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

Entomologist Justin O. Schmidt is on a mission. Some say it's a brave exploration, others shake their heads in disbelief. His goal? To compare the impacts of stinging insects on humans, mainly using himself as the gauge. In The Sting of the Wild, the colorful Dr. Schmidt takes us on a journey inside the lives of stinging insects, seeing the world through their eyes as well as his own.

Throughout history - from the bone-crushing age of antiquity to the sack-tearing modern era - there have been larger-than-life ass-kickers with a natural talent for unleashing their epic bloodlust on anyone who crossed them. They built empires, smashed armies, and ravaged civilizations for wealth, glory, and ultimate supremacy. Sometimes villains, sometimes heroes, sometimes criminally insane, they had one thing in common: They were all Badass!

When Paul Kusserow began consulting for Amedisys, the home healthcare company was on the brink of collapse. Its stock had fallen to less than $11 per share, and it had to borrow money to pay a massive government fine. Six months later, Kusserow became its CEO. Under his leadership, Amedisys dramatically improved operations, increased its market capitalization by over tenfold, and took its place among the country's top home care and hospice businesses. In this in-depth case study, Kusserow explains how he achieved this stunning turnaround.

Charles Hood is on a boat, wearing at least two life jackets as he scans the sky for seabirds and plumbs the depths of his—and our—relationship with the vast Pacific Ocean. Winner of the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year for his collection of essays A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat: The Joys of Ugly Nature, Hood now brings his irrepressible curiosity to the lives of petrels, frigate birds, sea snakes, and flying fish.

A nerdy farmer—and doctor with expertise in nutrition—provides insight into how best to prepare and savor vegetables while recounting his journey in building an organic vegetable farm and discovering the family that farmed the same land some 200 years ago.

First Contact: Assess humans with the flawed, rudimentary, mind … Unbeknownst to simpleton Cuddy Perkins, his dependable, uneventful, life was about to be turned completely upside down. It’s a moonless summer night when a severely damaged intergalactic spacecraft enters Earth’s upper orbit. The alien pilot is desperate. Needs to hold up long enough to make repairs—before his pursuers find him.

Regain the balance in your life! Discover the three powerful habits needed to minimize distractions, maximize accomplishments, and find time to do what matters most. Drawing on the authors' forty years of leadership research, this book offers three powerful habits that that will help people and teams do what matters most. These three high-performance habits are: developing a written personal vision, identifying and setting annual roles and goals, and consistently doing pre-week planning.

Los Angeles, 1916: Photographer Bill Ogden has opened a portrait studio in the seedy noir world of early Hollywood, where he is joined by his granddaughter, Flavia—a woman in need of a fresh start after bludgeoning her abusive husband to death in Wichita. Though his business is mainly legit, Bill finds himself brushing up against the “blue movie” porn industry growing in the shadows of the motion picture mainstream. When a series of grisly murders take place across the city, Bill and his capable granddaughter are pulled into events as tricky and tangled as anything this side of The Big Sleep.

Rick and Frank are recovering addicts and accomplished house thieves. They do not steal randomly—they steal according to order, hired by a mysterious handler. The jobs run routinely until they're tasked with taking a seemingly worthless trophy: an object that generates interest and obsession out of proportion to its apparent value. Just as the robbery is completed, the two are involved in a freak car accident that sets off a chain of events and Frank disappears with the trophy.

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.

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.