Showing results by narrator "Christopher Kipiniak" in All Categories

What is the GDP, and what does it mean? Why does the stock market go down when interest rates go up? What causes a dreaded recession? Economics impacts everyone's life, but most people take on faith what they read in the newspaper. Now, for anyone who doesn't know much about economics, noted economist Todd Buchholz explains it all simply and clearly. With refreshing wit and irreverence, Buchholz takes listeners by the hand and reveals the basic rules behind everything from food prices to trade deficits.

Here is Fast’s powerful denunciation of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and a remarkable historical document of Spain’s fight for freedom from governmental oppression. Howard Fast was a longtime proponent of the antifascist movement in Spain. During the Spanish Civil War, Fast supported a hospital for Popular Front forces, and in 1950 he was sentenced to three months in jail for refusing to give the names of other supporters of that hospital to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

With all the continents overrun by the living dead, the hubs of commerce and civilization are no longer New York or London or Beijing: they’re Nantucket, Havana, and Reykjavik. The sea is not the deadly, foreboding barrier it once was to human life: now it’s their source of safety, transportation, and sustenance. But the mainland beckons reckless, restless men, just as the sea did hundreds of years before, luring them with the promise of riches and danger.

The Wallet Allocation Rule is a revolutionary, definitive guide for winning the battle for share of customers' hearts, minds, and wallets. Backed by rock-solid science published in the Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, this landmark book introduces a new and rigorously tested approach - the wallet allocation rule - that is proven to link to the most important measure of customer loyalty: share of wallet.

An excruciatingly honest, unapologetic account of reckless alcoholism, Drinking and Driving is one young man's account of reaching rock bottom behind the wheel. Oliver Miller believes all he needs to be happy is a full tank of gas and a bottle of brand-name booze. It will take him years of false starts, shattered glass, doctors offices, dingy halfway houses, fights and slurred phone calls to anyone who'll pick up to realize that drinking and driving brings him everything but happiness.

Jack Keller works in fugitive apprehension and never feels more alive than when he's hunting down a skip. But when a young girl goes missing, and Keller finds out that the father is an AWOL member of the army's elite Delta Force, he knows immediately that this case will be anything but fun and games.

Brian Donovan returns with a hilarious glimpse into yet another struggle faced by many: losing weight. Chunk follows him along his crazy, overweight journey from the chubby 10-year-old who stole brownies and tricked his parents into thinking he'd lost weight to the teenage boy who made regular after-school plans to eat entire pies to the adult man who still hates working out and still loves Cinnabons.

The Hunter and The Trap presents two thrilling and suspenseful stories by Howard Fast, one of the most prolific authors of the 20th century. In “The Hunter,” celebrated but down-on-his-luck novelist Andrew Bell returns to New York from an African safari only to find himself the prey in someone else’s big game hunt. Bell must seek the help of an old friend in order to escape with his life.

After years of exile, shattered dreams, and confusion, Josan has finally discovered he is not the simple monk he appeared to be. Nor is he the victim of a mysterious fever, as he was led to believe. Instead his soul had been magically shifted into the body of the condemned Prince Lucius, leader of a failed rebellion against the rightful monarchs of the kingdom of Ikaria. And though Josan is the dominant personality in that body, the remnants of Lucius’s mind grow stronger each day.

It was a fate Josan once considered preferable to death. Cast by dark sorcery into the body of Emperor Lucius of Ikaria, the scholar-monk struggled to make peace with a mind that regarded him as a hostile intruder. But now, as simmering rivalries threaten to plunge the kingdom into a bloody civil war, Josan is faced with the most difficult choice of all. For the uneasy truce between him and Lucius is unraveling in a form of madness that is destroying the body they share. There’s only one hope for a cure.

It's a beautiful day in Greenwich Village, and for once Bedford Green is selling paintings. Business is booming, and this gossip columnist turned art dealer owes it all to his invaluable assistant, Sloane - who goes and spoils the fun by announcing that she's leaving on safari. Sloane is a Midwestern girl and has never laid eyes on any animal more exotic than a house cat, but she can't resist her uncle Dixon's invitation to visit Kenya to hobnob with everyone from the department-store king of Chicago to the prince of Wales.

In Horny: Stories Selected & New, Greg Boyd reinvents fictions and fables we think we know and takes them in unexpected directions. From the "Minor Russian Classic" in highly-condensed form to the updated re-telling of the Lone Ranger tale in "Tonto," to the tabloid satire of "I Married Elvis," the stories in this collection celebrate the unexpected - often unraveling the threads of contemporary American myth and culture in the process.

Madrid, 1936. In a city blasted by a civil war that many fear will cross borders and engulf Europe - a conflict one writer will call "the decisive thing of the century" - six people meet and find their lives changed forever. Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes that this war will give him fresh material and new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious novice journalist hungry for love and experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain.

Five generations of Preswicks, living, loving, fighting, laughing, and dying in a surge of limitless power that paralleled the course of America. A full tale of a family that grew with America, of an Aristocracy that gained everything but reason to live. Two women bore John Preswick two children - one the daughter of a southern innkeeper, who nursed a broken Revolutionary soldier back to health, the other a girl in New York, who waited seven years for her lover to return from the war.

Two mismatched cops search Los Angeles for a pair of bloodthirsty killers. On the night he escapes the asylum, Tom does not take his medication. He slips out of bed soon after lights out, pockets a knife, and goes looking for a guard. At knifepoint, he takes the man's clothes, cuts his throat, and walks out of the institution a free man. His brother is waiting outside the gate. They have work to do.

Spaceman and Blue track a trio of Vietnam veterans with murder on their minds. As Saigon erupts into chaos, General Tran walks with the easy calm of a man with a plan. After years of working with the Americans, he has no intention of being left behind in Vietnam, and so he has arranged for an escape route. He is nearly home free when he hears footsteps behind him in the darkened alley. He knows then that he will never leave Saigon alive.

Promised Land is part of my James Dean sequence of stories, which includes the recently published novel The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean. My intent was to explore the great icons of the 50’s and 60’s. Major iconic characters in the novel (besides James Dean) and short stories include Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley, Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe and, in this story, President Lyndon Johnson.

A team of burglars plans to rob a secluded country house in Waterbury, Connecticut while the famous owner is away visiting relatives for the holidays. But volatile relationships within this family lead to a last minute change in plans, and three generations convene in Waterbury instead. When the burglars arrive to find the house occupied instead of empty, a simple crime quickly becomes complicated in this gripping psychological thriller.