HarperCollins Leadership

Performed by Kara Young

A haunting novel about a black woman who returns to her hometown for a plantation wedding and the horror that ensues as she reconnects with the blood-soaked history of the land and the best friends she left behind.

More than a decade ago, Mira fled her small, segregated hometown in the south to forget. With every mile she traveled, she distanced herself from her past: from her best friend Celine, mocked by their town as the only white girl with black friends; from her old neighborhood; from the eerie Woodsman plantation rumored to be haunted by the spirits of slaves; from the terrifying memory of a ghost she saw that terrible day when a dare-gone-wrong almost got Jesse—the boy she secretly loved—arrested for murder.

But now Mira is back in Kipsen to attend Celine’s wedding at the plantation, which has been transformed into a lush vacation resort. Mira hopes to reconnect with her friends, and especially, Jesse, to finally tell him the truth about her feelings and the events of that devastating long-ago day.

But for all its fancy renovations, the Woodsman remains a monument to its oppressive racist history. The bar serves antebellum drinks, entertainments include horrifying reenactments, and the service staff is nearly all black. Yet the darkest elements of the plantation’s past have been carefully erased—rumors that slaves were tortured mercilessly and that ghosts roam the lands, seeking vengeance on the descendants of those who tormented them, which includes most of the wedding guests. 

As the weekend unfolds, Mira, Jesse, and Celine are forced to acknowledge their history together, and to save themselves from what is to come.

WHEN THE RECKONING COMES by LaTanya McQueen

Welcome back to The Anatomy of Desire Podcast - A seven-episode series of highlights from the immersive full cast audio recording of L. R. Dorn’s crime novel THE ANATOMY OF DESIRE. We have reached the final episode, Girl Lost. In this installment, Cleo Ray learns that the jury has reached a verdict and that her fate is about to be decided. The jury files into a packed courtroom as spectators inside and the social media world outside holds its breath awaiting the moment of truth.

'The Anatomy of Desire' audiobook by L. R. Dorn is available now. Purchase it here: bit.ly/3vkBhJY

Episode Seven: Girl Lost

Answers to the most common questions and misconceptions about the Bible

Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew About the Bible is a short and accessible introduction to the Bible - its origins, interpretation, truthfulness, and authority.

Bible scholar, prolific author, and Anglican minister Michael Bird helps Christians understand seven important "things" about this unique book:

How the Bible was put together;
What "inspiration" means;
How the Bible is true;
Why the Bible needs to be rooted in history;
Why literal interpretation is not always the best interpretation;
How the Bible gives us knowledge, faith, love, and hope; 
How Jesus Christ is the center of the Bible.
Seven Things presents clear and understandable evangelical account of the Bible's inspiration, canonization, significance, and relevance in a way that is irenic and compelling. It is a must for any serious Bible reader who desires an informed and mature view of the Bible that will enrich their faith.

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SEVEN THINGS I WISH CHRISTIANS KNEW ABOUT THE BIBLE by Michael F. Bird | Chapter 1

Three-time Olympian Lolo Jones delivers a tough yet inspiring look into the strategies she has used to overcome immense obstacles on her way to becoming the number one women's hurdler in the world.

Lolo Jones' path to becoming a world champion and an Olympian began in childhood with a single mother who worked multiple jobs to support a family of six and a father who was serving time in prison. These early years instilled in Lolo an overcomer's mindset that gave her the strength she needed to rise above an unstable and impoverished background, to earn an economics degree at LSU, and then to establish herself as the best women's hurdler in the world.

In Over It, Lolo delivers a high-octane dose of no-BS encouragement, storytelling, humor, and practicality and exposes the obstacles that too often hold us back. With the same pluck and boldness that defines her life and career, Lolo teaches people how to face their challenges head-on and keep working to overcome them with strength. 

Even when the obstacles are large and we feel frustrated, overwhelmed, and ready to quit, we’ve got to keep fighting - full force, full speed. We've got to get over it.

OVER IT by Lolo Jones | Chapter 1

After hearing the words no one wants to hear--"you have cancer"--Jim Burns set out to articulate the most important principles for a life well lived and now shares them with you as a collection of essential truths for a healthy, balanced, and successful life. 

What's truly important for leading a life well lived? After being diagnosed with cancer and facing his mortality, prolific author and family-life expert Jim Burns learned what it really means to live a meaningful life from the perspective and practical wisdom only gained from facing death. Now cancer free, those same life-changing lessons continue to guide and enrich Jim's faith, work, and relationships in immeasurable ways. With his conversational style and heartwarming and entertaining stories, Jim brilliantly distills that hard-earned wisdom into 13 simple yet powerful life principles you can put into practice today. 

Jim will help you learn how to:

- Break the cycle of being overcommitted and underconnected once and for all
- Make family the priority you want it to be with an action plan that will nurture your closest relationships
- Embrace the discomfort of discipline and avoid the pain of regret
- Incorporate the vital element of fun in your life for connection and relief in even the toughest times
- Train your mind in reflexive gratitude to rise above negative circumstances. 

Don't wait any longer. Let these principles guide you into deeper joy, more purpose, and better connection--and start truly living today.

HAVE SERIOUS FUN by Jim Burns | Lesson One

Dr. Jeremy DeSilva joined us for an interview on SoS 128. This week, in addition to a replay of his original interview, we hear audio excerpted from First Steps: How upright walking made us human by Jeremy DeSilva, read by Kaleo Griffith. Copyright 2021 by Jeremy DeSilva. Production Copyright 2021, HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. You can find First Steps here: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/first-steps-jeremy-desilva
You can find out more about Dr. DeSilva, his lab, and his work here: anthropology.dartmouth.edu/people/jeremy-desilva and on Twitter @desilva_jerry

Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website:humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc

Cara Ocobock, Website: sites.nd.edu/cara-ocobock/, Email:cocobock@nd.edu, Twitter:@CaraOcobock

Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair, Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, Email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly

Delaney Glass, Website: dglass.netlify.app/, Email: dglass1@uw.edu, Twitter: @GlassDelaney

Alexandra Niclou, Email: aniclou@nd.edu, Twitter: @fiat_Luxandra

SoS 135- How Upright Walking Made Us Human with Dr. Jeremy DeSilva

On this episode, Andrew Kaberline, Senior Audio Marketing Associate, returns to the pod to tell the library team about some exciting new audiobooks that are perfect for any library collection. You'll hear newly discovered audio of Jim Morrison reading poetry, Jennifer Jason Leigh inhabit the characters of Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Pacino from ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, and much more!

Find a list of the titles presented and show notes here: bit.ly/LLFaudiobooks

For more information, go to librarylovefest.com.
You can find us on Facebook (@librarylovefest), Twitter (@librarylovefest), and Instagram (@harperlibrary). We also have a voicemail! Give us a call at 212-207-7773.

Show Notes

Audiobook Update! (Featuring Andrew Kaberline, Senior Audio Marketing Associate)

On this episode, we feature an interview with Lisa Harding, author of BRIGHT BURNING THINGS—on sale December 7, 2021—from a previous Door to Door Facebook Live.

Watch the full interview here: https://www.facebook.com/librarylovefest/videos/285190386412089

For more information, go to librarylovefest.com.
You can find us on Facebook (@librarylovefest), Twitter (@librarylovefest), and Instagram (@harperlibrary). We also have a voicemail! Give us a call at 212-207-7773.

Full interview!

An Interview with Lisa Harding, Author of BRIGHT BURNING THINGS

These favorite Brother and Sister Bear stories are wrapped up in this six-in-one Berenstain Bears audiobook collection!

These stories will remind young listeners of important biblical values and offers essential life lessons. From being kind to others to gossip to having a bad day, and forgiveness to helping others to doing your best, Brother and Sister Bear’s relatable adventures and everyday opportunities to learn will inspire listeners young and old.

This collection includes:

The Berenstain Bears and the Forgiving Tree: When Cousin Fred accidentally damages Brother’s brand-new bike, Brother Bear is angry. Can Sister Bear help him see that forgiving his friend is the right thing to do?

The Berenstain Bears Get Involved: A storm hits Bear Country, and it might flood! It’s up to the Bear family and the rest of the rescue team from the Chapel in the Woods to come together and save their community.

The Berenstain Bears and a Job Well Done: Brother, Sister, and Honey Bear need to clean their playhouse, but they’d rather play outside.

The Berenstain Bears and the Golden Rule: Should Sister Bear ignore the new girl at school just because her friends do? Choosing to be kind may not always be the easy choice, but it is always the right one.

The Berenstain Bears' Gossip Gang: Talking about others makes Sister feel like she is special, even if what is said might not be true. But when rumors are spread about her, Sister begins to understand just how hurtful gossip can be.

The Berenstain Bears Why Do Good Bears Have Bad Days?: Sister and Brother Bear go on a bike ride and fishing trip in the countryside, and things go very wrong. Brother falls into the pond, Sister’s fishing rod breaks, and they get caught in the rain on the way home. Why did this bad stuff happen to them?

