Audiobooks narrated by Michael Puttonen

Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconsious Judgements in Our Daily Lives

Are you biased? May as well ask, "are you human"? Because if you are human, you are biased. Howard Ross, diversity expert, explores this fundamental truth and the biases we each hold. Most of us do not see ourselves as biased towards people of different races, genders, or religious/cultural backgrounds, and yet, disparities remain in virtually every area of modern life. Even in corporate America, which has seemed to embrace the idea of diversity, patterns of disparity remain rampant. Why? Recent breakthroughs in the cognitive and neurosciences provide insight into why our results are inconsistent with our intentions. Bias is a survival mechanism that is fundamental to our identity, it is natural to the human mind. It is overwhelmingly unconscious. Ross helps readers understand how and why unconscious bias impacts our daily lives, particularly our daily work lives, incorporating anecdotes from today's headlines as well as case studies from over 30 years of research. And, most importantly, he answers the question: "Is there anything we can do about it?", offering ways we can become less unconsciously biased towards people who are different from us. This audio edition includes the added appendix with lessons for handling conflict and bias in the workplace. An invaluable resource for everyone, from those seeking to understand and confront their own biases to business leaders and human resource professionals striving to create bias-free organizations. If we understand the powerful nature of the biases we all have, we can create personal and business environments that are more productive, fairer, and offer greater personal happiness.

Howard J. Ross (Author), Michael Puttonen (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Arrogant Autocrat

Mel Hurtig, Canadian nationalist, publisher, best-selling author, has been warning Canadians about the negative influences of the excessive corporate takeover of Canada, including the impacts of foreign ownership and so-called free-trade agreements for over four decades. In this short but important book, Mel Hurtig turns his attention to the devastating impact that the Stephen Harper government has had on Canada, radically altering the democratic, social and economic fabric of the country. He shows how Stephen Harper's single-minded pursuit of big oil and the tar sands, at a time when the world must take dramatic action to arrest climate change, has inflicted enormous damage on our country and on our international reputation. He contends that Harper rose to power with an agenda so contrary to Canadian principles and values, that the only way he could pursue it was through a takeover of Canadian democracy. Mel Hurtig is the legendary Edmonton bookseller, publisher and creator of The Canadian Encyclopedia who became a political activist, then an author in 1991 with his huge bestseller The Betrayal of Canada. He is also the author of Pay the Rent or Feed the Kids, The Vanishing Country, Rushing to Armageddon and The Truth About Canada. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and has received many honorary degrees and other honours. He lives in Vancouver.

Mel Hurtig (Author), Michael Puttonen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Party of One: Stephen Harper and his Radical Makeover of Canada

A timely indictment of a prime minister determined to remake Canada. In Party of One, Investigative journalist Michael Harris gives us an intimate look at Stephen Harper, and draws a portrait of a Prime Minister whose policies and instincts, Harris believes, are a clear and present danger to Canada’s democracy. Fueled by the election victory of May 2011, unchecked by the opposition, the staggering gap between Stephen Harper’s stated political principles and his practices starkly drive Harris’ arguments home. Harper, an acknowledged master at controlling information is, Harris argues, profoundly anti-democratic. The Harper Government’s sins include keeping facts from Canadians and an inclination to invent them (as it did in the F-35 debacle). Since coming to power, Harper has made war on every independent source of information in Canada. Harris recounts Stephen Harper’s well-defined and growing list of enemies, whose perspectives are unwelcome, and whose voices are to be suppressed: scientists, diplomats, union members, environmentalists, First Nations peoples, and journalists. Counter to the backdrop of a Conservative commitment to transparency and accountability, Harris exposes a regime of ultra-secrecy, non-compliance, and dismissiveness. With this Conservative majority in Parliament, the law is simple: what one man, Stephen Harper, says, goes.

Micheal Harris (Author), Michael Puttonen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Becoming the Kind Father: A Son's Journey

The macho society that held John Wayne as a role model has created an emotional wasteland where eighty percent of men are unable to accurately express their feelings, and where that same percentage feel estranged from their fathers. The stifled male, disconnected and out of touch, fills the void with apathy or anger and the toll is staggering: short unhealthy lives, ruined relationships and damaged children. This destructive behavior repeats itself in the next generation as the sins of the father continue the cycle. In Becoming a Kind Father, Calvin Sandborn aims to break that cycle. His intensely personal story is heart-searing and inspirational. Brought up to fear his father's alcohol-fuelled fury and hateful put-downs, the author buried his feelings and fine-tuned his own rage. His father's early death and the collapse of the author's marriage provided catalysts for change. Interspersing clever literary references with painful childhood memories, intense self-examination and astute observations, Sandborn provides well-researched psychological findings and self-help tips, including how to:

Calvin Sandborn (Author), Michael Puttonen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Supply Shock: Economic Growth at the Crossroads and the Steady State Solution

