Showing results by narrator "Dennis McKee" in All Categories

On December 16, 1947, two physicists at Bell Laboratories, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, jabbed two electrodes into a sliver of germanium half an inch long. The electrical power coming out of that piece of germanium was 100 times stronger than what went in. In that moment, the transistor was invented and the information age began. Crystal Fire recounts the story of the transistor team at Bell Labs, led by William Shockley, who shared the Nobel Prize with Bardeen and Brattain.

In Tom Wolfe's hands, the strange saga of American architecture in the 20th century makes for both high comedy and intellectual excitement. This is his sequel to The Painted Word, the book that caused such a furor in the art world five years before. Once again Wolfe shows how social and intellectual fashions have determined aesthetic form in our time and how willingly the creators have abandoned personal vision and originality in order to work a la mode.

Sturkey, a former Marine "Bonnie-Sue" HMM-265 helicopter pilot, combines fascinating detail with grim realism in this eloquent saga of Marines at war. Weaving actual military records with personal accounts from the helicopter crews, he breathes life into the daily struggle of the soldier.

God did not mean for salvation to be a deep, complicated subject that man could not understand. But sometimes man's words confuse God's simple truths. D. L. Moody, one of the 19th century's greatest evangelists, shows how simple salvation is. Avoiding heavy philosophy, he simply shows "the way to God."

Crystal Fire is a tale of the human factors in technology; the pride and jealousies coupled with scientific and economic aspiration that led to the creation of modern microelectronics and ignited the greatest technological explosion in history.

You Know Me, Al is a classic of baseball, the game and the community. Jack Keefe, one of literature's great characters, is talented, brash, and conceited. Self-assured and imperceptive, impervious to both advice and sarcasm, Keefe rises to the heights, but his inability to learn makes for his undoing. Through a series of letters from this bush-league pitcher to his not-quite-anonymous friend Al, Lardner maintains a balance between the funny and the moving, the pathetic and the glorious.

For 46 years, author Charles Hillinger journeyed around the world writing human-interest stories for the Los Angeles Times. He also helped to create and produce special features for the popular NBC television show Real People. From these experiences comes California Characters, a collection of stories about intriguing, eccentric, or simply amazing individuals.

When companies like Wal-Mart, Kinko's, and Service Corp. International adopted active, consumer-driven marketing strategies in place of traditionally passive supplier/consumer relationships, they not only became more profitable - they became market leaders. Roger Blackwell explores what it means to be a mind-to-market leader and how any company, large or small, can beat its competition by employing visionary leadership strategies.