Showing results by narrator "Andy Ingalls" in All Categories

Army Veteran Mason Sharpe is killing time on Florida's gulf coast when he meets Ralph Roberts, a heartbroken older man who has come to Florida in search of the woman he loves–a woman who has mysteriously disappeared with a great deal of Ralph's money. Mason immediately suspects that Ralph has fallen victim to a scam artist, but Ralph won't hear a bad word about his true love, Camilla.

The snow is beginning to fall, the chestnuts are roasting, and the mulled cider is ready to serve at the Garland Street markets this holiday season. When Amelia arrives in Manhattan to help Cleo at her knitting stall, and Nathan comes to New York for a holiday with his daughter, both soon realize they won’t be getting quite the peaceful escape they’d imagined. Amelia is used to putting other people first, and this year is no exception. With surly nephew Kyle in tow, she has her work cut out trying to get both him and his mum to work through their problems before it’s too late.

Feathers are an evolutionary marvel: Aerodynamic, insulating, beguiling. They date back more than 100 million years. Yet their story has never been fully told. In Feathers, biologist Thor Hanson details a sweeping natural history, as feathers have been used to fly, protect, attract, and adorn through time and place. Applying the research of paleontologists, ornithologists, biologists, engineers, and even art historians, Hanson asks: What are feathers? How did they evolve? What do they mean to us?

The mythologies of the world are collective cultural dreams, and as such should be analyzed first from cultural perspectives. How do myths of the ancient Egyptians or Greeks, for instance, reflect the realities of the Egyptian and Greek cultures? When compared, however, mythologies reveal certain universal themes or motifs that point to larger trans-cultural issues such as the place of the human species in creation or the nature of deity as a concept. World Mythology: A Very Short Introduction is organized around the universal motifs.

Set in modern-day America and France, Renaissance Italy and Boxer Rebellion China, these stories embrace whole lifetimes, much in the manner of Alice Munro and William Trevor. Joan Silber skilfully and subtly ties one story to the next, as a minor element in one becomes a major element in the next, until the last is tied convincingly to the first. Intense in subject yet restrained in tone, they are about longings—often held for years—and the ways in which sex and religion can become parallel forms of dedication and comfort.

It’s October 1944, and while Claire’s older brother, Danny, is off fighting in World War II, her dad hires a group of German POWs to help with the apple harvest on their farm. Claire wants nothing to do with the enemies in the orchard, until she meets soft-spoken, hardworking Karl. Could she possibly have something in common with a German soldier? Karl, meanwhile, grapples with his role in the war as he realizes how many lies Hitler’s regime has spread—and his complacency in not standing up against them.

Lying in the remote hills of southwest Uganda, Bwindi Impenetrable Forest harbors elephants, chimpanzees, monkeys, and half the world’s population of endangered mountain gorillas. For two years, Thor Hanson called that forest home, working with local guides and trackers to develop an ecotourism program for the newly-formed Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Thoroughly researched and beautifully told, Hanson’s story blends natural history with cultural insight to place the forest and the gorillas in the context of modern Africa.

As a massive hurricane rolls toward the Louisiana coast, Army veteran Mason Sharpe is sheltering in Mobile, Alabama. There he meets Jessica and her gifted ten-year-old daughter, Autumn, who are fleeing a different kind of storm—an abusive husband and father with violent tendencies. When Autumn disappears just as the hurricane is about to make landfall, Jessica is certain that Autumn's deadbeat dad Randy has taken her. She turns to Mason for help.

What if you had a plan so clear you could hold it in your hands? Learn to not only create a vision, but also to measure your progress and translate the vision you have into a plan of action so clear that everyone on your team can follow and buy in! Starting with a powerful personal story of walking his wife home, Virg Christoffels offers a glimpse into his journey, emphasizing just how important it is to "Do life big" each and every day.

View from the Top brings listeners inside the corridors of power and relates the personal stories and powerful findings from the Platinum Study, a groundbreaking study of 550 elite American CEOs, senior government leaders, and nonprofit executives based on 10 years of research. The largest study of its kind, the Platinum Study delves into the domains of the elite with stories that illustrate both the use and misuse of power across the landscape of prominent American institutions such as AT&T, Harvard University, UnderArmour, JP Morgan Chase, Bain & Company, and the White House.

There's a specter floating above the pews at afternoon mass. Father Montgovery has no idea why the ghostly presence has followed him around for years, but when a longtime parishioner asks for help in getting his drug-addicted daughter clean, Father Montgovery must do his best to ignore the phantom and shift his focus to the physical and sometimes harrowing world.