Showing results by narrator "Paul Heitsch" in All Categories

As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn't seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. He spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer's greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with his memories of a difficult, complicated childhood.

Successful word coinage—those that stay in currency for a good long time—tend to conceal their beginnings. We take them at face value and rarely when and where they were first minted. Engaging, illuminating, and authoritative, Ralph Keyes' The Hidden History of Coined Words explores the etymological underworld of terms and expressions and uncovers plenty of hidden gems.

Five years ago, astronaut Jack Templeton took the spacecraft Magellan to the farthest reaches of our solar system, never to be heard from again. Until now. When the Magellan suddenly reappears where an undiscovered planet was suspected to be, it poses more questions than answers. How did Jack survive all this time? Can he be rescued before his life support runs out? And what is the object long thought to be the elusive "Planet Nine?"

To Miami Jones, fishing is a pastime best done with a cooler of beer and low expectations. So when a cable TV personality hires him to investigate irregularities in a competitive fishing tournament in Spanish Wells, Bahamas, Jones is less than enthusiastic. He expects to find a bunch of old geezers kicking back with lazy rods and a bucket of worms. What he finds is a high-stakes and big money game, where winning is measured not in inches and pounds but in views and sponsorship deals. Before he knows it, Jones finds himself in over his head.

To his New York intellectual peers, Lionel Trilling could seem reserved and circumspect. But in his selected letters, Trilling is revealed in all his variousness and complexity. In Life in Culture, edited by Adam Kirsch, Trilling's letters add up to an intimate portrait of a great critic and of America's intellectual journey from the political passions of the 1930s to the cultural conflicts of the 1960s and beyond.

In this fascinating and comprehensive examination of the underside of globalization, Moises Naim illuminates the struggle between traffickers and the hamstrung bureaucracies trying to control them. From illegal migrants to drugs to weapons to laundered money to counterfeit goods, the black market produces enormous profits that are reinvested to create new businesses, enable terrorists, and even to take over governments. Naim reveals the inner workings of these amazingly efficient international organizations and shows why it is so hard - and so necessary - to contain them.

War is a serious business - or is it? Christopher Anvil turns his sardonic sense of humor loose on the subject. Hard-SF legend and Analog regular Christopher Anvil brings together mind-bending ideas and grim-but-true black humor in the face of war's utter destruction in this mega-compilation.

Every parent of a teenage boy knows there are certain conversations they must have with their son, but they often put them off - or worse, don't have them at all - because they simply don't know where to start. Written by Dr. Tim Hawkes, one of Australia's top educators, Ten Conversations You Must Have with Your Son offers a practical, accessible, and invaluable way to get these discussions started. Dr. Hawkes provides parents with the essential information they need to negotiate their way through what can often be very difficult territory.

Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like. Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice in the Dutch Golden Age. Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic.

There has never been a more important time - in corporate America and in the American military - for leaders, at all levels, to understand how to invest in people. This book teaches you to do just that. Written by a 27-year army colonel, veteran, and leader of more than 5,000 troops in the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, It's Personal, Not Personnel offers true stories and practical frameworks you can apply to the people in your organization and on your team.

When a South Florida golf club is hit with a series of suspicious events on the eve of hosting a big tournament, there’s only one man to call. Miami Jones. But when a caddy goes missing after an altercation with Jones, Miami finds himself in the middle of the case - not just solving it. Miami must navigate billionaire property developers engaged in a high-priced tit-for-tat, death threats, and a state investigator interested in his girlfriend in a professional capacity, and maybe more - to keep himself, the club, and the great state of Florida well and truly out of the deep rough.

Humans - there's no understanding them, and no dealing with them either. Or even their planet. Pity the poor aliens, whose shape-changing ability should let them take over the planet Earth before the humans even know they're there - if it weren't for all that omnipresent pollution. Or consider another set of invaders, from a planet where the weather is always mild and the changing of the seasons is hardly noticeable. They land in force; their weapons more powerful than those of the primitive humans, but they've never had to deal with below-zero temperatures, flash floods, or tornadoes.

In this book, former North Korea lead foreign service officer at the US embassy in Seoul, Patrick McEachern, unpacks the contentious and tangled relationship between the Koreas in an approachable question-and-answer format. Why have the two Koreas developed politically and economically in such radically different ways? What are the origins of a divided Korean Peninsula? Who rules the two Koreas? How have three generations of the authoritarian Kim dictatorship shaped North Korea?

By 2016, it was impossible to ignore an international resurgence of xenophobia. What had happened? Looking for clues, psychiatrist and historian George Makari started out in search of the idea’s origins. To his astonishment, he discovered an unfolding series of never-told stories. While a fear and hatred of strangers may be ancient, he found that the notion of a dangerous bias called “xenophobia” arose not so long ago.

Sasha Naradnyo had come a long way from the slums of Crack City on the planet Peezgtaan - from Human gangster to head of security for Tweezaa e-Traak, the Varoki heiress to the largest fortune in the history of the Stellar Commonwealth. Then the largest nation on the Varoki home world collapsed into riots and civil war, a murderously anti-human Varoki fanatic made his bid for power, and the head of the Secret Police decided to take a personal interest in Sasha.

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.

Discover life-altering direct contact by phone, computer, TV, radio, letter, and other mediums. From whom? Entities, loved ones, extraterrestrials, and bizarre beings from the past or future. They take photos, deliver warnings, cause havoc, transcend time, and more. Join William Hall and Jimmy Petonito on a mission to unravel the mysterious world of impossible communication.

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.

Rob Chandler, regaining consciousness, realizes he’s somehow been involved in a horrendous car accident. In pain and unable to move, he has no memory of his identity, or how the hell he'd gotten on that deserted desert road in the middle of nowhere. He has little time to contemplate his situation when he sees an 18-wheeler barreling down on him. The truck swerves, crashes, and plows into Chandler’s already decimated car.

With every day that passes, Dust is more afraid of what he will become. His powers are growing far beyond what he can predict, and he is reluctant to tell his make-shift family that he isn't sure when - or if - it will ever stop. His goal is to get to Portland, Oregon, and find his aunt and uncle. Ideally he would get there alone, because he's far too much of a danger to the people around him, but they aren't willing to give up on him, and an old enemy isn't far behind.