Showing results by narrator "Andy Ingalls" in All Categories

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 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.

The Ragger and Sekar aliens have pushed humanity to the brink of annihilation. Two hopes for survival - genetic modifications to protect against the Sekar, and the death pulse generator - are years from completion. With no other choice, Fleet Admiral Stone is forced to make a deal with the devil in the form of a mutually beneficial exchange of technology with the back-stabbing Raggers. Naturally, the Raggers haven’t changed. However, the aliens are about to discover that when humanity is pushed into a corner, anything goes.

The Sekar aliens have already killed billions, and nobody knows where they came from or how to defeat them. The enemy’s only weakness is tharniol - the rarest substance in the known universe. Desperate times call for desperate measures and a shaky truce is made with the Raggers. The Raggers claim knowledge of data that will assist in the fight. Unfortunately, the data is buried deep in a subsurface facility on a fringe planet called Glesia - a facility which is crawling with Sekar.

Days 9 to 16 is the third title in the Mass Extinction Event series, continuing the story of a worldwide apocalypse seen from the eyes of two very different people in two different parts of the US. Finally realising that she must leave the city, Elizabeth sets out alone along a deserted road. Eventually, however, she encounters some fellow survivors, and before long she's taken to a remote farmhouse where a small community is struggling to take shape. She soon discovers, however, that this particular farmhouse hides some dark secrets.

The Unity League has decided to send a peace mission into Ragger space. A single shuttle named Colorado carries the hopes of billions. Captain Jake Griffin is tasked with following the Colorado in a heavily armed assault craft to watch for signs of treachery. When betrayal comes, Griffin delivers retribution in the form of a nuclear warhead, which wipes out much of a primary Ragger facility and almost wrecks his spaceship. He ends up trapped in a place far beneath the ground.

Having been rescued from the forest, Elizabeth is shocked to find herself living with a small group of survivors. But when she's plunged into an unlikely reunion, she begins to realise that the task of saving humanity might require difficult decisions. Meanwhile, Thomas discovers the truth about another group of survivors. Old alliances are destroyed and new alliances are formed, but finally Thomas is forced to make a stand.

Trapped in a ruined city, Elizabeth and her brother, Henry, try to avoid the dangers that seem to lurk on every street. But even when they manage to get home, they face an entirely different kind of threat. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, Thomas struggles to keep his brother alive. First, though, he needs to find out what happened to his father, and he also has to make a difficult decision about his ailing mother.

Three decades ago, renowned literary expert Robert Alter radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as not only a human creation but a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. In The Art of Biblical Poetry, his companion to the seminal The Art of Biblical Narrative, Alter takes his analysis beyond narrative craft to investigate the use of Hebrew poetry in the Bible.

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.

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.

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.

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.