Showing results by narrator "Michael Kirby" in All Categories

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.”

It is the dawn of the twentieth century when the beautiful, budding feminist Katherine Dexter falls in love with Stanley McCormick, son of a millionaire inventor. The two wed, but before the marriage is consummated, Stanley experiences a nervous breakdown and is diagnosed as a schizophrenic sex maniac. Locked up for the rest of his life at Riven Rock, the family's California mansion, Stanley is treated by a series of confident doctors determined to cure him.

My name is Isobel Drake. And I have a dangerous secret. I'm a half-human, half-dragon hybrid hiding in plain sight in the humans-only city of Yerba Buena. There are others like me, pretending to be fully human, in a world where dragons are exiled to reservations and face the death penalty if caught in a human settlement. When a half-dragon warrior demands my help to find a stolen dragon's egg, I realize I can't hide anymore. Now, the fate of a helpless dragon hatchling lies in my hands. I have to save her...even if it means confronting dangerous enemies and risking my secret.

In The Pricing Model Revolution: How Pricing Will Change the Way We Sell and Buy On and Offline, world renowned pricing expert Danilo Zattais delivers an essential and engaging blueprint to building an enduring competitive advantage with insightful pricing models. In the book, you'll learn to identify the best monetization approaches for your products and how to execute the one that makes the most sense for your business. From freemium to subscription, pay-per-use, and even neuropricing, the author discusses every available option and shows you how to choose.

There are two sides to every story. The surface reality that’s presented to the world. And then, there’s the other side. The real one. The one that matters. Seventeen-year-old self-proclaimed asshole Toby Page is alone. No friends. No family. He trades maintenance work in exchange for room and board. Every day, he fights demons no one else can see. Every day, he wants to give up. But he can’t. Not yet. When Alice Eliot moves in downstairs, she offers Toby some light in his dark world.

In the newly revised third edition of Inside the Black Box: A Simple Guide to Systematic Investing, veteran practitioner and investor Rishi K Narang delivers another insightful discussion of how quantitative and algorithmic trading strategies work in non-mathematical terms. As with prior editions, this third edition is full of timeless concepts and timely updates. Supplemented by compelling anecdotes and real-world stories, the book explains the most relevant developments in the discipline since the publication of the second edition in 2013.

[Contains explicit content] Get ready for a completely improvised and unscripted Audible Original that invites you to listen in on the funniest phone calls from the world’s weirdest town. Bad Reception is an entirely improvised comedy, set entirely on the phone. A cast of over 40 top comedians and improvisers brings to life (and completely makes up) the story of South Grampers, Northern California - the Movie Theater Butter Capital of the World.

In the summer of 1938, Layla Beck's father, a United States senator, cuts off her allowance and demands that she find employment on the Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal jobs program. Within days Layla finds herself far from her accustomed social whirl, assigned to cover the history of the remote mill town of Macedonia, West Virginia, and destined, in her opinion, to go completely mad with boredom.

After serving as a US Marine during World War II and attending college on the GI Bill, Sam Keith decided to seek adventure in Alaska as a laborer on the Adak Navy base. There he befriended Dick Proenneke, whose shared love of the outdoors, hard work, and self-reliance quickly bonded an alliance between the two. Together they explored the wilds of South Central Alaska, while working on the Navy base, hunting and fishing with friends and breathing in the great outdoors.

Private investigator Harry Angel is in a jam. Handcuffed in his apartment along with the cops and a corpse, he stands accused of violently murdering three people. The good news is he knows who did it. But in order to exonerate himself, Harry must first make his escape—and figure out his own identity.

Big-band frontman Johnny Favorite was singing for the troops when a Luftwaffe fighter squadron strafed the bandstand, killing the crowd and leaving the singer near death. The army returned him to a private hospital in upstate New York, leaving him to live out his days as a vegetable while the world forgot him. But Louis Cyphre never forgets. Cyphre had a contract with the singer, stipulating payment upon Johnny's death—payment that will be denied as long as Johnny clings to life. When Cyphre hires Harry Angel to find Johnny at the hospital, Angel learns that the singer has disappeared.

Vampires crave dragon's blood. I'm the only guy who can deliver the goods. My name is Fynn Drake. When vampires attacked my city, they killed hundreds, including my wife and precious daughter. But the vampires spared me. Why me and not the others? Because they deem my dragon expertise useful. I'm their slave. Their henchman. Their broker. Dragon's blood heals vampires from lethal injuries and even allows them to walk in daylight. It makes these monsters almost invincible.

For decades, performance management has been seen as an annual chore by managers and HR alike. But this process is changing, and there are ways to make it more effective for your organization and more useful for employees. If you read (or listen to) nothing else on performance management in your organization, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you assess performance more accurately, have more effective feedback conversations, and encourage the growth of your employees.

The annals of movie history are full of lost treasures – spectacular scripts from world-renowned writers that could have been classics, had they only been made. Now, for the first time, some of these forgotten gems have been brought to life, fully realised as vivid, cinematic radio productions. Scripted by major 20th Century writers, they star a host of A-list actors and feature richly evocative, atmospheric soundtracks.

It only takes an instant for Grim—monster hunter and emotionally scarred hero—to lose everything. Grim is having a bad year. A hunter by trade, his world is ripped apart when he is cursed with a sickness that is slowly changing him into one of the very creatures he hunts. Worse, Grim is forced to abandon the woman he loves for fear that he'll destroy her. So he must find a cure. Otherwise, they'll never be together.

Waking in the hospital after a car accident, Lovina Yoder doesn’t remember the Amish family who claim her as their own - or the man who says he’s her fiancé. Thoughtful and handsome, Johannes Miller clearly cares for her, and Lovina longs to recall the walks and buggy rides he describes, and the plans they once made. Life in the Amish community seems full of joy, faith, and warmth. And yet, Lovina senses there is something more in her past, just beyond her grasp….

With his father’s mysterious disappearance and his brother Ronnie enlisting in the Vietnam War, 13-year-old TJ Crowley is left alone with his racist, unstable mother, Kate. The newly enforced Fair Housing Act results in the unthinkable for the Crowleys when a Black family, headed by the eminent Dr. Washington, crosses the racial red line and moves in next door. Kate is quick to warn TJ that their new neighbors are strictly off-limits and makes a panicked call to beg Ray, her old flame, to travel to their home in Wichita Kansas to help deal with “the problem next door.”

Ollie and Moritz are two teenagers who will never meet. Each of them lives with a life-affecting illness. Contact with electricity sends Ollie into debilitating seizures while Moritz has a heart defect and is kept alive by an electronic pacemaker. If they did meet, Ollie would seize, but turning off the pacemaker would kill Moritz. Through an exchange of letters, the two boys develop a strong bond of friendship that becomes a lifeline during dark times.

Grim is having a bad year. A monster hunter by trade, his world is ripped apart when he's cursed with a sickness that's slowly changing him into one of the very creatures he hunts. Yet there's hope in a truce with his sister, Shelby. If anyone can help, it's her, because she's the strongest witch he knows. But unfortunately, Shelby hates him. She begrudgingly agrees to help, but Grim has to assist her first. You see, her old coven seeks the bones of a dead witch—magical bones that are supposedly hidden in her house. All Grim has to do is find them to stop the coven from snatching them first.

The short works of Dostoevsky exist in the very large shadow of his astonishing longer novels, but they too are among literature's most revered works and offer keys to understanding the themes in his longer works. Contained in this volume are the short stories "White Nights", "A Disgraceful Affair", and "The Dream of the Ridiculous Man", three of Dostoevsky's most troubling, moving, and poignant works.