Showing results by narrator "Paul Heitsch" in All Categories

One day in 1996, the neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel took a call from his program officer at the National Institute of Mental Health, who informed him that he had been awarded a key grant. Also, the officer said, he and his colleagues thought Kandel would win the Nobel Prize. "I hope not soon," Kandel's wife, Denise, said when she heard this. Sociologists had found that Nobel Prize winners often did not contribute much more to science, she explained.

In Americans in China, Terry Lautz provides a series of biographical portraits of Americans who have lived and worked in China from before the Communist era to the present. The pathbreaking experiences of these men and women provide unique insights and deeply human perspectives on issues that have shaped US engagement with the People's Republic: politics, diplomacy, education, business, art, law, journalism, and human rights.

Life in Kissimmee, Florida, is more than tropical weather, palm trees, and sipping Bloody Marys. When one of her regular informants doesn’t return her messages, Private Investigator Madison Law knows something is amiss even if no one else believes her. Just when she thinks things can’t get worse, she receives a terse call from her partner, Rick Anders.

 Accomplishing the Impossible draws contemporary leadership lessons from the events and people that were central to the beginning of the American Revolution. Retired general, scholar, and educator William E. Rapp cuts through the popular mythology around the Boston Campaign and applies the historical lessons to challenges faced by today's business and public sector leaders. By doing so, he inspires today's leaders to view contemporary leadership and change management through a fresh lens. 

On a business trip, a high-powered 56-year-old American entrepreneur visits his partners in China. After their meeting, his Asian mentor invites him to an orphanage, a trip that will change the course of his family’s life forever. Without hesitation, he and his wife fall in love with Anglo/Asian twin girls and become their adoptive parents. The children grow up in a world of twists and turns with multiple coincidences and synchronicity. Their journey takes them from China to Europe to America and back to China where their unusual birth mother enters their lives.

Nobody Hates Trump More than Trump: An Intervention is perhaps the only genuinely original thing you have read yet about Donald Trump. It can be read in a variety of ways: as a psychological investigation of Trump, as a philosophical meditation on the relationship between language and power, as a satirical compilation of the “collected wit and wisdom of Donald Trump”, and above all as a dagger into the rhetoric of American political discourse - a dissection of the politesse that gave rise to and sustains Trump.

Football is at a crossroads, its future imperiled by the very physicality that drives its popularity. Its grass roots - high school and youth travel program - are withering. But players from the small South Pacific American territory of Samoa are bucking that trend, quietly becoming the most disproportionately overrepresented culture in the sport. But the very thing that makes them so good at football - their extraordinary internalization of discipline and warrior self-image - makes them especially vulnerable to its pitfalls, including concussions and brain injuries.

Alan I. Abramowitz has emerged as a leading spokesman for the view that our current political divide is not confined to a small group of elites and activists but a key feature of the American social and cultural landscape. The polarization of the political and media elites, he argues, arose and persists because it accurately reflects the state of American society. Here, he goes further: The polarization is unique in modern US history. Today's party divide reflects an unprecedented alignment of many different divides: racial and ethnic, religious, ideological, and geographic.

Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of 31 men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016. Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue-collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community.  

Jonas had resigned himself to a solitary life on the remote island of Palmyra, home of Sandra Whitmeyer's clandestine clone-growing lab. With young clones now inexplicably dying, Jonas is torn between feeling responsible for cleaning up his mother's mistakes - alone - and his desire to be with Bree. A heated tussle on Palmyra leaves Jonas and Briana further apart than ever. Bree storms off to Portland, Oregon, but not before encountering clones of a loved one lost long ago.

A year-old murder in the rainforest of Costa Rica haunts Raven MacMillan. Details of the tragedy she witnessed remain suppressed deep inside her subconscious. When circumstances force her to return to the scene of the crime, someone makes it abundantly clear: Raven isn't welcome. Finally healing from his girlfriend's murder, human clone Kyle Jones is on a mission: find the stolen trackers scientists are using to control the actions of innocent children.

The Lupane Legacy is a story of tangled family ties, of love, betrayal, and revenge. From the halls of power and intrigue in Washington, DC, to the dark secrets of postcolonial Africa, this international thriller will pull you into a world where nothing is black and white, and everyone has something to hide.

Turn to me, Natalie. His mental call to her was dangerous, of course. Dangerous for him. Dangerous for her too, but she was in danger, anyway. Look at me now. Her gaze traveled slowly upward. With every moment, physical awareness stretched tauter between them. Her eyes wandered over Julian's face, over his slashing dark brows, down the ridge of his aquiline nose to his chiseled mouth.

One hot night, the past and present came together in a blinding flash of passion and violence. When a hood on the run and a sex-hungry teenager meet up with two ruthless killers at a lonely desert motel, a night of terror and violence ensues.

A member of the underground is caught and forced to relate the details of a conspiracy to overthrow the Leader who has all Earth in subjugation in the year 2240.

From the author of the literary pulp phenomenon Spaceman Blues comes a future history cautionary tale, a heist movie in the style of a hippie novel. Liberation is a speculation on life in near-future America after the country suffers an economic cataclysm that leads to the resurgence of ghosts of its past (such as the human slave trade). Our heroes are the Slick Six, a group of international criminals who set out to alleviate the worst of these conditions and put America on the road to recovery.

Jonathan Seede is the picture of Washington, DC, respectability, an urban pioneer with a pretty wife, a new baby, and a job at the town’s most esteemed newspaper. But 10 blocks from the White House, on the notorious 14th Street strip, a war is raging over deviant behavior. And Seede is on the front lines, deep into a secret freelance project that’s taking him to places where most people would never dare to go.

The project sponsor/executive/director is essential for any project, as this person is in charge and ultimately accountable for its success (or lack thereof). However, he or she is rarely trained in project management; rather they are likely to be a general manager or senior executive. Michiel van der Molen seeks to help these accidental project overseers understand their role and responsibilities, guiding them to proactively take control of the project.

Roger Federer could live anywhere in the world, but he always returns to the place he loves most: Switzerland. Dave Seminara is a mad traveler and tennis lifer who has written about Federer for the New York Times and other publications. A pair of autoimmune diseases and a knee surgery kept Dave from playing tennis for years, but as he inched toward recovery, he had a bright idea: why not start his tennis comeback on hallowed ground - courts that his hero Roger Federer graced in Switzerland.

In a career defined by an allegiance to the truth, Charles Bowden's reporting continually unearthed the gritty realities behind high-profile hype, including the doomed war on drugs. His daring expeditions to Ciudad Juárez, which resulted in such books as his best-seller Murder City, left him with haunting images of ruthless drug lords and their prey. In Jericho, an unpublished work brought to light after Bowden's death in 2014, he captures the monumental corruption and addiction to power that fuel Mexico's drug cartels.