Showing results by narrator "Donald Corren" in All Categories

Nearly fifty years into IBM’s existence, Thomas Watson Jr. undertook the biggest gamble in business history when he “bet the farm” on the creation of the IBM System/360, the world’s first fully integrated and compatible mainframe computer. As CEO, Watson drove a revolution no other company—then or now—would dare, laying the foundation for the digital age that has transformed every society, corporation, and government. The story of Watson being “present at the creation” of the digital age is intertwined with near-Shakespearean personal drama

The Goddess had rescued Wallie Smith from certain death, endowed him with a magnificent new body, and gifted him with the legendary Sapphire Sword of Chioxin. She asked only one service in return...So Wallie became the Goddess' champion -- and promptly found himself on the losing side in a battle against magics far beyond any the priests of the Goddess could hope to summon.

In Analogia, technology historian George Dyson presents a startling look back at the analog age and life before the digital revolution - and an unsettling vision of what comes next.

Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case synonymous with "separate but equal", created remarkably little stir when the justices announced their near-unanimous decision on May 18, 1896. Yet it is one of the most compelling and dramatic stories of the 19th century, whose outcome embraced and protected segregation, and whose reverberations are still felt into the 21st. Separate spans a striking range of characters and landscapes, bound together by the defining issue of their time and ours - race and equality.

When the Lord of Tarsis finds himself with a politically volatile murder on his hands, he turns to the three most expendable inhabitants of the city of a solution. A mercenary, a poet-assassin, and a thief might not be everyone's first choice for detectives. But they find they're quite good at bringing murderers to justice.

A "brilliant, fun, and wise" (Cass R. Sunstein) tour of nine common business decision-making traps - and practical tools for avoiding them - from a professor of strategic thinking.

In A Giant Win, Coach Tom Coughlin reveals the intricacies of football, sharing details only a coach would know. He also details relationships with some of the most iconic players from the Giants, including Eli Manning and Michael Strahan. A Giant Win provides a frame for Coach Coughlin to discuss his life in football—including his years with the Giants as an assistant coach in the late 1980s and 1990, when he helped win a Super Bowl working under Hall of Fame Head Coach Bill Parcells and alongside the coach he’d oppose in Super Bowl XLII: Bill Belichick.

Early one morning as Boston's only investigator is returning home from solving another peculiar case, he has the displeasure of witnessing a spectacularly horrible show outside his front door: a massive aircraft, carrying over one hundred souls, exploding in midair over the harbor. Almost immediately, the Human Surplus League takes credit for the heinous act of terrorism. But "Reluctant Flynn" isn't so easily convinced, unlike his partner and governmental counterparts.

In the early 1990s, Motorola, the legendary American technology company, developed a revolutionary satellite system called Iridium that promised to be its crowning achievement. Light-years ahead of anything previously put into space, and built on technology developed for Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars", Iridium's constellation of 66 satellites in polar orbit meant that no matter where you were on Earth, at least one satellite was always overhead, and you could call Tibet from Fiji without a delay and without your call ever touching a wire.

Gothic master Edgar Allan Poe's complete works are collected in this multivolume set by Blackstone Audio. Here are his short stories, detective fiction, and poems in all their mysterious and macabre glory. Also included are Poe's literary reviews and editorial musings, comprising an often caustic analysis of the poetry, drama, and fiction of the period.

One of the leading authorities on British archaeology, Barry Cunliffe, takes the listener on a fast-paced look at the ever-fascinating story of the Druids, as seen in the context of the times and places in which they practiced. Sifting through the evidence, Cunliffe offers an expert's best guess as to what can be said and what can't be said about the Druids, discussing the origins of the Druids and the evidence for their beliefs and practices, why the nature of the druid caste changed quite dramatically over time, and how successive generations have seen them in very different ways.

Here, collected in one volume and chosen by the author himself, are favorites such as "What Kind of Day Did You Have?", "Leaving the Yellow House", and a previously uncollected piece, "By the St. Lawrence". With his larger-than-life characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. With a preface by Janice Bellow and an introduction by James Wood, this is a collection to treasure for longtime Saul Bellow fans and an excellent introduction for new listeners.

How do politics shape our world, our lives, and our perceptions? How much of “common sense” is actually driven by the ruling class’ needs and interests? And how are we to challenge the capitalist structures that now threaten all life on the planet? Consequences of Capitalism exposes the deep, often unseen, connections between neoliberal “common sense” and structural power. In making these linkages, we see how the current hegemony keeps social justice movements divided and marginalized. And, most importantly, we see how we can fight to overcome these divisions.

Journalist Maximillian Potter uncovers a fascinating plot to destroy the vines of La Romance-Conti, Burgundy's finest and most expensive wine. In January 2010, Aubert de Villaine, the famed proprietor of the Domaine de la Romance-Conti, the tiny, storied vineyard that produces the most expensive, exquisite wines in the world, received an anonymous note threatening the destruction of his priceless vines by poison - a crime that in the world of high-end wine is akin to murder - unless he paid a one million euro ransom.

Finding himself in a complicated and sensitive dilemma, Police Commissioner Eddy D'Esopo summons Inspector Flynn to an extravagant country house hidden deep in the woods, cleverly disguised as a hunting and fishing lodge and aptly named the Rod and Gun Club. Unfortunately, Flynn hasn't been called up for a weekend of leisure, he's there to solve the mystery surrounding the death of a young and promising congressman.

Not since the last American troops left Vietnam have we faced such a sudden vacuum in our foreign policy—not only of authority, but also of explanations of what happened, and what the future holds. Few analysts are better poised to address this moment than Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, intellectuals and critics whose work spans generations and continents.

From the award-winning and acclaimed author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, From Warsaw with Love tells the epic story of how Polish intelligence officers forged an alliance with the CIA in the twilight of the Cold War. In 1990, soon after the Polish people voted in their first democratic election since the 1930s, the young Polish government sent a veteran spy, who’d battled the West for decades, to rescue six American officers trapped in Baghdad.

It is 1936, and on the East Side of Manhattan, a would-be writer named Don Birnam decides to have a drink. And then another, and then another, until he's in the midst of what becomes a five-day binge. A classic tale of one man's struggle with alcoholism, this revolutionary novel remains Charles Jackson's best-known book - a daring autobiographical work that paved the way for contemporary addiction literature.

Wallie Smith can feel the pain. He goes to the hospital, remembers the doctors and the commotion, but when he wakes up it all seems like a dream. However, if that was a dream how do you explain waking up in another body and in another world? Little Wallie finds himself in the physique of a barbarian swordsman, accompanied by both an eccentric priest babbling about the Goddess and a voluptuous slave girl. Is this a rude awakening or a dream come true?

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation's foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time.