Politicians, economists, and Wall Street would have us believe that limitless economic expansion is the Holy Grail, and that there is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment. Supply Shock debunks these widely accepted myths and demonstrates that we are in fact navigating the end of the era of economic growth, and that the only sustainable alternative is the development of a steady state economy. Starting with a refreshingly accessible, comprehensive critique of economic growth, the author engages readers in an enormous topic that affects everyone in every country.Publisher's Weekly favorably compared Czech to Carl Sagan for popularizing their difficult subjects; Supply Shock shows why. Czech presents a compelling alternative to growth based on keen scientific, economic, and political insights including: The "trophic theory of money" The overlooked source of technological progress that prevents us from reconciling growth and environmental protection Bold yet practical policies for establishing a steady state economy. Supply Shock leaves no doubt that the biggest idea of the 20th century – economic growth – has become the biggest problem of the 21st. Required reading for anyone concerned about the world our children and grandchildren will inherit, this landmark work lays a solid foundation for a new economic model, perhaps in time for preventing global catastrophes; certainly in time for lessening the damages.

Brian Czech (Author), Michael Puttonen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Hard Hed: The Hoosier Chapman Papers

In this contemporary retelling of the Johnny Appleseed story, Tidler has created an Indiana as Faulkner created a Mississippi and Steinbeck a California. Local historian and apple orchardist Hoosier Chapman has just been released from a Northwestern Ohio jail. Having served two years for planting wild apple trees in a city park, he is dropped at the State Line by a deputy sheriff. Hoosier Chapman, barefoot, treks west into Indiana state, recreating history and inventing myth, both public and private, along the way. The historian in Chapman yearns for a pre-colonial, pre-gunpowder freedom, one that lies just beyond the common fields, before the wetlands were drained and the forests cut down. His every step is dogged by chaos and violence. Ranging in style from fantasy to realism to historical document to speculative fiction to lyric poetry, page after page Tidler's joy of craft that shows through. Part meta-story, part documentary, part violent romance, this unabashedly original work of fiction roams in and out of time and place and point of view. "Tidler takes readers on a roller-coaster of a ride, with highs and lows and mighty twists. The history of the Indiana Territory is revealed, along with the brutalizing of its original inhabitants. And the brutality never stops. ... The language is raw and crude at times, reflecting the violence of the narrative, but it is also eloquent. ...'Hard Hed: The Hoosier Chapman Papers' is an impressive achievement..." - The Times-Colonist

Charles Tidler (Author), Michael Puttonen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Going to New Orleans

Lewis King is a trumpet player who lands a gig in the Big Easy. He is a genius on horn, but King's private life is, morally, physically, and financially bankrupt. A heavy drinker and compulsive sexual manipulator, he is prone to paranoid fits of violent rage. Ms Sugarlicq, his girlfriend, can’t keep her pants on. They’re perfect for each other… A fantastic and graphic first-person narrative, Going to New Orleans serves as a surreal, yet faithful, guide to the food, music, history, and literature of New Orleans. A dirty book, but also a spiritual book one.. If books had bloodlines, Going to New Orleans would be a cousin to both Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter and Tom Walmsley's Doctor Tin, and a bastard grandchild of Georges Bataille's The Story of the Eye. Like Slaughter, the protagonist is a horn player with a dark side, New Orleans in all its voodoo glory is a central character, and the language is evocative and spare. As with Tin and Eye, the all-pervasive sexuality is transgressive, perverse, algolagnic, and disturbingly captivating, like seeing a car wrecked after running the red-light district. -- Georgia Straight, Sept. 2004

Charles Tidler (Author), Michael Puttonen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA

World War II commando, Cold War spy, and CIA director under presidents Nixon and Ford, William Egan Colby played a critical role in some of the most pivotal events of the twentieth century. A quintessential member of the greatest generation, Colby embodied the moral and strategic ambiguities of the postwar world, and first confronted many of the dilemmas about power and secrecy that America still grapples with today. In Shadow Warrior, eminent historian Randall B. Woods presents a riveting biography of Colby, revealing that this crusader for global democracy was also drawn to the darker side of American power. Aiming to help reverse the spread of totalitarianism in Europe and Asia, Colby joined the U.S. Army in 1941, just as America entered World War II. He served with distinction in France and Norway, and at the end of the war transitioned into America's first peacetime intelligence agency: the CIA. Fresh from the fight against fascism, Colby zealously redirected his efforts against international communism. He insisted on the importance of fighting communism on the ground, doggedly applying guerilla tactics for counterinsurgency, sabotage, surveillance, and information-gathering on the new battlefields of the Cold War. Over time, these strategies became increasingly ruthless; as head of the CIA's Far East Division, Colby oversaw an endless succession of assassination attempts, coups, secret wars in Laos and Cambodia, and the Phoenix Program, in which 20,000 civilian supporters of the Vietcong were killed. Colby ultimately came clean about many of the CIA's illegal activities, making public a set of internal reports known as the family jewels" that haunt the agency to this day. Ostracized from the intelligence community, he died under suspicious circumstances a murky ending to a life lived in the shadows. Drawing on multiple new sources, including interviews with members of Colby's family, Woods has crafted a gripping biography of one of the most fascinating and controversial figures of the twentieth century.

