Showing results by narrator "R. A. Stephens" in All Categories

Vaz is the story of Vaz Gettnor, a socially impaired yet scientifically brilliant man. Despite his inability to relate to others, Lisanne married him in admiration of what she perceived as shy intelligence. However, she's been disappointed by the way he's settled for working as no more than a glorified lab tech with a low salary.

Given how quickly its operations have achieved global impact, it may seem that the Islamic State materialized suddenly. In fact, al-Qaeda's operations chief, Sayf al-Adl, devised a seven-stage plan for jihadis to conquer the world by 2020 that included reestablishing the Caliphate in Syria between 2013 and 2016. Despite a massive schism between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, al-Adl's plan has proved remarkably prescient. In summer 2014, ISIS declared itself the Caliphate after capturing Mosul, Iraq - part of stage five in al-Adl's plan.

The year is 2011, and what starts as a pervasive and inexplicable illness ends up as a zombie infestation that devastates the world's population. Taking the form of a biologist's journal found in the aftermath of the attack, this pulse-pounding, suspenseful tale of zombie apocalypse follows the narrator as he flees from city to countryside and heads north to Canada, where he hopes the undead will be slowed by the colder climate.

If you have an anxiety disorder or experience anxiety symptoms that interfere with your day-to-day life, you can benefit from learning four simple skills that therapists use with their clients. These easy-to-learn skills are at the heart of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a cutting-edge therapeutic approach that can help you better manage the panic attacks, worries, and fears that limit your life and keep you feeling stuck. In The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Anxiety, you'll learn how to use each of these skills to manage your anxiety, worry, and stress.

Over the last 40 years our choices have narrowed, our opportunities have shrunk, and our lives have become governed by a handful of very large and very powerful corporations. Today, practically everything we buy, everywhere we shop, and every service we secure comes from a heavily concentrated market. This is a world where four major banks control most of our money, four airlines shuttle most of us around the country, and four major cell phone providers connect most of our communications.

An engaging account of innovation in healthcare and why the results fall short for patients and society. The evolution of the cell phones we carry in our pockets demonstrates that quality can increase while prices fall. Why doesn't healthcare also get better and cheaper? In Why Not Better and Cheaper?, James B. Rebitzer and Robert S. Rebitzer offer an answer to this question. Bringing together research on incentives, social norms, and market competition, they argue that the healthcare system generates the wrong kinds of innovation.

Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds is a rousing, all-original anthology that stands both as a significant achievement in its own right and as a heartfelt tribute to a remarkable writer - and equally remarkable man. A nicely balanced mixture of fiction and reminiscence, Multiverse contains more than a dozen stories and novellas by some of today's finest writers, along with moving reflections by, among others, Anderson's wife, Karen.

Magic is dying. And without magic, the sleepy town of Ashville is conquered with ease by a tyrannical king whose obsession with finding gold soon becomes a devastating campaign to enslave mankind. There is only one problem with this plan: an orphan boy with no name, a child of the woods who has learned to survive among man-eating plants and giant spiders, but whose greatest obstacle yet remains. The king with everything will be challenged by the boy with nothing - and on the path where courage and selflessness meet, the boy with no name will inspire magic to return once more.

The ability to think clearly and critically is a lifelong benefit that you can apply in any situation that calls for reflection, analysis, and planning. Being able to think systematically and solve problems is also a great career asset. Critical Thinking Skills for Dummies helps you hone your thinking abilities and become a better communicator. You'll find hands-on, active instruction and exercises that you can put to work today as you navigate social media and news websites, chat with AI, fact-check your own and others' views, and more. Become a thinking machine, with this Dummies guide.

Escaping the Housing Trap is the must-have resource for everyone with a stake in the future of housing in America-and that means everyone. Listeners will find discussions of housing as an investment and how the country's neighborhoods are being transformed by the introduction of large amounts of investment; explorations of housing as shelter, including discussions of zoning policy and NIMBYism; and a comprehensive overview of the Strong Towns approach to solving the American housing crisis.

When anxious feelings spiral out of control, they can drain your energy and prevent you from living the life you want. If you're ready to stop letting your anxiety have the upper hand, The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Anxiety (Second Edition) can help you to recognize your anxiety triggers, develop skills to stop anxious thoughts before they take over, and keep needless fears from coming back. In the second edition of this best-selling workbook, William J. Knaus offers a step-by-step program to help you overcome anxiety and get back to living a rich and productive life.

By one reading, things look pretty good for Americans today: The country is richer than ever before, and the unemployment rate is down by half since the Great Recession. But a closer look shows that something is going seriously wrong. This is the collapse of work - especially among America's men. Political economist Nicholas Eberstadt shows that while "unemployment" has gone down, America's work rate is also lower today than a generation ago - and that the work rate for US men has been spiraling downward for half a century.

There is no CEO task more significant than leading change in an organization whose old business model needs updating. Large-scale change involves rethinking how to engage customers, partners, and suppliers with new technology and hard decisions about how to reorganize internal operations—plus the challenges of executing the transformation. Too many things can go wrong, from natural organizational resistance and inertia, to lack of strategic focus, to execution problems. And yet, organizations today must be more dynamic than ever before.

Leading archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause and journalist Thomas Trappe investigate what DNA can tell us about how we got where we are and what our future might be. They show how the first humans were defeated again and again and suffered fatal setbacks, and how Homo sapiens succeeded in conquering continents, overcoming natural borders, and bringing other species under its control. But the genetic blueprint that enabled us to get to the place where we are today had one flaw: it didn't factor in planetary boundaries.

In The Go-to-Market Cheat Code: The Secret to Unlocking B2B Growth, award-winning entrepreneur Justin Gray and seasoned executive Josh Wagner deliver a research-rich and example-based exploration of why trust and relationships are the true foundation of every thriving business, and how you can build, maintain, and leverage trust in your own business dealings to gain an edge over competitors. This book avoids flash-in-the-pan trends and focuses instead on timeless, proven principles that can help you scale your organization to the next level.

This audiobook includes the first two books in the League of Gallize Shifters: Gray Wolf Mate and Mating a Grizzly. Gray Wolf Mate: As a respected human in preternatural criminal investigations, she’s suspicious when they capture a wolf-shifter at a crime scene, and he triggers memories of a man she’d once loved who vanished without a word. Mating a Grizzly: The grizzly-shifter bodyguard makes her want the one thing she can’t choose, a mate, because failure to accept her destiny will cost her a child who is everything to her.

With over twenty-five contributions by some of the nation's most influential progressive voices, Labor's Partisans brings to life a history of labor that is of immediate relevance to our own times. Introduced and edited by leading labor historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Samir Sonti, this essential volume reveals the powerful currents and debates running through the labor movement, from the 1950s to today.

From the national best-selling author of Racing Weight, Matt Fitzgerald exposes the irrationality, half-truths, and downright impossibility of a "single right way" to eat and reveals how to develop rational, healthy eating habits.

In The Politics Industry, Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter ingeniously apply the tools of business analysis - and Porter's distinctive Five Forces framework - to show how the political system functions just as every other competitive industry does, and how the duopoly has led to the devastating outcomes we see today. Using this competition lens, Gehl and Porter identify the most powerful lever for change - a strategy comprised of a clear set of choices in two key areas: how our elections work and how we make our laws.

Widowed Blanche Taylor Moore was about to lose her second spouse to symptoms that mysteriously mirrored those that killed her first husband—as well as her previous boyfriend. When an investigation reveals arsenic poisoning, the hideous truth about the wife and mother comes to light. Did the abuse Blanche suffered as a child at the hands of her alcoholic father turn her into a murderer she became?