Showing results by narrator "Christine Marshall" in All Categories

It's been 20 years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global microdemocracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything's on the line.

Margaret Starbird's theological beliefs were profoundly shaken when she read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a book that dared to suggest that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalen and that their descendants carried on his holy bloodline in Western Europe. Shocked by such heresy, this Roman Catholic scholar set out to refute it but instead found new and compelling evidence for the existence of the bride of Jesus - the same enigmatic woman who anointed him with precious unguent from her "alabaster jar".

Olivia Wallace has a birthday curse…or so she thinks. It was a broken heart on her 16th, a car accident on her 21st, pneumonia on her 30th, and a fall down a flight of stairs on her 35th. There were Ohio blizzards on her 38th, 39th, and 40th; and six days before her 45th, she lost the love of her life to a heart attack. Numbing grief stole that birthday and a couple more to follow and, on the morning of her 48th birthday, she received the call she'd dreaded ever since losing her mom so many years ago…

As if getting cheated on and dumped weren't enough, her roommate suddenly disappears after stealing Ellie's identity and half her furniture. Now Fin Hunter insists Ellie owes him 7,000 dollars and he won't leave her alone until he collects it. Determined to keep her overbearing family out of her life, Ellie agrees to work for Fin's illegal online poker operation. He's given her six weeks to pay off the debt. And to make matters worse, Fin is more than Ellie bargained for. He's too bossy and too sexy for his own good.

Darcy Rhone thought she had it all figured out: the more beautiful the girl, the more charmed her life. Never mind substance. Never mind playing by the rules. Never mind karma. But Darcy's neat, perfect world turns upside down when her best friend, Rachel, the plain-Jane “good girl,” steals her fiancé, while Darcy finds herself completely alone for the first time in her life . . . with a baby on the way. Darcy tries to recover, fleeing to her childhood friend living in London and resorting to her tried-and-true methods for getting what she wants.

Throughout the 1960s and '70s, Abbie Hoffman crisscrossed the country, ferreting out alternative ways of getting by in America - some illegal and all radical. Causing scandals with its advice on how to Survive!, Fight!, and Liberate! in the “prison that is Amerika”, Steal This Book is a revolutionary's manual to running a guerilla movement, as well as getting free food, housing, transportation, medical care, and more.

No Better Time tells of a young, driven mathematical genius who wrote a set of algorithms that would create a faster, better Internet. It's the story of a beautiful friendship between a loud, irreverent student and his soft-spoken MIT professor, of a husband and father who spent years struggling to make ends meet only to become a billionaire almost overnight with the success of Akamai Technologies, the Internet content delivery network he cofounded with his mentor.

A "gray rhino" is a highly probable high-impact yet neglected threat - kin to both the elephant in the room and the improbable and unforeseeable black swan. Gray rhinos are not random surprises but occur after a series of warnings and visible evidence. The bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters, the new digital technologies that upended the media world, the fall of the Soviet Union...all were evident well in advance.

Chief Customer Officer 2.0 will give you a proven framework that has launched and advanced the customer experience transformation in businesses around the world. And it will take years off your learning curve. Written by Jeanne Bliss, worldwide authority on customer experience, and preeminent thought leader on the role of the customer leadership executive, this book follows the five-competency model she uses to coach the C-Suite and chief customer officers.

Maggie is entirely devoted to her husband, Thomas, their two beautiful children, and God. But then what begins as innocent letter writing with poet James starts to become something far more erotically charged, their meeting of minds threatening to become a meeting of bodies. As everything Maggie believes in is thrown into doubt, the listener is drawn ever deeper into the battleground of her soul.

Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic Plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were, for centuries, at the center of the North American universe. We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, but why don't we know more? Who were they really? In this extraordinary book, Elizabeth A. Fenn retrieves their history by piecing together important new discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science.

First comes love. Then comes marriage. Then comes...a baby carriage? Isn’t that what all women want? Not so for Claudia Parr. And just as she gives up on finding a man who feels the same way, she meets warm, wonderful Ben. Things seem too good to be true when they fall in love and agree to buck tradition with a satisfying, child-free marriage. Then the unexpected occurs: one of them has a change of heart.

When her son's Hasidic babysitter vanishes, public defender turned stay-at-home mom Juliet Applebaum travels from her havoc-filled home in Los Angeles to a Hasidic enclave in Brooklyn. In search of answers. In pursuit of justice. And in desperate need of a big, long nap.

Elizabeth Carlson is living in the pits of hell - also known as grief. Her husband of eight years, the father of her four children and the love of her life, died from cancer. Grady's prognosis was grim even from the start, but Liz never gave up hope he would survive. How could she, when he was everything to her? Six months later she is trying to pick up the pieces of her shattered life and get the kids to school on time. Both seem impossible. Everything seems impossible these days.

In October 2018, Mark “Mace” Macy, sixty-four years old, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He had spent thirty years competing in Colorado and around the world in ultra-endurance competitions and is one of the few people who have finished all eight Eco-Challenge events. Once diagnosed, he feared losing endurance, strength, and independence.

The last time Information held an election, a global network outage, two counts of sabotage by major world governments, and a devastating earthquake almost shook micro-democracy apart. Five years later, it's time to vote again, and the system that has ensured global peace for 25 years is more vulnerable than ever. Unknown enemies are attacking Information's network infrastructure. Information's best agents question whether the data monopoly they've served all their lives is worth saving or whether it's time to burn the world down and start anew.

The future of democracy is about to implode. After the last controversial global election, the global infomocracy that has ensured 30 years of world peace is fraying at the edges. As the new Supermajority government struggles to establish its legitimacy, agents of information across the globe strive to keep the peace and maintain the flows of data that feed the new world order.

St. Louis Police Department psychologist PJ Gray applies a new virtual-reality investigative technology to a new case involving a serial killer who mutilates his victims and finds that she must step into the mind of a murderer to prevent her own death.

Of all the sports played across the globe, none has more curses, superstitions, or supernatural events like baseball, America's national pastime. While some of these can easily be explained, there are just as many that cannot. Field of Fantasies delves right into that superstition with short stories written by several key authors about baseball and the supernatural.

For billions of people, having a religious belief system provides purpose in life. For some, religion serves as a guide for moral behavior. After many years exploring the foundations of various world religions, Jason Boyett has written this comprehensive, easy-to-understand exploration of the 12 major world religions through a meticulous, yet unbiased lens. 12 Major World Religions offers an impartial look at where each of these belief systems intersects, how they differ, and why some have been - or are currently - misunderstood.