awash with economic information. Governments release reports. Pundits give their interpretation on television. And the stock market may go its own way, confusing everyone. How can you better understand what it means for you? Big Picture Economics, a new book by award-winning columnist and futurist Joel Naroff and veteran journalist Ron Scherer, says the thread that ties everything together is "context".

Here’s the truth: Thousands of businesses are started every hour of every day of every year. Most die, few thrive, and the rest struggle to survive - mainly through enormous effort, force of will, and luck. There is a better way to take the guesswork out of growth: focus on the few areas that make all the difference. Bill Flynn’s keen insights drawn from his personal experience, 30 years of studying business success, and speaking and working with hundreds of CEOs are neatly captured in Further, Faster.

It's the fall season and time for Ossie to make his annual southern migration from Portland, Maine to his winter nest down in Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Ossie meets up with a variety of whimsical and zany friends, but needs to navigate around obstacles, foes, severe weather, poacher,s and pollution if he is to reach his southern home. At an air show, Ossie meets a female osprey named Onida....

Today, everyone is familiar with Neil Armstrong's famous words as he first set foot on the moon: "one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind." But America's journey to the moon was anything but simple. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite, into orbit; later that year, America's first attempt was such a failure that the media nicknamed it "Kaputnik." Still, we didn't give up. With each failure, we gleaned valuable information about what went wrong, and how to avoid it in the future. So we tried again. And again. And each time we failed, we failed a little bit better.

Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. Some historians have charged that slaveholders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation's founding. The acclaimed political historian Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers' work. Far from covering up a crime against humanity, the Constitution restricted slavery's legitimacy under the new national government.

In the 1920s cotton buyer Earle Dickson worked for Johnson & Johnson and had a klutzy wife who often cut herself. The son of a doctor, Earle set out to create an easier way for her to bandage her injuries. Band-Aids were born, but Earle's bosses at the pharmaceutical giant weren't convinced, and it wasn't until the Boy Scouts of America tested Earle's prototype that this ubiquitous household staple was made available to the public.