Showing results by narrator "Michael Gilboe" in All Categories

Following the lead of Florence Nightingale, Steve’s partner in Eternity, he has returned to Hell to ease the suffering of the Damned. Yet Steve is faced with a dilemma. What can he do that will offer more than a brief respite from everlasting torment? And how can he make it funny at the same time? In Steve’s search for meaningful employment in the Afterlife, he has one comic misadventure after another. Along the way, he meets a few new angels and a couple of saints. He even learns what may be one of the great secrets of the universe...or maybe not.

What happens when Heaven’s hardest working saint is forced to take a vacation? In Saint Peter Takes a Holiday, or It's About Time, a reluctant Simon Peter heads for Aruba and a week in the sun. There, he encounters danger, romance, intrigue...and of course comedy. Magic, miracles, sunbathing, and golf, they all happen in this tropical adventure.

A group of old school friends meet to catch up. They end up discussing the unexpected, unforeseen changes to their lives, and one friend offers to tell a story about adapting to change. The story he tells involves four characters, two mice named Sniff and Scurry, and two "Littlepeople" named Hem and Haw. All of them are in a maze, looking for cheese, which they need to survive. For the "Littlepeople", cheese also has a larger, metaphysical connotation in the sense that it also makes them happy - their Cheese is thus spelled with a capital C....

The only thing worse than the end of the universe is...Casual Day. Six denizens of Hell, one saint and a small blue alien join forces to stop the ultimate catastrophe: The destruction of the cosmos. That most of them are dead is of little consequence, for they possess great powers. Halos and horns, strength and sarcasm, courage and comedy, oh, and a management textbook: This team has them all. They are The League of Unusual Denizens.

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni is a practical guide to organizational health. Organizational health is a characteristic of many successful businesses and organizations. Leaders can adopt organizational health strategies to transform their own operations and company culture in order to see the same successes that many other healthy organizations do.

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin is a guide to applying leadership principles of the United States Navy's Sea, Air, and Land Teams (SEALs) to business. At the center of the strategies that Willink and Babin illustrate is taking complete responsibility for everything in which all leaders are involved....

Steve Minion attends Beast Barracks, where he learns both the arcane and mundane arts of being a servant of the Devil. Strength, speed, and endurance are all part of a demon's physical makeup, but he must be taught to be sneaky, cruel, and ruthless and of course to ignore personal hygiene. As Steve begins work as a full-fledged bad guy, he must confront the inevitable: demons exist to torment the damned, and Hell's former handyman-in-chief doesn't seem to have the stomach for the work.

Jeannette Walls chronicles all the heartbreak, deprivation, humor, and love of her childhood in The Glass Castle, a memoir of growing up dirt-poor on a cross-country odyssey with her charismatic, but alcoholic, father and her codependent mother.

Williamsburg got its start as a fortified site, which was vitally necessary for English settlers to heavily outnumbered by nearby Native Americans, many of which were at times hostile. Known originally as Middle Plantation, the site served as the capital of the colony for much of the 18th century, and it bore witness to seminal events in the history of Revolutionary era America, including the Gunpowder Incident, which nearly coincided with the Battles of Lexington and Concord to the north.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a philosophical treatment of Taleb's research on highly improbable, high-impact events. These events, which Taleb calls "Black Swans", are so improbable that they are unpredictable. However, pundits and scholars are often inclined to fit such extreme events into a causal narrative after the fact, in order to make history appear more organized.

This is a summary and analysis of the book in which Bessel van der Kolk, MD, explores the ways in which trauma rewires the brain and changes the way people experience the world. Trauma affects the mind and body immensely and prevents those affected from living in the present. Van der Kolk, who has researched trauma since the 1970s, first became interested in trauma after meeting with Vietnam veterans who had a very hard time living their lives after returning from the war.

Bubba Snoddy is a good old country boy with a big problem. Although he's personable, handsome, and lives in a historical Southern mansion in a small Texas town, he has just discovered the dead body of a woman to whom he was once engaged to marry. His ex-fiancée was responsible for Bubba being thrown out of the military, which in turn caused his shameful return to the tiny town of Pegramville, where everyone is a consummate gossip, and no one has any secrets.

This story of Alexander Hamilton details a true story of an American Revolutionary war hero who was a true founding father. Hamilton was born in disarray in the British West Indies. He escaped a life of meaninglessness and moved to New York as a teenager where he set his feet in political and military prowess.

In The God Delusion, philosopher Richard Dawkins evaluates popular arguments for the existence of God. The idea that God is not an object that can be accessed and reviewed using human reason is rejected. Instead, evidence that proves with at least 51 percent certainty is presented to prove that God does, in fact, not exist, casting reasonable doubt on the efficacy and usefulness of belief in God.

Hollywood has never lacked leading men who could captivate viewers with dramatic performances that depict them as suave romantics or dashing heroes, especially during the Golden Age of Hollywood when stars like Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, and Cary Grant graced screens. But in 1940, the 4th most popular star in the U.S. was a foreign actor from Australia, and unlike other movie stars, he was more notorious for his pursuits off the screen than on it.

There has been no shortage of shocking crimes and trials that generated frenzied coverage across America, but few can lay claim to the "crime of the century" like the murder carried out by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in 1924. While studying as young adults at the prestigious University of Chicago, Leopold and Loeb devised a meticulous plot to kidnap and murder a child while managing to get away with ransom money, thereby perpetrating what they considered a "perfect crime".

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2011) is a book about human motivations. Many of the prevailing ideas about why humans make decisions and operate the way they do aren't true or, at least, they are incomplete. Businesses, schools, and organizations are stuck in outdated, unexamined beliefs about human motivation. These beliefs are rooted in the idea of extrinsic motivation - that people make decisions based on external rewards and punishments.

When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir about Paul Kalanithi's experiences as a doctor and as a terminally ill patient. The book discusses Kalanithi's lifelong fascination with questions of human biology, mortality, and meaning. It then examines how these questions are intensified by the author's own confrontation with lung cancer, sickness, and death.

The Gallic Wars, the series of campaigns waged by Julius Caesar on behalf of the Roman Senate between 58-50 BC, were among the defining conflicts of the Roman era. Not only was the expansion of the Republic's domains unprecedented (especially when considering it was undertaken under the auspices of a single general), it had a profound cultural impact on Rome itself as well.

The Devil in the White City is a book by Erik Larson that takes a close look at the World's Columbian Exposition, the world fair that Chicago hosted in 1893 in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. The fair was tainted by deaths, a serial killer, and an assassination. The lead architect, Daniel Burnham, and the serial killer, Henry Howard Holmes, play pivotal roles in the events that unfolded before, during, and after the fair.