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

From the highly acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts comes a collection of alternately playful and exquisite essays—including seven collected here for the first time—borne of a lifetime spent fishing.

I loved her like a sister forever ago. Before life served us tragedy with a bitter cherry on top. Before I learned love isn't a damn fairy tale. Before I became a single dad. Protecting my little girl is all I still care about. Kendra is my lifeline if she'll just play along. Her job is easy. Wear my ring. Turn my scowl into a family man's smile. Help save my daughter from a scorched earth custody fight. She gets the Cinderella treatment in return. My money, my mansion, my reputation. Simple. Painless. Mutual.

Laura Hunt was the ideal modern woman: beautiful, elegant, highly ambitious, and utterly mysterious. No man could resist her charmsnot even the hardboiled NYPD detective sent to find out who turned her into a faceless corpse. As this tough cop probes the mystery of Lauras death, he becomes obsessed with her strange power.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon described him as the Beatles' "favorite group", he won Grammy awards, wrote and recorded hit songs, and yet no figure in popular music is as much of a paradox, or as underrated, as Harry Nilsson. In this first ever full-length biography, Alyn Shipton traces Nilsson's life from his Brooklyn childhood to his Los Angeles adolescence and his gradual emergence as a uniquely talented singer-songwriter.

For the men of Madison Avenue, the battle between soft-drink giants Cherr-o-key and AmeriCherry seems heaven-sent. For years now, the firm of Mills/Lake/Ryman has fought to help Cherr-o-key become the nation’s favorite fizzy cherry soda, but each time they come up with a new slogan, mascot, or jingle, AmeriCherry somehow beats them to it. There’s a mole inside the agency, and only Nero Wolfe can ferret him out.

Readers and listeners can't get enough of Honor Harrington and her world, and here David Weber is again, accompanied by some of the top science fiction writers in the field - including John Ringo, Eric Flint, Timothy Zahn and Weber himself - with new adventures of the best starship commander in the galaxy, and explorations of previously uncharted corners of her universe. It's a party - and you're invited!

The world named Mount Lookitthat was never meant for humans - it was shrouded in lethal mists. Life existed only on one plateau, unreachable except from space. But the disastrous decision to colonize the planet could not be reversed. So the settlers survived somehow - under a ruthless dictatorship. Mount Lookitthat was rebellion-proof. Then fate dealt the colonists a wild card named Matthew Keller, who had a talent that neither he nor anybody else knew about. At last the colonists had a glimmer of hope!

In Outside the Box, Levinson explains that globalization is entering a new era in which moving stuff will matter much less than moving services, information, and ideas.

When his boyhood friend vanishes, a man who has coasted through life on the fading memory of high school heroics, risks everything to save him. Just as Darwin is getting back in the game, Billy vanishes, the FBI wants Darwin's help to find him, and Darwin learns his wife's secret past has put her life in jeopardy. Darwin know's Billy's guilty, but he can't betray his friend, and he's falling in love with Fariba, but can't abandon his wife. He has no good choice, no winning shot , and in this world heroes don't get parades.

Irving Berlin (1888-1989) has been called - by George Gershwin, among others - the greatest songwriter of the golden age of the American popular song. "Berlin has no place in American music," legendary composer Jerome Kern wrote; "He is American music." In a career that spanned an astonishing nine decades, Berlin wrote some 1,500 tunes, including "Alexander's Ragtime Band", "God Bless America", and "White Christmas". From ragtime to the rock era, Berlin's work has endured in the very fiber of American national identity.

Did you know that your morning coffee could be thanks to a herd of energetic goats? Or that a forgotten ingredient is behind the invention of the beloved brownie? Who got the fright of their life discovering corn could pop? And which popular soft drink first started out as a medicinal syrup? In Serendipity, Oscar Farinetti, founder of the high-end global food chain Eataly, shares fifty remarkable stories of how some of the greatest successes and examples of excellence in the food world came about by chance.

Erin tends bar at the last dive left in gentrified Red Hook, Brooklyn, where old-timers spin tales of the bar’s legacy and the waterfront’s crime-ridden past. Her boss, Jimmy, a real estate magnate responsible for much of the neighborhood’s shiny transformation, also has a story to share. Back when he was a struggling beat cop, two neglected boys introduced him to an ancient creature that made Jimmy’s dreams come true. Nightmares too. Erin doesn’t believe a word. The bar is her life. But this bar at the end of the world is also home to a deadly stowaway. And it’s looking for a new host.

In a time of chaos, the number one New York Times best-selling political humorist asks his fellow Americans to take it down a notch.

Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books has published over 60 volumes in its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Featuring Noir Series stories from: Dennis Lehane, Don Winslow, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Susan Straight, Jonathan Safran Foer, Laura Lippman, Pete Hamill, Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Child, T. Jefferson Parker, Lawrence Block, Terrance Hayes, and more.

It's become accepted wisdom that established companies can't build and scale new ventures the way startups can—after all, startups are lean and agile, while incumbents are too big, slow, and inflexible. But that's nonsense, and it's time to challenge that idea. Linda Yates, the founder and CEO of Silicon Valley-based Mach49, argues that to thrive, companies can and must harness their power—their ideas, talent, data, cash, resources, channels, and customers—to build a portfolio of game-changing ventures and beat the startups at their own game.

In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city gang life, Mark Bowden takes listeners inside a Baltimore gang, offers an in-depth portrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI investigation that landed eight gang members in prison.

Captain Jason Reynolds and his team—Billy, Rizzo, and the rhino-warrior, Traveler—must attempt to rescue Ricket and Gaddy, still held captive aboard the impregnable Dreathlor prison barge. Only then can Jason return to The Lilly, his highly advanced Caldurian vessel. The elusive Admiral Ot-Mul, leader of the Craing Drac-Vin forces, has not only survived, but thrived, in the far, outer-reaches of space. With hundreds of thousands of warships under his command, Ot-Mul’s combined fleets are on the move. But in truth, he cares about little else than making one man suffer….

With empathy, curiosity, and candor, Jared Dillian dives headlong into the central questions of existence with eyes wide open, observing life in a way that only he can.

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.

It's the summer of '74 . . . Richard Nixon has resigned from office, CB radios are the hot new thing, and in the great state of Texas two cousins hatch a plan to drive $1 million worth of stolen weed to Idaho, where some lunatic is gearing up to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle. But with a vengeful sheriff on their tail and the revered and feared marijuana kingpin of Central Texas out to get his stash back, Chuck and Dean are in for the ride of their lives—if they can make it out alive . . .