Randall B. Woods (Author), Michael Puttonen (Narrator)

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The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructured World

Large corporations, big governments, and other centralized organizations have long determined and dominated the way we work, access healthcare, get an education, feed ourselves, and generally go about our lives. The economist Ronald Coase, in his famous 1937 paper “The Nature of the Firm,” provided an economic explanation for this: Organizations lowered transaction costs, making the provision of goods and services cheap, efficient, and reliable. Today, this organizational advantage is rapidly disappearing. The Internet is lowering transaction costs—costs of connection, coordination, and trade—and pointing to a future that increasingly favors distributed sources and social solutions to some of our most immediate needs and our most intractable problems. As Silicon Valley thought-leader Marina Gorbis, head of the Institute for the Future, portrays, a thriving new relationship-driven or socialstructed economy is emerging in which individuals are harnessing the powers of new technologies to join together and provide an array of products and services. Examples of this changing economy range from BioCurious, a members-run and free-to-use bio lab, to the peer-to-peer lending platform Lending Club, to the remarkable Khan Academy, a free online-teaching service. These engaged and innovative pioneers are filling gaps and doing the seemingly impossible by reinventing business, education, medicine, banking, government, and even scientific research. Based on extensive research into current trends, she travels to a socialstructed future and depicts an exciting vision of tomorrow.

Marina Gorbis (Author), Michael Puttonen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America

If you've replaced a computer lately--or a cell phone, a camera, a television--chances are, the old one still worked. And chances are even greater that the latest model won't last as long as the one it replaced. Welcome to the world of planned obsolescence--a business model, a way of life, and a uniquely American invention that this eye-opening book explores from its beginnings to its perilous implications for the very near future. Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. America invented everything that is now disposable, Giles Slade tells us, and he explains how disposability was in fact a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. His book shows us the ideas behind obsolescence at work in such American milestones as the inventions of branding, packaging, and advertising; the contest for market dominance between GM and Ford; the struggle for a national communications network, the development of electronic technologies--and with it the avalanche of electronic consumer waste that will overwhelm America's landfills and poison its water within the coming decade. History reserves a privileged place for those societies that built things to last--forever, if possible. What place will it hold for a society addicted to consumption--a whole culture made to break? This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.

Giles Slade (Author), Michael Puttonen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life

An irreverent and illuminating journey through a day in the life of the affectionately named Trauma Farm, with numerous side trips into the natural history of farming. Beginning naked in darkness, Brian Brett moves from the tending of livestock, poultry, orchards, gardens, machinery, and fields to the social intricacies of rural communities and, finally, to an encounter with a magnificent deer in the silver moonlight of a magical farm field. Brett understands both tall tales and rigorous science as he explores the small mixed farm-meditating on the perfection of the egg and the nature of soil while also offering a scathing critique of agribusiness and the horror of modern slaughterhouses. Whether discussing the uses and misuses of gates, examining the energy of seeds, or bantering with his family, farm hands, and neighbours, he remains aware of the miracles of life, birth, and death that confront the rural world every day. Trauma Farm tells a story that's poetic, passionate, practical, and frequently hilarious, providing an unforgettable portrait of one farm and our separation from the natural world, as well as a commonsense analysis of rural life. An Amazon top 100 book of 2009! A Globe and Mail top 100 book for 2009! A Times Literary Supplement top 100 book for 2009! Now available in audio!

Brian Brett (Author), Michael Puttonen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Cold, Hungry and In the Dark

Conventional wisdom has North America entering a new era of energy abundance thanks to shale gas. But has industry been honest? Cold, Hungry and in the Dark argues that declining productivity combined with increasing demand will trigger a crisis that will cause prices to skyrocket, damage the economy, and have a profound impact on the lives of nearly every North American. Relying on faulty science, bought-and-paid-for-white papers masquerading as independent research and "industry consultants," the "shale promoters" have vastly overstated the viable supply of shale gas resources for their own financial gain. This startling exposé, written by an industry insider, suggests that the stakes involved in the Enron scandal might seem like lunch money in comparison to the bursting of the natural gas bubble. Exhaustively researched and rigorously documented, Cold, Hungry and in the Dark: Puts supply-and-demand trends under a microscope Provides overwhelming evidence of the absurdity of the one hundred-year supply myth Suggests numerous ways to mitigate the upcoming natural gas price spike. The mainstream media has told us that natural gas will be cheap and plentiful for decades, when nothing could be further from the truth. Forewarned is forearmed. Cold, Hungry and in the Dark is vital reading for anyone concerned about the inevitable economic impact of our uncertain energy future. Bill Powers is an author, private investor, contrarian and sits on the board of directors of Calgary-based Arsenal Energy.

Bill Powers (Author), Michael Puttonen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Michael Puttonen