Showing results by narrator "Johnny Heller"

What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster known as the Edsel, the fast and incredible rise of Xerox, and the unbelievable scandals at General Electric and Texas Gulf Sulphur have in common? Each is an example of how an iconic company was defined by a particular moment of fame or notoriety; these notable and fascinating accounts are as relevant today to understanding the intricacies of corporate life as they were when the events happened.

A tanker steaming through the deep Northwest Providence Channel of the Bahamas comes across a shocking sight: a lone dinghy carrying Captain Julian Harvey and the body of a young girl. They are all that remain of the ketch Bluebelle, a handsome sixty-foot sailing yacht chartered by the Duperrault family of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Fact: Your brain is being controlled - and you don't even know it. Because if you think the ads you're seeing today are just pretty pictures with nice, creative copy, you're mistaken. Truth is, you are being powerfully influenced by dozens of proven scientific principles of advertising psychology...little-known techniques of consumer persuasion that go completely unnoticed by the buying public.

'Hello there.' I looked at the pale, freckled hand on the back of the empty bar seat next to me in the business class lounge of Heathrow Airport, then up into the stranger's face. 'Do I know you?' Delayed in London, Ted Severson meets a woman at the airport bar. Over cocktails they tell each other rather more than they should, and a dark plan is hatched - but is either of them being serious? Could they actually go through with it? And if they did, what would be their chances of getting away with it?

Denise Hilton, a young single mother, is driving through Edenton, North Carolina, when her car skids off the road during a storm. With her is her four-year-old son, Kyle, a boy with severe learning disabilities for whom she has sacrificed everything. When volunteer fireman Taylor McAden finds her she is unconscious and bleeding, but when she wakes an even more chilling truth becomes clear: Kyle is gone.

In one of the last cities standing after the world fell to monsters, best friends Zed Kagari and Brock Dunderfel have high hopes for the future. Zed desperately wishes to join the ranks of the Mages Guild, where his status as Freestone's only half-elf might finally be an asset. Brock, the roguishly handsome son of merchants, is confident he'll be welcomed into the ranks of the Merchants Guild. But just as it seems the boys' dreams have come true, their lives take a startling turn...and they find themselves members of the perilous Adventurers Guild.  

Scotland's beloved storyteller, George MacDonald, 19th-century Scottish novelist and poet, was reintroduced to 20th century Christians by C. S. Lewis, whose reading of MacDonald's Phantastes triggered his own spiritual awakening and conversion. Other renowned writers have voiced similar acknowledgements. G. K. Chesterton said of MacDonald, "If we test the matter of originality of attitude, George MacDonald was one of the three or four greatest men of the 19th century."

Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson led the design of such crucial aircraft as the P-38 and Constellation, but he will be more remembered for the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. His extraordinary leadership of the Lockheed "Skunk Works" cemented his reputation as a legendary figure in American aerospace management. 

More than a year has passed since The Event, and the survivors who returned home are trying to stitch their lives back together. They think they are safe. But that is a lie. The Darkness has followed them, and this time It's amassing an army of allies. While key officials at Black Island fight to keep the secret, the survivors' lives converge again. Confused by terrifying visions and unpredictable rampages, they seek help wherever they can find it.

Born to a prominent Chicago judge and his stifled socialite wife, Mia Dennett moves against the grain as a young inner-city art teacher. One night, Mia enters a bar to meet her on-again, off-again boyfriend. But when he doesn't show, she unwisely leaves with an enigmatic stranger. With his smooth moves and modest wit, Colin Thatcher seems at first like a safe one-night stand. But following Colin home will turn out to be the worst mistake of Mia's life.

In Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington, our two favorite philosopher-comedians return just in time to save us from the doublespeak and flim-flam of politics in America.

Deploying jokes as well as the occasional insight from Aristotle and his peers, Cathcart and Klein explain what politicos are up to when they state: "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence"; "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is"; or even, "We hold these truths to be self-evident...."

A rarely frank account of the US infantry experience in northern Europe, A Foot Soldier for Patton takes the listener from the beaches of Normandy through the giddy drive across France to the brutal battles on the Westwall, in the Ardennes, and finally to the conquest of Germany itself. Patton's army is best known for dashing armored attacks; its commander combining the firepower of tanks with their historic lineage as cavalry. But when the Germans stood firm, the greatest fighting was done by Patton's long undersung infantry.

Pulitzer Prize winner James B. Stewart shows for the first time how four of the biggest names on Wall Street - Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel, and Dennis Levine - created the greatest insider-trading ring in financial history and almost walked away with billions - until a team of downtrodden detectives triumphed over some of America's most expensive lawyers to bring this powerful quartet to justice.

He's played a deranged groundskeeper, a bellowing lounge singer, a paranormal exterminator, and a grouchy weatherman. He is William James "Bill" Murray, America's greatest national treasure. From his childhood lugging golf bags at a country club to his first taste of success on Saturday Night Live, from his starring roles in Hollywood blockbusters to his reinvention as a hipster icon for the 21st century, The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray chronicles every aspect of his extraordinary life and career.

An airliner’s controls abruptly fail mid-flight over the Atlantic. An oil tanker runs aground in Japan when its navigational system suddenly stops dead. Hospitals everywhere have to abandon their computer databases when patients die after being administered incorrect dosages of their medicine. In the Midwest, a nuclear power plant nearly becomes the next Chernobyl when its cooling systems malfunction. At first, these random computer failures seem like unrelated events.

After container ships carrying black-market nuclear bombs are detonated in American port cities, millions are killed, and the country is thrown into panic. In Greenwood, Nebraska, Paul Edwards learns about the devastating terrorist attacks on the news. As the power grid goes down, his fear is magnified by the knowledge that his wife and daughter are a thousand miles away in Atlanta.

Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes offers an eye-opening account of how corporate managers think the world works, and how big organizations shape moral consciousness. Based on extensive interviews with managers at every level of two industrial firms and of a large public relations agency, IMoral Mazes takes the reader inside the intricate world of the corporation.

The bizarre murder of a parish priest at a New York bondage club opens Nikki Heat's most thrilling and dangerous case so far, pitting her against New York's most vicious drug lord, an arrogant CIA contractor, and a shadowy death squad out to gun her down. And that is just the tip of an iceberg that leads to a dark conspiracy reaching all the way to the highest level of the NYPD.

"Once upon a time Corporate America paid certain people huge fees to tell organizations what they were doing wrong. These men and women really knew next to nothing. They trashed businesses, destroyed careers, and wasted time and money. They called themselves Management Consultants. I know them well. I was one of them. Welcome to the House of Lies."

American Civil Wars takes listeners beyond the battlefields and sectional divides of the US Civil War to view the conflict from outside the national arena of the United States. Contributors position the American conflict squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings - all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s.