Kent Cassella has narrated 9 audiobooks on Listento.it by 13 authors, with an average listener rating of 3.9★ across 107 ratings. The most-rated is NYPD Red.
NYPD Red
Summary
It's the start of Hollywood on Hudson, and New York City is swept up in the glamour. Every night, the red carpet rolls out for movie stars arriving at premieres in limos; the most exclusive restaurants close for private parties for wealthy producers and preeminent directors; and thousands of fans gather with the paparazzi, hoping to catch a glimpse of the most famous and beautiful faces in the world. With this many celebrities in town, special task force NYPD Red is on high alert - and they can't afford to make a single mistake. Then a world-renowned producer fatally collapses at his power breakfast, and top NYPD Red Detective Zach Jordan is the first one on the scene. Zach works with his beautiful new partner, Detective Kylie MacDonald - who also happens to be his ex-girlfriend - to discover who the murderer might be. But this is only the beginning: the most brutal, public, and horrifyingly spectacular crimes they've ever encountered are about to send all of New York into chaos, putting NYPD Red on the ropes. Zach and Kylie know there's no way of telling what a killer this deranged will do next. With the whole world watching, they have to find a way to stop a psychopath who has scripted his finale down to the last explosive detail. With larger-than-life action, relentless speed, and white-knuckle twists, NYPD Red is the next mega-blockbuster from "The Man Who Can't Miss." (TIME)
©2012 James Patterson and Marshall Karp (P)2012 Hachette Audio
The Trusted Advisor
Summary
In today's fast-paced networked economy, professionals must work harder than ever to maintain and improve their business skills and knowledge. But technical mastery of your discipline is not enough, assert world-renowned professional advisors David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford. The key to professional success, they argue, is the ability to earn the trust and confidence of clients. The creation of trust is what earns the right to influence clients; trust is also at the root of client satisfaction and loyalty. The workings of trust are even more critical in the new economy than in the old. Maister, Green, and Galford enrich our understanding of trust---yet they have also written a deeply practical book. Using their model of the "Trust Equation," they dissect the rational and emotional components of trustworthiness. With precision and clarity, they detail five distinct steps you must take to create a trust-based relationship. Each step---engage, listen, frame, envision, and commit---is richly described in distinct chapters. The book is peppered with pragmatic "top ten" lists aimed at improving advisors' effectiveness that can be put to use instantly. This book will be welcomed by the inexperienced advisor and the most seasoned expert alike. The authors use anecdotes, experiences, and examples---successes and mistakes, their own and others'---to great effect. Though they use the professional services advisor/client paradigm throughout the book, their prescriptions have resonance for other trust-reliant situations---selling, customer relationship management, and internal staff functions like HR and information technology. The result is a tour de force---brilliant, penetrating, unique. It is essential listening for anyone who must advise, negotiate, or manage complex relationships with others.
©2009 David Maister, Charles H. Green, Robert M. Galford (P)2009 Tantor
For the Love of Physics
Summary
"You have changed my life" is a common refrain in the emails Walter Lewin receives daily from fans who have been enthralled by his world-famous video lectures about the wonders of physics. "I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes," wrote one such fan. When Lewin's lectures were made available online, he became an instant YouTube celebrity, and the New York Times declared, "Walter Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube's greatest hits." For more than 30 years as a beloved professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lewin honed his singular craft of making physics not only accessible but truly fun, whether putting his head in the path of a wrecking ball, supercharging himself with 300,000 volts of electricity, or demonstrating why the sky is blue and why clouds are white. Now, as Carl Sagan did for astronomy and Brian Green did for cosmology, Lewin takes listeners on a marvelous journey in For the Love of Physics, opening our eyes as never before to the amazing beauty and power with which physics can reveal the hidden workings of the world all around us. "I introduce people to their own world," writes Lewin, "the world they live in and are familiar with but don't approach like a physicist - yet." Could it be true that we are shorter standing up than lying down? Why can we snorkel no deeper than about one foot below the surface? Why are the colors of a rainbow always in the same order, and would it be possible to put our hand out and touch one? Whether introducing why the air smells so fresh after a lightning storm, why we briefly lose (and gain) weight when we ride in an elevator, or what the Big Bang would have sounded like had anyone existed to hear it, Lewin never ceases to surprise and delight with the extraordinary ability of physics to answer even the most elusive questions.
©2011 Walter Lewin and Warren Goldstein (P)2011 Tantor
Pathways to the Gods
Summary
A spaceport in the Andes! A computer chart in Egyptian ruins! Primitive sculptures of figures wearing space suits! Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods stunned the world with the archaeological discovery that alien beings once colonized earth. Now, in Pathways to the Gods, von Daniken reveals the story of his travels following the trail of the ancient visitors---from the technologically sophisticated stone ruins in the Bolivian Andes to the sensational Sanskrit descriptions of space battles in Calcutta---new proof of von Daniken's startling theory that man descended from the stars!
©1981 Erich von Daniken (P)2011 Tantor
The Remedy
Summary
Winner of the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Quality Improvement From the Shingo judges: "This work has an extremely widespread application as the tools, techniques, and methods described are at a level that achieves the goals of Lean and operational excellence without tying them down to a specific industry or work stream. The book provides practical knowledge for lean champions, managers, and executives driving toward operational excellence enterprise-wide. The story format, and the presentation of this material was excellent, and the avoidance of lean and operational excellence jargon gives the book a wide appeal...it is a pleasure to read." The Sequel to the Influential "Lean" Business Novel, Andy & Me The Remedy is a compelling a business fable that shows how Lean quality improvement business practices - traditionally associated with manufacturing - can dramatically improve the service areas of your business - including design, engineering, sales, marketing and all processes in between. Written by Pascal Dennis, a leading Lean consultant, the story follows Tom Pappas and Rachel Armstrong, senior leaders at a desperate automotive company as they try to implement a Lean management system across an entire platform, the Chloe, a breakthrough "green" car. The future of the company is at stake. Can Tom and Rachel, supported by Andy Saito, a retired, reclusive Toyota executive, regain the trust and respect of the customer? Can a venerable but dying company implement Lean practices to every part of their business and learn a new, more effective way of managing? Shows you how to use the Lean quality improvement method to fix not just a manufacturing system, but an entire company, including management, design, marketing, and supply chain Written by Pascal Dennis, author of four books on Lean practices and winner of the coveted Shingo Prize for outstanding research contributing to operational excellence Originally developed by Toyota, the Lean approach to quality improvement has gained a worldwide following and helped turn around enumerable struggling businesses
©2010 Lean Productivity Netword (P)2013 Gildan Media
When Oil Peaked
Summary
In two earlier books, Hubbert's Peak and Beyond Oil, geologist Kenneth S. Deffeyes laid out his rationale for concluding that world oil production would continue to follow a bell-shaped curve, with the smoothed-out peak somewhere in the middle of the first decade of this millennium---in keeping with the projections of his former colleague, pioneering petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert. Deffeyes sees no reason to deviate from that prediction, despite the ensuing global recession and the extreme volatility in oil prices associated with it. In his view, the continued depletion of existing oil fields, compounded by shortsighted cutbacks in many exploration-and-development projects, virtually assures that the mid-decade peak in global oil production will never be surpassed. In When Oil Peaked, Deffeyes revisits his original forecasts, examines the arguments that were made both for and against them, adds some new supporting material to his overall case, and applies the same mode of analysis to a number of other finite gifts from the Earth: mineral resources that may be also in shorter supply than "flat-Earth" prognosticators would have us believe.
©2010 Kenneth S. Deffeyes (P)2010 Tantor
Iceworld
Summary
As the planet gleamed in his viewport, Sallman Ken could not believe that such a bleak and icy globe could have produced intelligent life. Yet when the expedition had sent in unmanned landers, that was what it had found. Some sort of native alien, surviving on the barren planet. But Sallman and his team were not the first to make contact. Smugglers from his own planet had begun trading with the natives for a new and virulent narcotic - the most dangerous drug in the universe. Now Sallman would have to find out how he could survive on a planet so cold that sulphur was solid and water was liquid - and how to stop the source of the deadly drug!
©1953 Harry Stubbs (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
The Lamoille Stories
Summary
Schubart brings to life the friends and characters of his native Lamoille County, where in the late 1950s and early 1960s, life was lived close to the earth and often against the grain. Schubart’s collection of 22 stories captures Vermont in its transition from an enclave of hill farms and small towns where everyone knew your grandfather to a place where vehicles bearing license plates from “away” mix with hippie vans filled with born-again Vermonters getting back to the land...until snowfall.
©2012 Bill Schubart (P)2019 Bill Schubart
The Political Mind
Summary
You can't understand 21st-century American politics with an 18th-century brain.... In What's the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank pointed out that a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests. In The Political Mind, George Lakoff explains why. As it turns out, human beings are not the rational creatures we've so long imagined ourselves to be. Ideas, morals, and values do not exist somewhere outside the body, ready to be examined and put to use. Instead, they exist quite literally inside the brain - and they take physical shape there. For example, we form particular kinds of narratives in our minds just like we form specific muscle memories such as typing or dancing, and then we fit new information into those narratives. Getting that information out of one narrative type and into another - or building a whole new narrative altogether - can be as hard as learning to play the banjo. Changing your mind isn't like changing your body - it's the same thing. But as long as progressive politicians and activists persist in believing that people use an objective system of reasoning to decide on their politics, the Democrats will continue to lose elections. They must wrest control of the terms of the debate from their opponents rather than accepting their frame and trying to argue within it. This passionate, erudite, and groundbreaking book will appeal to readers of Steven Pinker and Thomas Frank. It is a fascinating read for anyone interested in how the mind works, how society works, and how they work together.
©2008 George Lakoff (P)2008 Tantor