Showing results by narrator "Shawn Compton" in All Categories

Paul D'Anieri explores the dynamics within Ukraine, between Ukraine and Russia, and between Russia and the West, that emerged with the collapse of the Soviet Union and eventually led to war in 2014. Proceeding chronologically, this book shows how Ukraine's separation from Russia in 1991, at the time called a "civilized divorce", led to what many are now calling "a new Cold War".

A Devastating Plan. The Undead Rising. Worlds Ending. I’d barely had time to recover from Elsbeth Wyght’s vicious game when the call from Detective Haskins came. This time a bank robbery with a difference... and of course nothing as it seemed. With this turn of events I found myself thrust onto a shadowy trail that would lead me back to the asylum of my deepest nightmares and a desperate hunt for the truth amid a growing, cataclysmic danger.

In September 1943, as America began advancing from its foothold on Guadalcanal, a young American airman was lost in heavy weather over the South Pacific on what was expected to be a routine flight. In examining that loss and the events leading up to a rescue attempt on an island in the South Pacific, and bringing together societies utterly alien to each other, Survival in the South Pacific brings together the big themes of the Pacific War.

I returned to the city with one thing on my mind; find my nemesis and finish her. Nothing else mattered. Not the shadowy Organization I worked for. Not the Magic Council and their veiled threats. None of it. Just me and the witch locked into one final dance. But things weren’t exactly going to plan as I discovered a new, sinister threat. One that was trying to pry at the kind of locked doors that should never be opened, as well as driving a conspiracy to turn the entire world on its head.

He was a flashy, high-rolling con man...a militant street hustler...a front man for the mob.... On TV and in the movies, FBI undercover agents are a dime a dozen. But in reality, only an elite handful have the unique combination of wit, instinct, and daring to work these highly dangerous scams. For 10 years, Larry Wansley was one of them.

Ben Clary is an everyday working man who caps off an afternoon of holiday shopping with a drink at his favorite watering hole. Before long, he is intoxicated, and a brutal winter storm descends. Trapped by a howling storm seems bad enough, until Ben and his fellow bar patrons find out something terrible lurks in the blizzard outside. One by one, unseen assailants pick them off until a local historian claims the attackers may be the remnants of a clan caught up in an ancient blood feud, said to have occurred at the site of the tavern. And, worse, they seem to eat human flesh.

The dust had barely settled after my skirmish at Galloway Asylum, and there I was looking forward to some downtime, maybe even a promotion. What I got instead was a covert assignment and an urgent warning from on high: Get out of the city. So I did. And after a quick, or should I say bad, trip down the wrong side of memory lane, I found myself holing up in a sleepy rural town on a strictly cloak and dagger mission: Copperwood Falls, a haunted town where the woods whisper at night, and demons come calling. A place where the shadows are restless, and almost nothing is as it seems.

On September 15, 1944, the United States invaded the tiny Pacific island of Peleliu, located at the Southern end of the Palau Islands. Boasting a large airfield from which the Americans could mount bomber campaigns, Peleliu was a strategically essential part of Gen. MacArthur's long-awaited liberation of the Philippines. With the famed 1st Marine Division making the amphibious assault, Pacific High Command was confident that victory would be theirs in just a few days. They were drastically wrong.

The scar across the side of Jack’s head is the visible price. The risk to his friends at the academy is the hidden price. His challenge is how to balance the risks. The final stage of his training is a shakedown cruise on an old minesweeper. Midway through their cruise, the minesweeper collides with an ancient alien wreck, ripping the sides off the starship. Jack’s team of bots help seal the combined wreck to prevent air loss. Jack and his girlfriend, Sofia, are the only survivors, and air, food, and supplies are critical. The countdown of days to survive is ticking.

The exact qualities that bring an individual to found a start-up company (their brilliance and expertise) are what prevent them from achieving the success they are looking for - this is the paradox that is entrepreneurship. What starts out as freedom and financial independence turns into grueling hours and added stress and bills. But successful five-time entrepreneur Curtis Morley is here to help. He shares that every entrepreneur is typically doing the same 15 things wrong or just not doing them at all - regardless of industry or business type.

