Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Todd Ross" in All Categories

The War on Drugs doesn't work. This became obvious to El Paso City Representatives Susie Byrd and Beto O'Rourke when they started to ask questions about why El Paso's sister city, Ciudad Juarez, has become the deadliest city in the world - 8,000-plus deaths since January 1, 2008. Byrd and O'Rourke soon realized American drug use and United States' failed War on Drugs are at the core of problem.

For most of high school, Bijan Majidi has flown under the radar. He gets good grades, reads comics, hangs out with his best friend, Sean, and secretly crushes on Elle, one of the most popular girls in his school. When he's called off the basketball team's varsity bench and makes the winning basket in a playoff game, everything changes in an instant. But not everyone is happy Bijan is the man of the hour: An anonymous cyberbully sends the entire school a picture of Bijan photoshopped to look like a terrorist.

Everybody's Doin' It is the eye-opening story of popular music's 70-year rise in the brothels, dance halls, and dives of New York City. It traces the birth of popular music, including ragtime and jazz, to convivial meeting places for sex, drink, music, and dance. Whether coming from a single piano player or a small band, live music was a nightly feature in New York's spirited dives, where men and women, often black and white, mingled freely - to the horror of the elite.

The grizzly is one of North America's few remaining large predators. Their range is diminished, but they're spreading across the West again. Descending into valleys where once they were king, bears find the landscape they'd known for eons utterly changed by the new most dominant animal: humans. In searing detail, award-winning writer, Montana rancher, and conservationist Bryce Andrews tells us about one such grizzly. Millie is a typical mother: strong, cunning, fiercely protective of her cubs. But raising those cubs becomes ever harder as the climate warms and people crowd the valleys.

In the long annals of sports and crime, no story compares to the one that engulfed the Luckman family in 1935. As 18-year-old Sid Luckman made headlines across New York City for his high school football exploits at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, his father, Meyer Luckman, was making headlines in the same papers for a very different reason: the gangland murder of his own brother-in-law. Amazingly, the connection between sports celebrity son and mobster father was studiously ignored by the press and ultimately overlooked for eight decades.

For decades, the name Labatt was synonymous with beer in Canada, but no longer. Through Labatt's lively history from 1847 to 1995, this book explores the wider spirit of Canadian capitalism, the interplay between the state's moral economy and enterprise, and the difficulties of creating popular beer brands in a country that is regionally, linguistically, and culturally diverse. A comprehensive look at one of the industry's most iconic firms, Brewed in the North sheds light on what it takes to succeed in the business of Canadian brewing.

The creator of the viral parenting concept the “X-Plan” illuminates the importance of awakening your child’s unique strength - while also taking an introspective look at your own life story to become a better parent.

Meet your new sales force: They love collaboration, live and breathe technology, and happily bring assignments home. They also show up late, resist authority, text their friends in meetings, and job hop like there's no tomorrow. You can bark orders all you want, but it won't work with millennials. To get great sales results, you need to let go of old-school approaches and learn to speak their language. Creating Sales Stars is your field guide to managing today's emerging sales professionals.

Brand advocates are your most loyal, passionate, and engaged customers, and your best marketers. They don't just buy your products - they sell your products for you. Brand Advocates teaches you how to turn your enthusiastic customers into a powerful and sustainable marketing force. Through a step-by-step playbook and real-world examples, you'll learn exactly what it takes to build and activate your "Advocate Army", from identifying your advocates to energizing them and tracking results.

One of Silicon Valley's top leadership trainers distills his proven framework that has empowered teams at the world's most innovative companies - from Google and Facebook to Cisco Systems and biotech giant Genentech/Roche - to do the best work of their lives. Richard Lee has worked with thousands of ambitious leaders and their teams, and has found that they all share the same frustration. Whether it's because of communication breakdowns or systemic complexity, people at every level of an organization feel like their results fall short of their expectations.

Zane is not that interested in the Gollywhopper Games. He’d rather play football and is sure that he’s headed straight for the NFL. But after he gets his second concussion, his parents tell him, “No football for a year.” Instead, to his surprise, he gets a chance to compete in the Gollywhopper Games. Zane’s sense of strategy, his physical strength, and his competitive edge are all assets, and so is his ability to motivate his teammates and get them to work together.

The Golly Toy and Game Company is hosting the regional rounds for the next Gollywhopper Games, and this time it's brother against brother in the physical challenges and mental puzzles. The companion to the popular The Gollywhopper Games will appeal to fans of Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Chasing Vermeer. Chock-full of puzzles, riddles, and challenges for the listener to solve along with the main characters, this fast-paced companion to The Gollywhopper Games is bigger, bolder, and braver!

Multiple times a day, in cities across the US and beyond, a simple yet powerful message is repeated by the well-meaning, the ignorant, and the bigoted: “don’t go”—avoid at all costs those Black and Brown disinvested neighborhoods that have become bywords for social disorder and urban decay. This book is a collection of intimate stories that uncover the hidden influence of both subtle and overt “don’t go” messages and the segregation they perpetuate in Chicago.

Fights over history are at the heart of most important constitutional disputes in America. The Supreme Court's current embrace of originalism is only the most recent example of how lawyers and judges try to use history to establish authority for their positions. Jack M. Balkin argues that fights over constitutional interpretation are often fights over collective memory. Balkin shows how lawyers and judges channel history through standard forms of legal argument that shape how they use history and even what they see in history.

Not far from Seattle skyscrapers live 150-year-old clams, more than 250 species of fish, and underwater kelp forests as complex as any terrestrial ecosystem. For millennia, vibrant Coast Salish communities have lived beside these waters dense with nutrient-rich foods, with cultures intertwined through exchanges across the waterways. Transformed by settlement and resource extraction, Puget Sound and its future health now depend on a better understanding of the region's ecological complexities.

This is the first book to examine how and why the United States refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide until the early 2020s. Although the American government expressed sympathy towards the plight of the Armenians in the 1910s and 1920s, historian Julien Zarifian explores how, from the 1960s, a set of geopolitical and institutional factors soon led the United States to adopt a policy of genocide nonrecognition which it would cling to for over fifty years, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

Swirling snow may have stranded me at this tiny airport in the middle of nowhere on Christmas Eve, but it has nothing on the storm raging inside me when he walks into the terminal. Artemis Warren. My first love and the man who shattered my world. I thought I locked my feelings for him safely away in the past, but one look is all it takes for me to drown in his icy blue eyes again. So much time has passed. I’m no longer that naïve teenager standing on a beach, wishing the boy would choose me. Now, I’m hiding a secret that could unravel both our lives.

The incredible, untold story of the men who risked their lives in the first transcontinental air contest—and put American aviation on the map.

Major Megan McClung is the first female United States Naval Academy graduate to be killed in action since the school’s 1845 founding and the highest-ranking female U.S. Marine Corps officer to die during the Iraq war. Be Bold is Megan’s inspirational story of defying steep odds, making the ultimate sacrifice and paving the way for a new era of women at war.

Few leads. No witnesses. Detective Logan Ryder is running out of time to stop a serial killer from claiming a fourth woman on Hawaii’s Big Island. Grief counselor Elena Kekona puts her life on the line to help when she discovers she resembles the victims. But Logan’s reserve—and Elena’s secrets—could turn their instant attraction into a devastating endgame that both might not survive …