Showing results by narrator "Mark Ashby" in All Categories

Starting in 1948 and reaching its climax during the Six-Day War of 1967, The Hope begins the story of Israel, a country fighting for its life - outmatched and surrounded by enemies. Zev Barak, Sam Pasternak, Don Kishote, and Benny Luria are all officers in the Israeli Army, caught up in the sweep of history, fighting the desperate desert battles and meeting the larger-than-life personalities that shaped Israel’s fight for independence.

Projects require managers, but programs warrant maestros. Tasked with overseeing multiple project teams and thousands of activities, program managers have one of the most challenging jobs in the market. Too many overburdened managers are leaving otherwise great jobs, even the field entirely, because they haven’t equipped themselves with the right tools in hand to take on this complex but fulfilling job. How to Manage Complex Programs explains the ins and outs of program management and provides concrete and effective techniques for structuring deliverables, workflow, and staffing.

Every 13,000 years on Earth a sacred and secret event takes place that changes everything. Mother Earth's Kundalini energy emerges from its resting place in the planet's core and moves like a snake across the surface of our world. Once at home in ancient Lemuria, it moved to Atlantis, then to the Himalayan mountains of India and Tibet, and with every relocation changed our idea of what spiritual means. And gender. And heart. This time, with much difficulty, the Serpent of Light has moved to the Andes Mountains of Chile and Peru.

The pope wanted it, Montesquieu used it, and the Nazis pilfered an Italian noble's villa to get it: the Germania, by the Roman historian Tacitus, took on a life of its own as both an object and an ideology. When Tacitus wrote a not-very-flattering little book about the ancient Germans in 98 CE, at the height of the Roman Empire, he could not have foreseen that the Nazis would extol it as "a bible", nor that Heinrich Himmler, the engineer of the Holocaust, would vow to resurrect Germany on its grounds. But the Germania inspired - and polarized - people long before the rise of the Third Reich.

This audiobook examines the meteoric rise of Sweden as the pre-eminent military power in Europe during the Thirty Years War during the 1600s, and then follows its line of warrior kings into the next century until the Swedes finally meet their demise, in an overreach into the vastness of Russia. A small Scandinavian nation, with at most one and a half million people and scant internal resources of its own, there was small logic to how Sweden could become the dominant power on the Continent.

Leadership Isn't for Cowards offers straightforward steps to leading courageously and practical tips for driving performance. Courageous leadership means toughening your approach by being rigorous in the application of your values through the company culture. It means confronting and challenging people, and not letting them get away with being less than you know they can be.

Most global citizens are well aware of the explosive growth of the Chinese economy. Indeed, China has famously become the "workshop of the world." Yet, while China watchers have shed much light on the country's internal dynamics - China's politics, its vast social changes, and its economic development - few have focused on how this increasingly powerful nation has become more active and assertive throughout the world.

Forced to become a normal citizen, the exiled son of the late Shah of Iran attempts to provide understanding and direction for his country and its people.

The invasion of California has begun, threatening to trigger World War III.

Greater China and its South American allies control Mexico, and their armies are poised on the Rio Grande, ready for the next phase of the North American conquest. It is 2039. The Chinese are launching their secret weapon against the American border fortifications. At the same time, an amphibious fleet steams toward San Francisco. The Chinese have formed the Pan Asian Alliance and signed a war-pact with the South American Federation. Glacial cooling has brought the Earth to the brink of starvation. Now, U.S. soil is the most valuable commodity in the world....

An epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding: the monumental race to build the first atomic weapons.

Rich in personality, action, confrontation, and deception, The First War of Physics is the first fully realized popular account of the race to build humankind's most destructive weapon. The book draws on declassified material, such as MI6's Farm Hall transcripts, coded Soviet messages cracked by American cryptographers in the Venona project, and interpretations by Russian scholars of documents from the Soviet archives.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) was one of the few men in history to fight simultaneously on moral, religious, political, social, economic, and cultural fronts. During his time as a lawyer in South Africa he developed his strategy of non-violence: the idea of opposing unjust laws by non-violent protest. He led the Indian National Congress party in three major campaigns against British rule, each culminating in his arrest.

A disturbingly realistic vision of war several decades into the future. Invasion: China is as ambitious as it is powerful. Using advanced technologies in military science, the world's superpowers battle on land, sea, air, and space for global supremacy. This controversial tale will keep you sleepless at night as America challenges the new colossus in the East: Greater China and her Pan-Asian allies. Hard-hitting. Vast in scope. And all too possibly real.

The end of the Cold War promised a new era of international peace. But instead, violence has proliferated across the globe, not in the form of a superpower arms race or a clash of armies, but in bitter local conflicts marked by terrorism, insurgency, and guerrilla warfare. Former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey likened the post-Cold-War world to "a jungle full of snakes". The emergence of this new, potentially never-ending struggle has forced our military to reevaluate strategies or risk losing hearts, minds, and soldiers the world over.

Surviving the Dragon is the remarkable life story of Arjia Rinpoche, who was ordained as a reincarnate lama at the age of two and fled Tibet 46 years later. In his gripping memoir, Rinpoche relates the story of having been abandoned in his monastery as a young boy after witnessing the torture and arrest of his monastery family. In the years to come, Rinpoche survived under harsh Chinese rule, as he was forced into hard labor and endured continual public humiliation as part of Mao’s Communist "reeducation".

Climate change is a major topic of concern today and will be so for the foreseeable future, as predicted changes in global temperatures, rainfall, and sea level continue to take place. But as Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams reveal in The Goldilocks Planet, the climatic changes we are experiencing today hardly compare to the changes the Earth has seen over the last 4.5 billion years.

Branding guru David Aaker explains how to eliminate the competition and become the lead brand in your market. This ground-breaking book defines the concept of brand relevance using dozens of case studies - Prius, Whole Foods, Westin, iPad, and more - and explains how brand relevance drives market dynamics, which generates opportunities for your brand and threats for the competition. Aaker reveals how these companies have made other brands in their categories irrelevant.

In a world on the brink of madness...In the summer of 1914, a young man beyond reproach awakens under police guard grievously injured and accused of heinous, impossible murder.

William F. Buckley, Jr., was the foremost architect of the conservative movement that swept the American political landscape from the 1960s to the early 2000s. When Buckley launched National Review, in 1955, conservatism was a beleaguered, fringe segment of the Republican Party. Three decades later Ronald Reagan - who credited National Review with shaping his beliefs - was in the White House. Buckley and his allies devised a new-model conservatism.

What do revolutions - almost always made in the name of freedom - really change? In this engaging survey, Durschmied looks at major revolts, upheavals, and revolutions over the last 200 years, describing and enriching our understanding of each of these historic and dramatic events. Each revolution has its own dynamic and fascinating cast of characters, but all too often, as this well-researched work shows, the end result is the same: mayhem, betrayal, glory, and death.

Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its "nobility", as has everyone ever since - but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its "bright unbearable reality" (the word used when gods come to earth, not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance.