Audiobooks narrated by Linda Jones

The CIA Intelligence Analyst: Views from the Inside

The common perception of a CIA officer is someone who collects secret intelligence abroad—a spy. However, the critical link between secrets and policy is the intelligence analyst. The CIA Intelligence Analyst brings to light the vital, but often-unseen, work of these officers. Roger Z. George, Robert Levine, and the contributors to this book demystify the profession of intelligence analyst at the CIA and describe how the wide array of analytic specialties—or 'disciplines' in the language of the CIA—function. The disciplines range from political, economic, leadership, and military matters to science and technology, cyber, counterterrorism, and counterintelligence. Each of the chapters—written by former or current CIA analysts—discusses how analysts interact with those who collect raw intelligence. Just as important, the chapters describe the relationships analysts develop with the diverse set of policymakers who use CIA analyses. The contributors reveal the key intelligence questions that analysts address, their methods, their products, and their challenges. This book will be an invaluable resource for scholars of national security and intelligence who want to develop a fuller picture of the internal workings of the CIA and for those who are considering a career as an analyst.

Adam Wasserman, Blake Mobley, Clark Shannon, Cynthia S. Barkanic, James B. Bruce, Jane P. Fletcher, Jeffrey W. Waggett, Peter Clement, Robert Levine, Roger Z. George, Steven M. Stigall (Author), Bob Johnson, Linda Jones (Narrator)

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The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires

Obtaining a new citizenship is rarely easy. But for those with the means, it's just a question of price. More than a dozen countries, many of them small islands in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South Pacific, sell citizenship to 50,000 people annually. Through six years of fieldwork on four continents, Kristin Surak discovered how the initially dubious sale of passports has transformed into a full-blown citizenship industry that thrives on global inequalities. Some 'investor citizens' hope to parlay their new passport into visa-free travel-or use it as a stepping stone to residence in countries like the US. Other buyers take out a new citizenship as an insurance policy or to escape state control at home. Almost none, though, intend to move to their selected country and live among their new compatriots, whose relationship with these global elites is complex. A groundbreaking study of a contentious practice that has become popular among the nouveaux riches, The Golden Passport takes listeners from the details of the application process to the geopolitical hydraulics of the citizenship industry. It's a business that thrives on uncertainty and imbalances of power between big, globalized economies and tiny states desperate for investment. In between are the fascinating stories of buyers, brokers, and sellers, all ready to profit from the citizenship trade.

Kristin Surak (Author), Linda Jones (Narrator)

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Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding

Unassuming but formidable, American maritime insurers used their position at the pinnacle of global trade to shape the new nation. The international information they gathered and the capital they generated enabled them to play central roles in state building and economic development. During the Revolution, they helped the U.S. negotiate foreign loans, sell state debts, and establish a single national bank. Afterward, they increased their influence by lending money to the federal government and to its citizens. Even as federal and state governments began to encroach on their domain, maritime insurers adapted, preserving their autonomy and authority through extensive involvement in the formation of commercial law. Leveraging their claims to unmatched expertise, they operated free from government interference while simultaneously embedding themselves into the nation's institutional fabric. By the early nineteenth century, insurers were no longer just risk assessors. They were nation builders and market makers. Deeply and imaginatively researched, Underwriters of the United States uses marine insurers to reveal a startlingly original story of risk, money, and power in the founding era.

Hannah Farber (Author), Linda Jones (Narrator)

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Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers

Leadership from Bad to Worse is about how leadership that is bad, invariably, inexorably, gets worse-unless it is somehow, by someone or something, stopped or slowed. This work draws on four cases of bad leadership-two in political leadership, two in business leadership-to show how it goes from bad to worse. Kellerman finds that bad leadership and bad followership go through four phases of development: 1) Onward and Upward; 2) Followers Join In; 3) Leaders Start In; and 4) Bad to Worse. These findings correctly suggest that the book, in addition to being of theoretical interest, is of practical import. It is intended, deliberately, to serve as an early warning system. By breaking bad leadership and followership into phases-each more ominous and ultimately dangerous than the one preceding-their progression will be easier to predict and detect. And easier, therefore, to slow or, preferably, to stop before they turn toxic. Bad leadership is a social disease. But unlike diseases that are physical or psychological, it remains at the margins of our collective concerns. Leadership from Bad to Worse is, then, a corrective. Knowing that bad leadership can be checked before it corrupts is knowing that bad and then worse can be, if not completely precluded, then sometimes short-circuited.

