Showing results by narrator "Jeff Cummings" in All Categories

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.

Humanity put all its fading hopes in New Eden, a pristine star system 230 light-years from the ravaged Earth. But upon arrival, the would-be colonists encountered the Kresh - a diabolical alien race who quickly captured the human starship and tortured its inhabitants in hopes of learning the coordinates of Earth. Street-smart Cyrus Gant managed to escape, crashing to the surface of a nearby moon terraformed by the Kresh and inhabited by primitive humans.

When a woman in Bel Air dies of a rattlesnake bite, the case doesn’t seem to fit the usual purview of LAPD’s Special Cases Unit. But Carrie Holder was no ordinary LA woman. She was a member of the city's latest cult, the Church of the Gate, which counts Hollywood's movers and shakers among its devotees. Investigating the cult's secrets takes Detective Michael Gideon, his German shepherd K-9 partner, Sirius, and pit bull rescue Emily across Los Angeles's canyons, neighborhoods, and movie studio lots - but all the while, an even darker threat looms closer.

Adjustment Team is the second installment of a uniform, five-volume edition of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. This wide-ranging collection contains 26 stories and novellas from the extraordinarily productive years of 1952 and 1953, along with extensive story notes.

The Devil Came on Horseback is an intense, vivid autobiographical report from the heart of violent Darfur and a call to action by a former American Marine who became a military observer for the African Union. The first extensive on-the-ground account of the genocide in Sudan, it leads us through the tragic impact of an Arab government bent on destroying its black African citizens and the frustrating complexity of international inaction.

In the eighteen years since her father went to prison for killing her mother and brother, Della Stallings has battled a crippling phobia. Her fear only grows when her father’s released. She still believes he killed her family, but the police don’t have enough evidence to arrest him again. When new grisly murders occur - each bearing the telltale signs that seem to implicate her father - Della begins to wonder if the real murderer is still out there. Could her father have been framed?

This explosively entertaining memoir abounds in gossip, satire, historical apercus, and trenchant observations. Vidal’s compelling narrative weaves back and forth in time, providing a whole view of the author’s celebrated life, from his birth in 1925 to today, and features a cast of memorable characters - including the Kennedy family, Marlon Brando, Anais Nin, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

One of the most talented and creative authors working today, Neal Stephenson is renowned for his exceptional novels - works colossal in vision and mind-boggling in complexity. Exploring and blending a diversity of topics, including technology, economics, history, science, pop culture, and philosophy, his books are the products of a keen and adventurous intellect. Stephenson ponders a wealth of subjects, from movies and politics to David Foster Wallace and the Midwestern American College Town; and more.

We struggle to manage complexity every day. We follow intricate diets to lose weight, juggle multiple remotes to operate our home entertainment systems, face proliferating data at the office, and hack through thickets of regulation at tax time. But complexity isn't destiny. Sull and Eisenhardt argue there's a better way: by developing a few simple yet effective rules, you can tackle even the most complex problems.

In The Glass Cage, bestselling author Nicholas Carr digs behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, as he explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure. Even as they bring ease to our lives, these programs are stealing something essential from us.

There has never been a better time to build an audience around your idea or product. But with so many people and companies clamoring for attention, it's also more challenging than ever to do work that deeply resonates with the marketplace and creates true and lasting impact.

After Hank Morgan of Hartford, Connecticut, takes a blow to the head, he inexplicably awakens in sixth-century Camelot. At first lost and confused, the time traveler soon realizes that he can use modern knowledge and his ability to foretell the future to his advantage. Consequently, he is granted a place in the king’s court as Arthur’s right-hand man. When the Catholic Church grows fearful of his power, the Connecticut Yankee aims higher and concocts a grandiose plan to bring American ideals to sixth-century England to change the future.

Abby Donovan’s decade-long dream of partnership at her prestigious Chicago law firm is just months from fruition. But it’s all about to change because of one misstep. One step onto a late-night train headed in the wrong direction. Headed into Chicago’s west side, where gangs and violence and drugs fill the streets. In this engaging debut, E.C. Diskin, a former Chicago attorney, takes us on a fast-paced thrill ride with a believable and flawed heroine. Listeners will relate to her, fear for her, and get a glimpse inside Chicago’s best and worst.

In 2012, he skewered "amateur" Barack Obama. In 2014, he revealed vicious infighting between the Obamas and the Clintons. Now, New York Times bestselling author and investigative reporter Edward Klein turns his attention to Hillary Clinton and asks: why exactly is Hillary so unlikeable?

Organized around a simple metaphor of a dipper and a bucket - already familiar to thousands of people - How Full Is Your Bucket? shows how even the smallest interactions we have with others every day profoundly affect our relationships, productivity, health and longevity. Coauthor Donald O. Clifton studied the effects of positive and negative emotions for half a century, and he and his colleagues interviewed millions of people around the world. Their discoveries contributed to the emergence of an entirely new field.

It was the election that would ultimately give America "Camelot" and its tragic aftermath. 1960 is a stunning recreation of the bare-knuckle politics of the primaries, the party conventions' backroom dealings, the unprecedented television debates, along with hot-button issues of race, religion, and foreign policy. And, at the center of it all, three future presidents - Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon. In this essential work of history, David Pietrusza chronicles 1960's struggle for power by bringing to life its towering events and personalities, unlocking its secrets, and turning expert scholarship into rich, human storytelling.

AD 2457. The longest space voyage in history has begun: 230 light years from a ravaged Earth to the pristine star system of New Eden - a beacon of hope following the Doom Star days. Aboard the ship are human colonizers, the Space Navy, fierce “Monitors” once bred to fight Cyborgs, and four “Specials” - humans with psionic abilities, capable of ripping holes in space to jump vast distances.

We all make mistakes. Nobody’s perfect. Not even some of the greatest geniuses in history, as Mario Livio tells us in this marvelous story of scientific error and breakthrough. Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein were all brilliant scientists. Each made groundbreaking contributions to his field - but each also stumbled badly. These five scientists expanded our knowledge of life on Earth, the evolution of the Earth itself, and the evolution of the universe, despite and because of their errors. As Mario Livio luminously explains, the scientific process advances through error.

Gore Vidal’s reputation as America’s finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabakov, and Montaigne (a previosly uncollected essay from 1992).

Addiction is a preventable, treatable disease, not a moral failing. As with other illnesses, the approaches most likely to work are based on science - not on faith, tradition, contrition, or wishful thinking. These facts are the foundation of Clean, a myth-shattering look at drug abuse by the author of Beautiful Boy. Based on the latest research in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine, Clean is a leap beyond the traditional approaches to prevention and treatment of addiction.