Showing results by narrator "Jeff Cummings" in All Categories

Baby Boomers are reinventing retirement just as they have so many other aspects of their lives. They will live longer and be healthier than their parents and grandparents, and they plan to remain relevant, be fulfilled, and leave legacies. Many will continue to work well into their 70s and 80s, some because they want to, others because they need to.

Widely known as "master hairdresser of the seven seas," Sigismund Skrik is famous both as an artist of the scissors and comb, and as the soul of discretion. Not only will he give clients new, life-changing looks - he also gets to know all their secrets. But the days of transatlantic sailing are numbered. It's 1879, and Europeans immigrating to the United States are starting to prefer the huge new steamships that make the crossing ten times as fast.

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.

Tichy draws on decades of hands-on experience working with CEOs and boards to provide a framework for building a smart, effective transition pipeline, whether for a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, a family business, a small start-up, or a non-profit. Through revealing case studies like Hewlett Packard, IBM, Yahoo, P&G, Intel, and J.C. Penney, he examines why some companies fail and others succeed in training and sustaining the next generation of senior leaders.

Two years after the end of World War II, a director sets out to mimic real life by creating a film without a script, where the actors learn the story and their part in it as they go. The tale unfolds of a young couple on the run during the Nazi occupation, but soon the characters they play begin to take on lives of their own. As the lines between fiction and reality blur, the Secret Police become convinced that the director holds information that could compromise the nation’s security, and they decide to interrogate him about his fictional plot.

In The Leap, bestselling author Ulrich Boser shows how the emerging research on trust can improve our lives, rebuild our economy, and strengthen society. As part of this engaging and deeply reported narrative, Boser visits a radio soap opera in Rwanda that aims to restore the country’s broken trust, profiles the man who brought honesty to one of the most corrupt cities in Latin America, and explains how a college dropout managed to con his way into American high society.

Abby Donovan’s decade-long dream of partnership at her prestigious Chicago law firm is just months from fruition. But it’s all about to change because of one misstep. One step onto a late-night train headed in the wrong direction. Headed into Chicago’s west side, where gangs and violence and drugs fill the streets. In this engaging debut, E.C. Diskin, a former Chicago attorney, takes us on a fast-paced thrill ride with a believable and flawed heroine. Listeners will relate to her, fear for her, and get a glimpse inside Chicago’s best and worst.

It’s summer in the Valley of the Sun; the temperature’s rising and so is the body count. One of the city’s most exclusive escorts has lost her little black book - and a brutal killer has turned it into a hit list. One after another, some of Phoenix’s richest and most respectable men are turning up dead. Troubled homicide detective Sean Richardson and his partner, Maggie McClinton, take lead on the hunt for a brutal, methodical killer stalking Phoenix’s elite and meting out a very personal brand of justice. But when so many people share a secret that just might get them killed, the next victim - and the killer - could be anyone.

A young man falls instantly for a woman he spots at a summer backyard party. He knows nothing about her except that she's wearing a T-shirt of his favorite band but his imagination runs wild with the life he hopes they might share. The young woman ends up changing the course of his life as dramatically as he thought she would upon first sight, but in none of the ways he had hoped.

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.

Overcoming Fake Talk explains why we often fail at our most important communications and offers proven advice for turning challenging confrontations into rewarding exchanges that foster collaboration, improve performance, and achieve results. You'll develop an understanding of the skills for holding a REAL conversation, including both the "said" and the "unsaid" elements present in any conversation; discover the framework for preparing and holding difficult yet meaningful conversations; and learn to no longer avoid the tough conversations they need to have.

The rich are very different from you and me. Blessed by great wealth, they can get what they want, even what they shouldn’t have. Cursed by great wealth, they become the targets of others who will risk everything to become affluent. Nelson DeMille introduces twenty original tales by today’s most elite mystery writers who explore the life (and death) styles of the rich and infamous.

Police Sergeant Lou Boldt heads a special task force within Seattle’s Homicide bureau. His job: find and stop the Cross Killer, a twisted, perverse serial murderer who has eluded police for six months and paralyzed the city. But when a body washes up on the shore of Puget Sound, Boldt thinks the killer has finally made a mistake. This body shows some of the work of the Cross Killer - but a job badly botched. Did this woman die while trying to escape? Did she knowingly jump in the water to preserve a clue? And is she now desperately trying to tell Boldt something?

At The Shelter, no one judges the runaway teens who come in off the rainy Seattle streets. Volunteers, like police psychologist Daphne Matthews, want only to rescue and rebuild lives. Being a cop, Daphne thinks she's seen it all. But, as best-selling author Ridley Pearson's edge-of-your-seat thriller opens, what she encounters in a 16-year-old girl chills her in a way she thought a case no longer could. For help, Daphne turns to Lou Boldt, a man with creative instincts and an appreciation for forensic lab techniques.

Seattle police detective Lou Boldt and police psychologist Daphne Matthews return in No Witnesses to confront the most challenging case of their careers. People are dying throughout Seattle - victims of a madman who is placing poisoned food in neighborhood supermarkets. But the criminal is intelligent: He writes the police chilling extortion letters, faxed directly from a laptop computer over public telephone lines, and retrieves his ransom electronically, through ATMs in hundreds of locations.

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.

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.

Under the pseudonym S.S. Van Dine, Wright has booked passage on what would be the luxury liner’s disastrous final crossing. He claims to be interviewing celebrity passengers, but the reporter is actually investigating rumors that the ship is ferrying an illegal cache of weapons to aid the British war against Germany. His investigation is put on hold when three German stowaways are discovered and then - in an unexpected and violent twist - killed.

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.