Showing results by narrator "L J Ganser" in All Categories

On the eve of the Sino-American great power competition General Mattis challenged America to move forward at the speed of relevance. To compete effectively America needed to excel in its AI capacity. The call fell on deaf ears—and years later the nation found itself sliding towards a state of irrelevance on the global stage. A series of blunders contributed to what President Biden calls American AI's "failing and falling behind." This is the story of American AI's fall from grace.

My name is Collin Frost. I’m a fairly unpopular 17-year-old high school student. This is my story…one that chronicles how my already-dredge-of-a-life went from miserable to totally and irreversibly jacked. I guess I should start at the beginning…right before we were shanghaied-up into that alien spaceship. It all started on the way back from the game. I’m the kicker. We lost. It was because of me. Big surprise. But everything started to really go south when the school bus pulled up at another railroad crossing in just one more hicksville small town in rural Texas.

Tom Hopkins, the world's leading expert on salesmanship and author of 11 books, joins forces with award-winning speaker Laura Laaman to create a fool-proof guide to being a successful salesperson. This handbook focuses on selling techniques, from handshakes and clothing to networking and presentations.

Kate McCall's husband has been killed by her teenage son, Luke, in a tragic bow-hunting accident. In the aftermath, Jack, a charismatic but troubled ex-con from Kate's past, shows up. When Luke takes off on his own for their rural cabin, Kate and Jack follow, but they're not the only ones hot on his heels. Two-time losers Teddy and Celeste, along with hitman DeJuan, are all looking to cash in on the money left to Kate.

Douglas Rigby, attorney-at-law, is bankrupt. He's just sunk his last $200,000 - a clandestine "loan" from his last remaining client, former bigshot TV exec Glenn Haskill - into a cocaine deal gone wrong. The lesson? Never trust anyone else with the dirty work. Desperate to get back on top, Rigby formulates an art forgery scheme involving one of Glenn's priceless paintings, a victimless crime.

Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat, is having a record-breaking season in his first year as a New York Yankee. Larger than life on the field and off, Ruth is about to discover what the Chicago White Sox players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series are learning - baseball heroes are not invulnerable to scandal. With suspicion in the air, Ruth's 1918 World Series win for the Boston Red Sox is now being questioned. Under scrutiny by the new baseball commissioner and enmeshed with gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein, Ruth turns for help to Speed Cook, now a promoter of Negro baseball.

From Major General Jeffrey Schloesser - former commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division and Regional Command-East - comes a revealing memoir of leadership in the chaos and fog of the Afghanistan War.

Shale gas extraction - commonly known as fracking - is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is personal. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet - whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the land beneath our feet - is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent.

On June 16, 1918, America’s leading voice of conscience, Eugene Victor Debs, stepped onto a stage in Canton, Ohio, and gave a soul-stirring speech against American intervention in WWI. He did so knowing the cost would be severe: Debs was charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and sentenced to 10 years in a federal penitentiary for sedition. It has never been easy for any man to risk everything - from his possessions, his family, his freedom, or his health - to do what he knows is right. Debs’ crisis is dramatized in Debs in Canton.

ESPN the Company reveals the inside scoop on the biggest business story in sports, detailing the creative and innovative spirit and practices that drove the programming, products, and services of the most powerful and prominent name in sports media. The authors provide a behind-the-scenes perspective on how ESPN dealt with their many partners and how they handled mistakes and missteps along the way - from the humble beginnings of ESPN as an underrated startup to the pinnacle of their success as a major industry player.

The world is awash with economic information. Governments release reports. Pundits give their interpretation on television. And the stock market may go its own way, confusing everyone. How can you better understand what it means for you? Big Picture Economics, a new book by award-winning columnist and futurist Joel Naroff and veteran journalist Ron Scherer, says the thread that ties everything together is "context".

What Retirees Want presents the culmination of 30 years of research by world-famous "Age Wave" expert Ken Dychtwald, PhD, and author and consultant Robert Morison. This entertaining, thought-provoking, and wide-ranging book explains how individuals, businesses, nonprofits, and governments can best prepare for a new era - where the needs and demands of the "Third Age" will set the lifestyle, health, social, marketplace, and political priorities of generations to come.

It's the fall season and time for Ossie to make his annual southern migration from Portland, Maine to his winter nest down in Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Ossie meets up with a variety of whimsical and zany friends, but needs to navigate around obstacles, foes, severe weather, poacher,s and pollution if he is to reach his southern home. At an air show, Ossie meets a female osprey named Onida....

Today, everyone is familiar with Neil Armstrong's famous words as he first set foot on the moon: "one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind." But America's journey to the moon was anything but simple. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite, into orbit; later that year, America's first attempt was such a failure that the media nicknamed it "Kaputnik." Still, we didn't give up. With each failure, we gleaned valuable information about what went wrong, and how to avoid it in the future. So we tried again. And again. And each time we failed, we failed a little bit better.

Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. Some historians have charged that slaveholders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation's founding. The acclaimed political historian Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers' work. Far from covering up a crime against humanity, the Constitution restricted slavery's legitimacy under the new national government.

In the 1920s cotton buyer Earle Dickson worked for Johnson & Johnson and had a klutzy wife who often cut herself. The son of a doctor, Earle set out to create an easier way for her to bandage her injuries. Band-Aids were born, but Earle's bosses at the pharmaceutical giant weren't convinced, and it wasn't until the Boy Scouts of America tested Earle's prototype that this ubiquitous household staple was made available to the public.

Being a Secret Service agent is one of the most treacherous jobs in the world and never more so than in today's highly polarized America. Facing threats from fence jumpers and manifesto writers, and from murderous terrorists and sophisticated spies, protecting the president is harder than ever. In an age of hyper-partisan politics, emotions are high and threats are everywhere. On top of that, with international tensions reaching a boiling point, it's harder than ever to determine friend from foe.

Having spent the past three decades' worth of summers on Nantucket, the Warners are as much a part of the island as the crust of salt on the ferry. But this year is different: Tripp is no longer the father he was, and it becomes clear that nothing - not the beams that hold the house together, and not the values the family clings to - can survive the ravages of time. When tradition turns to tragedy, the creaky old house swirls with suspicion. There are just so many reasons to want someone gone.

An obsessive (if strange) pilgrimage to the late J.D. Salinger's New Hampshire sanctuary, where, if you listened closely, you could hear the sound of one man hiding. "The Catcher in the Driveway" was originally published in Esquire, June 1997.

In "Travels with Dr. Death", Ron Rosenbaum profiles legendary Texas forensic psychiatrist James Grigson, who, as of this reporting, had testified in court against 124 murderers. Acting on his advice, and his weird, unproven theories, juries had sentenced 115 of them to death, leading some opponents to call Grigson the "hanging shrink".