Showing results by narrator "Patrick Lawlor" in All Categories

Dan Davis, an electronics engineer, had finally made the invention of a lifetime: a household robot that could do almost anything. Wild success was within reach, but then Dan's life was ruined. In a plot to steal his business, his greedy partner and greedier fiancée tricked him into taking the "long sleep": suspended animation for 30 years.

In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that sounds like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer.

In Counter-Clock World, time has begun moving backward. People greet each other with "goodbye", blow smoke into cigarettes, and rise from the dead. When one of those rising dead is the famous and powerful prophet Anarch Peak, a number of groups start a mad scramble to find him first - but their motives are not exactly benevolent, because Anarch Peak may just be worth more dead than alive, and these groups will do whatever they must to send him back to the grave.

Joseph Campbell, arguably the greatest mythologist of the twentieth century, was certainly one of our greatest storytellers. This masterfully crafted book interweaves conversations between Campbell and some of the people he inspired, including poet Robert Bly, anthropologist Angeles Arrien, filmmaker David Kennard, Doors drummer John Densmore, psychiatric pioneer Stanislov Grof, Nobel laureate Roger Guillemen, and others. Campbell reflects on subjects ranging from the origins and functions of myth, the role of the artist, and the need for ritual to the ordeals of love and romance.

Serial killers come in all shapes and sizes, but this one is particularly puzzling. There's no pattern to the mutilated bodies that have been showing up in Albuquerque: The victims have been both sexes and all races, ages, and ethnic groups. There is no evidence of rape or ritual. Only one thing connects the victims: They were the victims of a natural disaster - one of the most unnatural natural disasters imaginable - leading to a most painful, most certain, and most hideous death.

The Minority Report is the fourth installment of a uniform, five-volume edition of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. This generous collection contains 18 stories and novellas written between 1954 and 1963, years in which Dick produced some of his most memorable work, including such novels as Martian Time Slip and the Hugo Award-winning The Man in the High Castle.

Jim Paul's meteoric rise took him from a small town in Northern Kentucky to governor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, yet he lost it all - his fortune, his reputation, and his job - in one fatal attack of excessive economic hubris. In this honest, frank analysis, Paul and Brendan Moynihan revisit the events that led to Paul's disastrous decision and examine the psychological factors behind bad financial practices in several economic sectors.

Don’t look down.... Because you’re trapped on the 40th floor of a deserted office building by a psychopath called "The Butcher". Don’t look down.… Because you’re an ex-mountain climber and a fall from Everest left you with a bad leg and a paralyzing fear of heights. Don’t look down.… Because The Butcher hasslaughtered the guards an.d short-circuited the elevators - the stairways are blocked, and for you and the beautiful woman with you, there’s only one escape route. Don’t look down.… Because 600 feet of empty space are looking back at you.

The death of a nameless young woman in his emergency room spurs physician AJ Docker to seek answers. Together with his policeman friend and a police dog, he sets out on a quest for justice for his lost patient, but he discovers more questions than answers as he delves into the criminal world.

When moonlighting medical students harvesting skin from a corpse for temporary use accidentally take it from the wrong donor, the results are catastrophic: A New York City hospital ward is destroyed in a bloodbath, and an elderly professor, admitted for a routine skin graft, is suddenly the city's most wanted fugitive. While the police hunt the fleeing professor, Mulder and Scully track the skin that was grafted onto him, a trail that leads from the morgue to the headquarters of a cutting-edge biotech company to the jungles of Thailand.

Though perhaps most famous as a novelist, Philip K. Dick wrote more than 100 short stories over the course of his career, each as mind-bending and genre-defining as his longer works. Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams collects 10 of the best. In "Autofac," Dick shows us one of the earliest examples (and warnings) in science fiction of self-replicating machines. "Exhibit Piece" and "The Commuter" feature Dick exploring one of his favorite themes: the shifting nature of reality and whether it is even possible to perceive the world as it truly exists.

In this stunning narrative spanning more than 200 million years, Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field - discovering 10 new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork - masterfully tells the complete, surprising, and new history of the dinosaurs, drawing on cutting-edge science to dramatically bring to life their lost world and illuminate their enigmatic origins, spectacular flourishing, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and startling living legacy.

In Your Dog Is Your Mirror, dog trainer Kevin Behan proposes a radical new model for understanding canine behavior: a dog’s behavior and emotion, indeed its very cognition, are driven by our emotion. The dog doesn’t respond to its owner based on what the owner thinks, says, or does; it responds to what the owner feels. And in this way, dogs can actually put people back in touch with their own emotions.

Over the past decade, A Patriot's History of the United States has become the definitive conservative history of our country, correcting the biases of historians and other intellectuals who downplay the greatness of America's patriots. Professors Schweikart and Allen have now revised, updated, and expanded their book, which covers America's long history with an appreciation for the values that made this nation uniquely successful.

The blonde who walked into Cole’s office was the best looking woman he’d seen in weeks. The only thing that kept her from rating a perfect "10" was the briefcase on one arm and the uptight hotel magnate on the other. Bradley Warren had lost something very valuable - something that belonged to someone else: a rare thirteenth-century Japanese manuscript called the Hagakure. Just about all Cole knew about Japanese culture he’d learned from reading Shogun, but he knew a lot about crooks - and what he didn’t know his sociopathic sidekick, Joe Pike, did.

In their first-ever jointly authored book, Michael and Nancy Brown share the inspiring, practical, and humorous story of their own journey from obesity to vibrant health. If you want to break free from the stronghold of food and discover a wonderful new way of life, this book will tell you the way.

AJ Docker (Doc) and his guard dog, Banshee, move to a small town in the mountains for a slower-paced lifestyle. Doc settles into the idyllic setting with a rewarding job and enriching colleagues, as well as with a romantic interest who leads him to contemplate marriage. His new life seems perfect, until he begins to uncover the town's dirty secrets. A serial killer hunts in the woods, and dirty money flows throughout the town.

In 1942, Hitler led the world's most savage military machine. Stalin ruled Russia while America was just beginning to show its strength in World War II. Then, in Harry Turtledove's brilliantly imagined Worldwar saga, an alien assault changed everything. Nuclear destruction engulfed major cities, and the invaders claimed half the planet before an uneasy peace could be achieved.

As a salesperson your product knowledge is extensive, but that's not enough. If you fail to ask the right questions - the ones that uncover a customer's real needs - you will never close the deal. Questions that Sell reveals advanced questioning techniques that will help you sell your products or services based on value to the customer, rather than price - and increase your success rate as a result.

Marathons have become too easy for some runners. What was once the pinnacle of achievement in a runner's life is now a stepping stone for extraordinary adventure in ultramarathoning. The number of ultrarunners - those running distances of 50k (31 miles), 50 miles, 100k (62 miles), or 100 miles - is growing astronomically each year. To date, there has been no practical guide to ultramarathoning. Now, Bryon Powell has written Relentless Forward Progress, the first how-to manual for aspiring ultrarunners.