Showing results by narrator "Mel Foster" in All Categories

American economic policy ranks as something between bad and disgraceful. As leading economist Alan S. Blinder argues, a crucial cultural divide separates economic and political civilizations. Economists and politicians often talk - and act - at cross purposes: politicians typically seek economists' "advice" only to support preconceived notions, not to learn what economists actually know or believe. Politicians naturally worry about keeping constituents happy and winning elections. Some are devoted to an ideology.

In today's fast-moving Information Age, traditional business-planning tools are rapidly becoming obsolete. Yet the competitive, ever-changing marketplace demands that executives move quickly or risk becoming relics. Here's how the world's top executives use chess tactics to thrive in the face of incalculable complexities and unexpected change.

Amos Walker is hired by Helen and Dante Gunner, a bohemian Ann Arbor couple, to find Jerry Marcus, a film director who has disappeared with their investment money. It's one of Walker's easiest jobs to date. In just a few short hours, Walker locates Marcus in his bedroom...murdered, his body shoved into a cupboard, a bullet through his head.

Bank robbers. Pimps. Wise guys. Murderers...Today's FBI street agents face a never-ending parade of violence and chaos perpetuated by society's most dangerous and sometimes most demented felons. In this action-packed confession of an FBI man, Phil Kerby takes us on a white-knuckle ride through a career that pitted him against militia bombers and black militants, against hardened, hardcore kidnappers, coed hookers, biker drug dealers, bank robbers on the lam, and much, much more. Here are hostage standoffs and cat-and-mouse games with the Mob.

Thanks Dad gives fathers the pat on the back they deserve. Children of all ages share their heartfelt words of thanks and loving memories in these stories. Thanks Dad will bring any father joy, inspiration, and humor, and maybe even the realization that his kids did pay attention after all.

For Jim McCann, the founder and CEO of the world’s leading florist, 1-800-Flowers.com, being open and ready to speak to a variety of audiences is his most powerful leadership tool. In Talk Is (Not!) Cheap, McCann illustrates how the art of conversation leadership - the process he developed to engage others and create forward momentum in the workplace - can be used to inspire, innovate, and win. Using a blend of how-to and insightful personal stories, this audiobook argues that the gift of gab may just be the most critical (and undervalued) skill set in today’s workplace.

Thanks Dad gives fathers the pat on the back they deserve. Children of all ages share their heartfelt words of thanks and loving memories in these stories. Thanks Dad will bring any father joy, inspiration, and humor - and maybe even the realization that his kids did pay attention after all.

Daniel Youngblood is a world-weary oil and gas investment banker who’s ready to hit the beach, when he’s hired by a Saudi Prince for an OPEC deal where he can net himself $25 million as a swan song. At the same time, he meets and falls in love with Lydia, an exotic European fashion photographer, who he later discovers is really a CIA trained spy with a shocking history with the Saudi Prince. She convinces Daniel to enlist in what becomes a race for the lovers to stop a Muslim terrorist internet plot to bring down the Saudi royal family and cripple the world’s oil capacity, all before they wind up dead.

This is the real story of the Beatles' harrowing rise to fame, focusing on that seven-year stretch from the time the boys met as teenagers in the 1950s to early 1964, when the Fab Four prepared to invade America. From the boys' humble beginnings in Liverpool, to the cellars of Hamburg, When They Were Boys includes stories never before told, including heartbreaks, lucky breaks, and dramatic twists of timing, fate, loyalty, and betrayal.

Barry Stackpole was tough once. Amos Walker met him in a Cambodian shell crater when Walker was serving his country and Stackpole was on the payroll of the Detroit News, and they formed the kind of bond that war often creates. At war’s end, they returned to the Motor City, where Stackpole took to reporting crimes and Walker to solving them. A violent run-in with a big time mobster left Stackpole a leg and two fingers short, and he became an alcoholic. He has made several attempts to get his life straight since, but never quite managed.

George Mitchell knows how to bring peace to troubled regions. He was the primary architect of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement for peace in Northern Ireland. But when he served as US special envoy for Middle East peace from 2009 to 2011 - working to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - diplomacy did not prevail. Now, for the first time, Mitchell offers his insider account of how the Israelis and the Palestinians have progressed (and regressed) in their negotiations through the years.

For his entire adult life, ex-criminal Will Daniels has been running from his past. Now, in the wake of his son’s gruesome death, he’ll turn around and embrace it. After learning his boy got his head half blown off while helping a couple of punks rob a bank, Will tries - oh, how he tries - to just let the police handle the investigation. But as legal channels fall well short and Will’s helpless fury mounts, it’s only a matter of time before he dishes out a more personal brand of justice.

The tabloids were full of it. Constance Thayer, after a night of clubbing, drinks, and drugs, had taken an automatic pistol from the collection of her industrialist husband Doyle Thayer Jr. and emptied it into his back, as he lay naked and unconscious in their Iroquois Heights home. The news of Constance Thayer's X-rated past breathed new life into the scandal for another month. Walker's job was to gather enough dirt on the late Mr. Thayer to make his widow look clean by comparison. What he found was a monstrous magnate, a dubious corpse, and a gang of country-style gunrunners.

Former reporter Scott Fleetwood and his family are still recovering after tangling with a notorious kidnapper, the Piper, when another kidnapper grips the city. The Shepherd has snatched a young girl from a vacationing family. Other than money, he has one demand: he'll talk only to Scott.

Hired to uncover the past of Jodi Taylor, an actress in a hit TV show, Elvis leaves his native Los Angeles to head for Louisiana in search of Jodi's biological parents. But before he can tackle the mystery of Jodi's background, he is up against a whole host of eccentrics, including a crazed Raid-spraying housewife, a Cajun thug who looks like he's been made out of spare parts and a menacing hundred-year-old river turtle named Luther.

Karl Rove, the man who masterminded the rise of George W. Bush from governor of Texas to the presidency, who advised Bush during two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who some claim helped seize the 2004 election for Bush, and who was at the center of the Bush administration's two biggest scandals - is back. Since exiting the Bush administration, Rove has quietly become the country's greatest Republican power broker. This up-to-the-minute journalistic report sheds crucial light on Rove's vital behind-the-scenes role.

The End of the Beginning is a remarkable history of cancer treatment and the evolution of our understanding of its dynamic interplay with the immune system. Through Michael Kinch’s personal experience as a cancer researcher at Washington University and the head of the oncology program at a leading biotechnology company, we witness the incredible accumulation of breakthrough science and its rapid translation into life-saving technologies that have begun to dramatically increase the quality and quantity of life for cancer patients.

Amos Walker has made a lot of friends - and a few enemies - in his years as a detective in Detroit, but he has never had to deal with quite the trouble he finds when he agrees to grant the deathbed wish of Beryl Garnet. Beryl was a madam with a long, successful career. She's got no regrets about that, but she does about her son. She hasn't seen him in a long time and would like him to know his mother never forgot him. So she asks Walker to make sure that her son gets her ashes when she's gone.

Spring has come to Detroit's Sugartown enclave, and Amos Walker would like to feel kindly toward the human race. Unfortunately, his first case of the new season immediately leads him into trouble among the Polish settlers of neighboring Hamtramck, when old Martha Evancek hires him to look for her missing grandson. But even before Walker gets a chance to investigate, he's presented with a second case: an eminent Russian novelist who fears that someone is out to kill him.

Move over, Jason Bourne! Step aside, Jack Ryan! Special Agent Vin Cooper's star is rising as he travels to the most dangerous corners of the world, investigating a conspiracy that reaches up the military chain of command, leading to an explosive ending that will leave listeners gasping.