Showing results by narrator "Mike Cooper" in All Categories

The Victorian period may have come to an end over 120 years ago, but the Victorians continue to be a vital presence in the modern world. Contemporary Britain is still in large part Victorian in its transport networks, sewage systems, streets, and houses. Victorian cultural legacies, especially in art, science, and literature, are still celebrated. Much mythologized, inexhaustibly controversial, the Victorians are an inescapable reference point for understanding the modern histories not just of Britain and its empire, but of the world.

Cask Strength is more than a history book. In it, Mike Gerrard, an award-winning travel and drinks writer, investigates the making, buying, and selling of barrels and details how drinks like wine, tequila, rum, cognac, and others are enhanced by specific kinds of barrel production.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill had no qualms about using native German speakers from Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany itself. The majority were Jews who had fled persecution. Two examples of these secret units were X Troop Commandos and the Special Interrogation Group. The SIG men deserve their legendary status. They fought, and often died, wearing Wehmacht uniform. As this book reveals that, after infiltrating Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps, one detachment even drew Nazi pay.

The Protestant conviction that believers would rise again, in bodily form, after death, shaped their attitudes towards personal and religious identity, community, empire, progress, race, and the environment. In To Walk the Earth Again, Christopher Trigg explores the political dimension of Anglo-American Protestant writing about the future resurrection of the dead, examining texts written between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.

Why We Hate tackles a pressing issue of both longstanding interest and fresh relevance: why a social species like Homo sapiens should nevertheless be so hateful to itself. We go to war and are prejudiced against our fellow human beings. We discriminate on the basis of nationality, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and gender. Why are humans at once so social and so hateful to each other? In this book, Michael Ruse looks at scientific understandings of human hatred, particularly Darwinian evolutionary theory.

Leading transformation in teams, businesses, and organizations is complex, and leaders are expected to know how to do it. This book provides the clear thinking required to navigate this challenge. In Navigate the Swirl: 7 Crucial Conversations for Business Transformation, renowned growth and strategy leader Richard Hawkes delivers a simple and powerful framework that any team can apply to overcome the most common leadership challenges to growing and scaling companies, known as "The Swirl."

These are easily the most challenging essays on the planet. Pinwill is an original conceptual thinker with a dry sense of humor and turn of phrase. Whether its politics, national economics, history, theology, or money, his writing all comes from somewhere different. You’ll need to buy his essays to discover whether you love or hate them.

One hundred years after a milestone medical discovery, Insulin: The Crooked Timber tells the story of how insulin was transformed from what one clinician called "thick brown muck" into the very first drug to be produced using genetic engineering, one which would earn the founders of the US biotech company Genentech a small fortune. Taking the listener on a fascinating journey, starting with the discovery of insulin in the 1920s through to the present day, the book reveals a story of monstrous egos, toxic career rivalries, and a few unsung heroes.

Matt Jardine, martial arts teacher and entrepreneur, has spent twenty years seeking the answer to one of life’s ultimate conundrums: How can we lead an authentic, spiritual, and creative life in a relentlessly money-centric world? In this insightful book, he brings together Buddhist teachings, spiritual lessons, and the advice and experience of a variety of experts and professionals from a Paralympic athlete, to a West End musical star, to a city banker, and presents nine practical lessons to help us all discover our passion and make it pay.

What defines a modern short story is much more than a question of length. Despite the efforts of early pioneers like Edgar Allan Poe, the genre was originally synonymous with the anecdote or tale and seen more as entertainment than art. However it has become far more than that, and this Very Short Introduction considers afresh the form's ongoing innovations in plot construction, capacity for psychological insight, and ability to offer intensely concentrated perceptions.

Far from slowing down, change and transformation in business seems to come only at a more and more furious rate. The last ten years alone have seen the introduction of groundbreaking new trends that pose new opportunities and challenges for leaders in all industries. In Business Trends in Practice, bestselling business author and strategist Bernard Marr breaks down the social and technological forces underlying these rapidly advancing changes and the impact of those changes on key industries.

Is the West finished as a political idea? In recent years, observers have begun pointing to signs that this transatlantic community is eroding. When the European Union expanded, the classic European nation state was in decline. Now, nationalism is on the rise. Furthermore, nations within the EU are less willing to cooperate with the US on policies that require sacrifice and risks, such as using military force alongside the US.

The Other Side of the Shamans, an adult-oriented novel, is divided into two parts: the first, set at the beginning of the 18th century, follows the historically-based life of Walking Horse, a young spiritual Native American in the Ho-Chunk tribe. A prodigy with remarkable physical and mental powers, Walking Horse encounters ecstatic love and abject evil, with varying degrees of success.

Christmas Tales are a variety of short stories, with a Christmas theme, for those who enjoy a short listen as opposed to a full length novel, and is suitable for all ages from one to 92

As globalization creates increasing challenges to established marketing practices, marketing efforts need to reposition and adapt continuously to maintain an organization's ability to reach potential customers. This Very Short Introduction provides a general overview of the function and importance of marketing to modern organizations. Kenneth Le Meunier-FitzHugh discusses how marketing remains central to creating competitive advantage, and why it needs to be forward looking and constantly reinventing itself in line with new developments in the marketplace.

A starry-eyed ode to self-expression and staying true to yourself, inspired by the life and lyrics of beloved icon David Bowie. For as long as David could remember, he felt like a stranger on his own planet. As if he’d fallen to Earth from outer space… David Bowie is one of the most...

The more we ponder, the odder the world can seem. How do footballers get their shirt numbers? Why does having daughters make couples more likely to divorce? How do you move a horse from one country to another? What counts as a journey into space? The keen minds at the Economist contemplate all these questions and more in their quest for the globe's most extraordinary quandaries and conundrums, with bizarre facts and headscratchers that show the world is even stranger than we might have thought.

When Ronald Reagan chose C. Everett Koop to be Surgeon General of the United States in 1981, liberal politicians, women's groups, and even the public health community opposed the nomination because of his conservative social views and strong anti-abortion beliefs. By the time he left office in...

We make choices all the time - about how to spend our money, about how to spend our time, about what to do with our lives. And we are also constantly judging the decisions other people make as rational or irrational. But what kind of criteria are we applying when we say that a choice is rational? What guides our own choices, especially in cases where we don't have complete information about the outcomes? What strategies should be applied in making decisions which affect a lot of people, as in the case of government policy?

Do you feel confident at work? Are there times when you lack confidence but can’t show it? The role of confidence in successful leadership is both significant and undisputed, and yet organizations are full of leaders and teams who don’t have as much as they want and, even worse, are not doing anything about it. Attempts to develop confidence are usually confined to empty affirmations and vanilla-flavored self-help books. In contrast, this book provides an evidence-based code that outlines the steps we can all take to positively shift our confidence and that of our teams.