The Earth has been the loving mother of humanity for thousands of years, but now humanity has left the cradle broken in its efforts to reach the stars. Those left behind have not fared well, but the efforts of the Conwin family and others have held the world together . . . oft time with an Iron Fist, but successfully nonetheless amid the strife since the lights went out.

A trio of vicious World War One veterans descend on the farm in the Adirondack mountains where one of them grew up and his father now lives alone. They embark on, happily wreaking drunken havoc at the old man's place and in the nearby town. But when a naïve, mail-order bride arrives, she ignites a tinderbox of resentment, lust, and betrayal among the men that explodes in brutal depravity, bloody violence, and shocking death. This hard-boiled, literary masterpiece includes a new introduction by Jack Mearns, author of John Sanford: An Annotated Bibliography.

In a near-future New York City, where self-driving cars roam the city streets, rival entrepreneurs Brandon and Tyler compete to produce the smartest AIs, training them in a virtual game world. As the two rivals struggle to dominate the market, their personal enmity pushes them to attack each other's reputations, hack each other's cars, and develop ever more sophisticated algorithms to keep their customers safe. The result? Intelligent computers that excel at using all available data to determine which humans should live, and which should die.

Echo has landed on his feet after finding himself in a mysterious other world with tens of thousands of gamers, and forms a close-knit unit of people like him. Echo's fighters quickly level up and get ahead of everyone else. But much remains unclear. Where is he, and what is this world? Who are the mysterious "arbiters" enforcing the rules of the game? What role does the local population play in all this? How deep can he delve into the underground realm full of unspeakable monsters? Complicating matters, the rules of the game suddenly start to change.

Most of us never get to test ourselves in combat. As a UH-1 Helicopter pilot flying in the jungle highlands of South Vietnam, Warrant Officer Jim Crigler and the men he flew with were tested daily. Coming of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s was challenging for most young men of that era. Throw in drugs, free love, draft notices, the Vietnam War, and a country deeply divided, and you have one of the most important books of this genre. This true story is a raw, bold, introspective autobiography.

Aaron Platt has spent every day of his life breaking his back to scrape a living from the rocky, played-out fields of the Adirondack farm he inherited from his sadistic father. One winter morning, he follows footprints in the snow to his barn and discovers a man freezing to death in a horse stall. What unfolds between the two men, past and present, is a brisk, gritty depiction of crime and punishment. But their harrowing story is more than that, exposing the shocking hypocrisy of the people who live in the nearby bucolic town.

God’s work with the human race in time and space has been, and continues to be, a series of new beginnings. At every point, the Trinity is central, for God’s relationship to his Son and his Spirit stands behind everything about his relationship to us. Starting from before time began, Donald Fairbairn leads us through these beginnings, shedding fresh light on the Trinity at each stage. He offers clues and questions along the way, inviting us to join in the discovery process.

Will's homecoming to Calcasieu Parish is anything but welcoming as he comes face to face with the Blanchards, a local crime family who have taken over the town. But long-strained family ties are strengthened when Will's cousins come to the rescue. A new community is formed as residents of Sugar Cove Road band together to protect their loved ones. As one thing leads to another, they become increasingly unable to secure their community against a much more powerful foe than the Blanchards.

From insulin comas and lobotomy to incarceration and exile, Walter Brown chronicles the troubling history of the diagnosis and (often ineffective) treatment of bipolar disorder through the centuries, before the publication of a groundbreaking research paper in 1949. Cade's "Lithium Salts in the Treatment of Psychotic Excitement" described, for the first time, lithium's astonishing efficacy at both treating and preventing the recurrence of manic-depressive episodes, and would eventually transform the lives of patients, pharmaceutical researchers, and practicing physicians worldwide.

Max and Liz have escaped the mysterious time phenomenon by traveling to the Mars colony, which promises a whole new, exciting, and secure life. But they've left behind someone important to them. Should they embark on a journey from which no one has ever returned? And why does everyone seem to put obstacles in their way even as they try? The physicist and the mathematician must contend with forces that cannot be swayed by logical arguments while time, at an accelerating pace, is running out for their friend on Earth.