Barbara Kellerman (Author), Linda Jones (Narrator)

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Walking, Autumnal Tints & Wild Apples

“In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Here are three of Thoreau’s most famous talks brought together in one volume. “Walking,” “Autumnal Tints,” and “Wild Apples” are all autumn essays—contemplative, deliberate, and insightful. They are profound reflections on nature, beauty, and our place in the world. In 1862, during Thoreau’s last weeks, he received a request from The Atlantic Monthly’s new editor, James Fields, to submit some of his work. These three were all published that year, after his death: “Walking” in June, “Autumnal Tints” in October, and “Wild Apples” in November. All three were also included in the collection Excursions, published in 1863.

Henry David Thoreau (Author), Linda Jones (Narrator)

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Racial Emotion at Work: Dismantling Discrimination and Building Racial Justice in the Workplace

This timely book unravels race and emotion in the workplace-exploring why racial emotion is often left out of equity conversations and why we must confront it. Racial Emotion at Work is an invitation to understand our own emotions and associated behaviors around race-and much more. With this surprising and timely book, Tristin K. Green takes us beyond diversity trainings and other individualized solutions to discrimination and inequality in employment, calling for sweeping changes in how the law and work organizations treat and shape racial emotions. Green provides listeners with the latest research on racial emotions in interracial interactions and ties this research to thinking about discrimination and disadvantage at work. We see how our racial emotions can result in discrimination, and how our institutions-the law and work organizations-value and skew our racial emotions in ways that place the brunt of negative consequences on people of color. It turns out we need to reset our institutional and not just our personal radars on racial emotion to advance racial justice. Racial Emotion at Work shows how we can rise to the task.

Tristin K. Green (Author), Linda Jones (Narrator)

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The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy: A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Indus

Three powerful men converge on the banks of the Red Cedar River in the early 1900s in southern Minnesota-George Albert Hormel, founder of what will become the $10 billion food conglomerate Hormel Foods; Alpha LaRue Eberhart, the author's paternal grandfather and Hormel's executive vice president and corporate secretary; and Ransome Josiah Thomson, Hormel's comptroller. Over ten years, Thomson will embezzle $1.2 million from the company's coffers, nearly bringing the company to its knees. The Butcher, The Embezzler, and The Fall Guy opens in 1922 as George Hormel calls Eberhart into his office and demands his resignation. Hailed as the true leader of the company he'd helped Hormel build-is Eberhart complicit in the embezzlement? Far worse than losing his job and the great wealth he'd rightfully accumulated is that his beloved young wife, Lena, is dying while their three children grieve alongside. Of course, his story doesn't end there. In scale both intimate and grand, Cherington deftly weaves the histories of Hormel, Eberhart, and Thomson within the sweeping landscape of our country's early industries, along with keen observations about business leaders gleaned from her thirty-five-year career advising top company executives.

Gretchen Cherington (Author), Linda Jones (Narrator)

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Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond

An accessible yet erudite deep dive into how platforms are remaking experiences of death Since the internet's earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists' plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism. Big Tech has authority not only over people's lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies' policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese takes listeners on a vibrant tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?

Tamara Kneese (Author), Linda Jones (Narrator)

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Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence

An 'ominous and persuasive' study of when violence starts in child development-and the preventive measures to stop it (The New York Times Book Review). This new, revised edition incorporates significant advances in neurobiological research and includes a new introduction by Dr. Vincent J. Felitti, a leading researcher in the field. When Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence was first published, it was lauded for providing scientific evidence that violence can originate in the womb and become entrenched in a child's brain by preschool. The authors' groundbreaking conclusions became even more relevant following the wave of school shootings across the nation, including the tragedies at Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, and shocking subsequent shootings. Following each of these, media coverage and public debate turned yet again to the usual suspects concerning the causes of violence: widespread availability of guns and lack of mental health services for late-stage treatment. Discussion of the impact of trauma on human life-especially early in life during chemical and structural formation of the brain-is missing from the equation. Karr-Morse and Wiley continue to shift the conversation among parents and policy makers toward more fundamental preventative measures against violence.

