Showing results by narrator "Amy Finegan" in All Categories

According to conventional wisdom, innovation is best left to the dynamic entrepreneurs of the private sector, and government should get out of the way. But what if all this was wrong? What if, from Silicon Valley to medical breakthroughs, the public sector has been the boldest and most valuable risk taker of all?

Isabel Archer is a young American woman swept off to Europe in the late 19th century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naïve girl's experience of the world. When Isabel comes into a large, unexpected inheritance, she is finagled into a marriage with the charming, penniless, and - as Isabel finds out too late - cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond, whose connection to a certain Madame Merle is suspiciously intimate.

Anna is the mother of the Virgin Mary and the grandmother of Jesus. Her teachings and service birthed a spiritual lineage that changed the world. In this audiobook, you'll discover missing pieces of history concerning Anna, Mary, and Jesus, as channeled by Claire Heartsong, who has been receiving telepathic messages from Anna for 30 years.

Through the syncopated rhythms of the ragtime era to the thumping, rocking beats of the 1970s, generations of Pecks have maintained a determined steadiness. Adamantly middle-class - Peck-proud, as the family slogan goes - they are quick to sweep under the rug those members who do not live up to their standards. Maybe that's why Caleb Peck took off with his violincello as a boy? Sixty years later, his brother, Daniel, is still wondering.

Thirty-eight-year-old Jeremy Pauling has never left home. He lives on the top floor of a Baltimore row house where he creates collages of little people snipped from wrapping paper. His elderly mother putters in the rooms below, until her death. And it is then that Jeremy is forced to take in Mary Tell and her child as boarders. Mary is unaware of how much courage it takes Jeremy to look her in the eye. For Jeremy, like one of his paper creations, is fragile and easily torn - especially when he's falling in love.

A week after her 41st birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, pro-pain "dolorists", and the many little murders of capitalism.

There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and the way business and government are managed today that must change. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies’ reliance on companies such as McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability, and impedes our collective mission of halting climate breakdown. Mazzucato and Collington argue for building a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good.

Follow Me to Ground is fascinating and frightening, urgent and propulsive. In Ada, award-winning author Sue Rainsford has created an utterly bewitching heroine, one who challenges conventional ideas of womanhood and the secrets of the body. Short but authoritative, Follow Me to Ground lingers long after listening, pulling the listener into a dream between fairy tale and nightmare, desire and delusion, folktale and warning.

Who really creates wealth in our world? And how do we decide the value of what they do? At the heart of today's financial and economic crisis is a problem hiding in plain sight. In modern capitalism, value extraction is rewarded more highly than value creation: the productive process that drives a healthy economy and society. From companies driven solely to maximise shareholder value to astronomically high prices of medicines justified through big pharma's 'value pricing', we misidentify taking with making, and have lost sight of what value really means.

Mazzucato and Collington expertly debunk the myth that consultancies always add value to the economy. With a wealth of original research, they argue brilliantly for investment and collective intelligence within all organizations and communities, and for a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good. We must recalibrate the role of consultants and rebuild economies and governments that are fit for purpose.

Kalypso Deed is a shotgun, riding the interface between the AI Ganesh and human scientists who solve problems through cyber-assisted Dreams. But she's young and a little careless; she'd rather mix drinks and play jazz. Azamat Marcsson is a colourless statistician: middle-aged, boring, and obsessed with micro-organisms. A first-class nonentity - until one of his Dreams implodes, taking Kalypso with it. Now Ganesh is crashing, and nothing could be worse.

Kate Standish has been on the forest-world of Huginn less than a week, and she's already pretty sure her new company murdered her boss. But the little town of mill workers and farmers is more worried about ecoterrorism and a series of attacks by the bizarre, sentient dogs of this planet than a death most people would like to believe is an accident. That is, until Kate's investigation uncovers a conspiracy which threatens them all.

Four hundred years in the future, the most dangerous criminals are kept in suspended animation aboard prison ships and 'rehabilitated' in a shared virtual reality environment. But Miska Storrow, a thief and hacker with a background in black ops, has stolen one of these ships and created her own private indentured army: the Bastard Legion. In Friendly Fire, the Bastard Legion are hired to pull off a daring power-armoured heist of propriety tech. Getting the tech will be hard. Getting off the planet, deadly.

Even as a child, Serenity Jones knew she possessed unusual psychic gifts. Now, decades later, she's an acclaimed medium and host of her own widely viewed TV show, where she delivers messages to the living from loved ones who have died. Lately, though, her efforts to boost ratings and garner fame have compromised her clairvoyant instincts. When Serenity books a young war widow to appear as a guest, the episode quickly unravels, stirring up a troubling controversy. And as she tries to undo the damage – to both her reputation and her show – Serenity finds that pride comes at a high price.

The Price family has spent generations studying the monsters of the world, working to protect them from humanity - and humanity from them. Meet Verity Price. Despite being trained from birth as a cryptozoologist, she'd rather dance a tango than tangle with a demon, and is spending a year in Manhattan to pursue her dream career in professional ballroom dance. That is, until talking mice, telepathic mathematicians, and a tangle with the Price family's old enemies, the Covenant of St. George, get in her way.

Behind the high and imposing gates of a prestigious college, five students have taken their lives. All of them friends, all of them good kids, all of them dead within months of each other. When FBI Agent Jess Bishop is called in to investigate, what she discovers will make her just as vulnerable as the students she’s trying to protect. As Jess begins to unravel the secrets behind the deaths, she uncovers something much more sinister at the school, and she is determined to find out who is at the centre of it.

This is a story about an inquisitive little fish whose mother gave him orders to remain at home while she went away in search of food. But Finspot could not resist temptation. He had to take a look at the area surrounding his home in the coral. The result of his disobedience was more trouble than he had bargained for - and some very narrow escapes. He barely made it home.

In a mall like any other, a gang of teenage girls are suddenly caught up in a maelstrom of shopping and violence. But - as the designer bullets fly - it is not only their own lives they are fighting for. Unknown to them they are battling for the life of a man trapped in another place, in a different world, and with very different enemies. He is a man they have never met, but who represents the future of the human race...or could destroy it.

In 21 Days to Baghdad, historian Dr. Heather Stur describes the commitment of the division to Kuwait, the invasion of Iraq and the three weeks of violent desert conflicts on the way to Baghdad before the siege and battle for the city itself, and the “thunder runs” that saw its fall to U.S. forces. She then details the complex security mission that required the soldiers and their commanders to convince Iraqi citizens that the U.S. was there to help them, while at the same time they continued fighting Saddam Hussein’s elite Republican Guard, paramilitary forces, and terrorists.

The story begins on the Italian coast in 1962. A young innkeeper watches in disbelief as a beautiful American girl gets out of a boat and climbs towards his hotel. She turns out to be an actress, on the run from the shenanigans going on down the coast in Rome at the filming of Cleopatra. A few days later international star Richard Burton, much the worse for wear, appears in the village, too. Half a century later, and half a world away in Hollywood, an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot - searching for the woman he last saw in his hotel 50 years before.