Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Beville" in All Categories

When CIA operator Mark Pierce suffers serious head injuries during a car crash in Rio De Janeiro his memory is wiped. He knows he works for the CIA, but the past year of his life is gone. There are two people with Pierce—a man and a woman, Amelia. The man claims he's Pierce's superior but then tries to stab Pierce and flees. Amelia seems terrified and says that Pierce kidnapped her. Is anyone telling the truth?

Jim Hampton arrived in New Orleans, eager to escape the stress of quitting a lucrative law practice. Instead, he finds a city on edge as a tropical depression brews in the Gulf. The storm appears to be dredging up the odd and unusual like shells from the ocean floor. Shadowy figures appear in alleyways; mysterious voices seem to come from nowhere. Jim is skeptical of the locals' claims that these are warnings from victims of past storms. He had all but given up on belief in the supernatural. That is until he meets Myriam, who begins to restore the faith of his childhood.

In Ray Kurzweil's New York Times bestseller The Singularity is Near, the futurist and entrepreneur describes the Singularity, a likely future utterly different than anything we can imagine. The Singularity is triggered by the tremendous growth of human and computing intelligence that is an almost inevitable outcome of Moore's Law. Since the book's publication, the coming of the Singularity is now eagerly anticipated by many of the leading thinkers in Silicon Valley, from PayPal mastermind Peter Thiel to Google co-founder Larry Page.

Brian Evenson's fifth story collection constructs a human landscape as unearthly as it is mundane. Replete with the brutality, primordial waste, and savage blankness familiar to listeners of his earlier works, Evenson's Kafkaesque allegories entice the mind while stubbornly disordering it.

After several missing university students turn up dead in Iowa’s cornfields, the police turn to FBI Special Agent Sterling Gray, a rising star at the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit. After painstaking investigative work, Gray thought they had identified the killer. But when Interpol suddenly contacts him about a similar investigation in London, the case takes a shocking turn. Now Gray must follow the chilling trail of a killer known only as the Mirror Man. To catch him, Gray must get inside the killer’s twisted mind—without losing himself in the process.

USA Today best-selling author Ty Hutchinson and former detective and Wall Street Journal best-selling author Brian Shea deliver a fast-paced mystery series filled with twists, perfect for fans of James Patterson and Michael Connelly.

When Bernd Heinrich decided to write a memoir of his ultramarathon running experience, he realized that the preparation for the race was as important, if not more so, than the race itself. In Why We Run, Heinrich considers the flight endurance of birds, the antelope's running prowess and limitations, and the ultra-endurance of camels to understand how human physiology can or cannot replicate these adaptations. Heinrich offers an original and provocative work combining the rigors of science with the passion of running.

It was once a utopian dream. But today’s internet, despite its conveniences and connectivity, is the primary cause of a pervasive unease that has taken hold in the U.S. and other democratic societies. The roots of this crisis, argue Frank McCourt and Michael Casey, lie in the prevailing order of the internet. In plain but forceful language, the authors—a civic entrepreneur and an acclaimed journalist—show how a centralized system controlled by a small group of for-profit entities has set this catastrophe in motion and eroded our personhood.

This is the unbelievable, unforgettable, unparalleled story of an ordinary guy whose attempts to become famous doing the thing he wanted most—become a world class race car driver—devolved into a you-can’t-make-this-up tale of one of the biggest crime rings and drug scandals of the 1980s. Now, with the help of New York Times bestselling author A.J. Baime, Randy tells the whole truth for the first time ever, a gripping narrative unlike any other, a sports story for the ages, and shocking a true crime epic.

What happens when you pack almost a dozen jails, bulging at the seams with society’s cast-offs, onto a spit of landfill purposefully hidden from public view? Prize-winning journalists Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau have spent two years interviewing more than 130 people comprising a broad cross section of lives touched by New York City's Rikers Island prison complex—from incarcerated people and their relatives, to officers, lawyers, and commissioners, with stories spanning the 1970s to the present day. The portrait that emerges calls into question the very nature of justice in America.

Historian Bennett Parten provides a groundbreaking account of Sherman’s March to the Sea—the critical Civil War campaign that destroyed the Confederacy—told for the first time from the perspective of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who fled to the Union lines and transformed Sherman’s march into the biggest liberation event in American history.

Five men drive into an empty Kazakh desert. Four are professional killers. The fifth is their intended victim. This is not the first time someone has underestimated CIA paramilitary operator Mark Pierce. And it won't be the last. Pierce quickly dispatches the assassins, but soon realizes that his problems are only beginning. Someone has deliberately brought him to Kazakhstan so that he can be framed for the theft of Russian nuclear waste.

When Mark Greenside - a native New Yorker living in California, political lefty, writer, and lifelong skeptic - is dragged by his girlfriend to a tiny Celtic village in Brittany at the westernmost edge of France in Finistere, or what he describes as "the end of the world," his life begins to change. In a playful, headlong style, and with enormous affection for the Bretons, Greenside shares how he makes a life for himself in a country where he doesn't speak the language or understand the culture.

Ancient Egypt wasn't all pyramids, sphinxes and gold sarcophagi. For your average Egyptian, life was tough, and work was hard, conducted under the burning gaze of the sun god Ra.

When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and beauty of his discoveries.

Throughout his storied career, Aswath Damodaran has searched for the universal key to demystify corporate finance and valuation. Now, at last, he offers the groundbreaking answer to listeners everywhere. As the corporate lifecycle touches virtually every aspect of business, this book is for anyone with skin in the corporate finance game—from managers to investors, from novices to seasoned pros. Aswath Damodaran’s The Corporate Life Cycle is the definitive guide to understanding businesses growth, behavior, and value.

In The Three Ages of Water, Peter Gleick guides us through the long, fraught history of our relationship to this precious resource. Water has shaped civilizations and empires, and driven centuries of advances in science and technology—from agriculture to aqueducts, steam power to space exploration—and progress in health and medicine.

Most scholars and analysts believe that the primary cause of our abysmal war record since Vietnam has been the US military’s overwhelmingly conventional approach to conflict, which favors kinetic operations, highly mobile precision firepower, and sophisticated systems of command and control. Here, James Warren argues that a much more formidable obstacle to success has been pervasive strategic ineptitude at the highest levels of decision-making, including the presidency, the national security council, and the foreign policy community in DC.

By the year 2032, the US federal debt has surpassed $50 trillion. The American empire is on the verge of collapse. An entrepreneur named Kade Kapur has an idea for rescuing the debt-ridden United States: The government will issue stock in a company with exclusive mining rights to an asteroid whose orbit will soon bring it near Earth. The asteroid, which contains $10 trillion in valuable minerals, is officially called 2015 RK 16 Maimonides, but it soon comes to be known by another name: Mammon.

CIA operative Mark Pierce is a trained killer with a strict moral code—he only targets those who truly deserve to die. So he has no qualms about taking out Victor Vautrin, an international arms dealer supplying fanatical terrorists in West Africa who may soon trigger a brutal civil war. But when he is tasked with other objectives—rescue kidnapped tourists and recover eleven million dollars of stolen CIA money—it quickly becomes clear to Pierce that someone doesn't want him to succeed in his primary mission.