Meredith S. Wiley, Robin Karr-Morse (Author), Linda Jones (Narrator)

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The First Atomic Bomb: The Trinity Site in New Mexico

On July 16, 1945, just weeks before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought about the surrender of Japan and the end of WWII, the US unleashed the world's first atomic bomb at the Trinity testing site located in the remote Tularosa Valley in New Mexico. In The First Atomic Bomb Janet Farrell Brodie explores the history of the Trinity test and those whose contributions have rarely been discussed-the men and women who constructed, served, and witnessed the first test-as well as the downwinders who suffered the consequences of radiation. Concentrating on these ordinary people, laborers, ranchers, and Indigenous peoples who lived in the region and participated in the testing, Brodie corrects the lack of coverage in existing scholarship on the essential details and everyday experiences of this globally significant event. This book also covers the environmental preservation of the Trinity test site and compares it with the wide range of atomic sites now preserved independently or as part of the new Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Although the Trinity site became a significant node for testing the new weapons of the postwar US, it is known today as an officially designated National Historic Landmark. Brodie presents a timely, important, and innovative study of an explosion that carries special historical weight in American memory.

Janet Farrell Brodie (Author), Linda Jones (Narrator)

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Our Own Unique Affliction

Our Own Unique Affliction is the story of Alice Ann, a dejected immortal who longs for her life in the sun. Navigating guilt, loss, family, meaning, murder, and all that comes with the curse of living forever. 'Unexpected and grim, Scott J. Moses' Our Own Unique Affliction is the most inventive and bombastically gruesome vampire story I've read since The Light at the End by John Skipp and Craig Spector. An exquisitely written meditation on grief, family, and trauma told with such empathy and care. I feel broken after reading this book, and I applaud Scott for obliterating my soul with such grace and tenderness.' - Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes 'Scott Moses writes from a place of pure empathy, the result of which is a story that pulls the reader in with deceptive ease, putting them through the emotional wringer, culling fear from every page. A tightly written fever dream of bloodlust and family ties, grief, rage and the eternal hunt.' - Laurel Hightower, author of Crossroads and Below 'Moses gives us not only complicated and relatable characters, but also cinematic scene-setting coated with pathos and grit. Our Own Unique Affliction forces readers to face that often circumstance is the only thing separating us from the monsters.' - J.A.W. McCarthy, Shirley Jackson Award nominated author of Sometimes We're Cruel and Other Stories 'Moses tenders a vampire's origin and fate in the skin of a mood-soaked tragedy, embraced by bloody nights and unyielding regrets. Fans of Paul Tremblay's The Pallbearers Club should sink their fangs in before sunrise.' - Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth

Scott J. Moses (Author), Linda Jones (Narrator)

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The Decisive Manager: Get Results, Build Morale, and Be the Boss Your People Deserve

People issues. They seemingly arise out of nowhere and just don't go away. It's critical that managers handle them right. As a manager, you need to know so many things about managing people, but you don't even know what to ask! The Decisive Manager can help. With examples of typical situations that managers encounter and advice on how to handle them, it's an easy-to-use guide for people managers and has information on hiring to firing, and everything in between. You'll find information on: finding and hiring the best talent; creating a positive employee experience; paying and rewarding employees; helping employees grow and develop; understanding policies and practices; ensuring graceful endings; and the important issues surrounding remote and hybrid work. Concerned about navigating the changing workplace and avoiding legal pitfalls? There are questions and essential answers about these issues, too. Managing people correctly is critical to every manager's success. The Decisive Manager will help with those unexpected challenges that arise too often. This is a must-listen for all who lead.

Barbara Mitchell, Cornelia Gamlem (Author), Linda Jones (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Linda Jones