The Berenstain Bears Brother and Sister Bear Favorites:

Includes all the Berenstain Bears family and friends who have been beloved by parents, grandparents, children, and grandchildren for decades
Features kid-friendly, easy-to-remember Scripture verses
Teaches valuable life lessons
Is a fun, new collection in the popular Zonderkidz Living Lights: A Faith Story series, which has sold over eight million copies since 2008

Read by Elizabeth Acevedo, Sixta Morel, Danyeli Rodriguez del Orbe

A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 from: Today.com * Time * Electric Literature * Seattle Times * Telemundo * Washington Post * HipLatina * Harper's Bazaar * Elle * AARP * Shondaland * New York Times * The Millions * LitHub

From the bestselling, National Book Award–winning author Elizabeth Acevedo comes her first novel for adults, the story of one Dominican-American family told through the voices of its women as they await a gathering that will forever change their lives.

Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake—a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led—her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila.

But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets: her sisters are hiding things, too. And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own.

Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City. Told with Elizabeth Acevedo’s inimitable and incandescent voice, this is an indelible portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces—one family’s journey through their history, helping them better navigate all that is to come.

An Excerpt From FAMILY LORE By Elizabeth Acevedo

Order Audiobook - http://bit.ly/BuildingStorybrand-Buy

Narrated by Donald Miller.

New York Times bestselling author Donald Miller uses the seven universal elements of powerful stories to teach readers how to dramatically improve how they connect with customers and grow their businesses.

Donald Miller's StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. This revolutionary method for connecting with customers provides readers with the ultimate competitive advantage, revealing the secret for helping their customers understand the compelling benefits of using their products, ideas, or services. Building a StoryBrand does this by teaching readers the seven universal story points all humans respond to; the real reason customers make purchases; how to simplify a brand message so people understand it; and how to create the most effective messaging for websites, brochures, and social media. Whether you are the marketing director of a multibillion-dollar company, the owner of a small business, a politician running for office, or the lead singer of a rock band, Building a StoryBrand will forever transform the way you talk about who you are, what you do, and the unique value you bring to your customers.

Building A Story Brand

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Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller | Chapter One

Order Audiobook - http://amzn.to/2Gxzysd

Narrated by the author, John Maxwell.

In this thoroughly revised and updated 25th-anniversary edition of his now-classic work, John C. Maxwell reveals how to develop the vision, value, influence, and motivation required of successful leaders.

Twenty-five years ago, John Maxwell published the book that forever transformed how we think about leadership. Developing the Leader Within You revolutionized the way leaders are made and in the process sold more than one million copies. Now John Maxwell returns to his classic text to include the leadership insights and practices he's learned in the decades since the book first appeared. Thoroughly revised and with two completely new chapters, this new edition updates the foundational principles for transformative leadership that Maxwell has used as a leader for more than 40 years. No matter what arena you are called to - family, church, business, nonprofit - the principles Maxwell shares will positively impact your own life and the lives of those around you. New listeners as well as longtime fans of Maxwell and the original book won't want to miss out on this one.

DEVELOPING THE LEADER WITHIN YOU 2.0 by John C. Maxwell

Order Audiobook - https://amzn.to/2C3lk42

Narrated by Van Tracy.

The founder and CEO of leading sales strategy consulting firm Sales Architects teaches business owners, executives, and salespeople how to win more deals at the prices they want by creating differentiation in the sales process.

"If we don't drop our price, we will lose the deal." That's the desperate cry sales management executives are accustomed to hearing from their salespeople. While the easy answer is to drop the price, the company sacrifices margin - oftentimes, unnecessarily.

To win deals at the prices you want, the needed strategy is differentiation. Most executives think marketing is the sole source of differentiation, but sales differentiation presents an untapped opportunity to create meaningful value and stand out from the competition.

Sales Differentiation presents 19 easy-to-implement concepts to help salespeople win deals while protecting margin. These concepts are applicable to any salesperson in any industry and are based on the foundation that how you sell, not just what you sell, differentiates you.

The audiobook's what you sell section helps salespeople and executives identify what their true differentiators are, determine the right circumstances to share them, and develop a strategy to position them in a compelling way with buyers.

In every stage of the seller-buyer interaction, opportunities exist for differentiation in how you sell, such as how to creatively get in the door with buyers who say they are happy, shape buyer decision criteria aligned with your differentiators, turn a buyer's request for references into a way to stand out from the competition, and much more!

Mediocre salespeople say what they sell is the "best". Top salespeople position "different" and lead their clients to say "best" without them ever uttering the word.

SALES DIFFERENTIATION by Lee B. Salz

Order Audiobook - https://amzn.to/2wEFUSs

Narrated by Stu Gray.

Learn how your start-up business can benefit through early-stage investment, sales revenue, or partnership by identifying and aligning with corporate innovation initiatives within larger companies.

Corporations are becoming desperate to change their culture (and perception) as giant, bureaucratic dinosaurs that are too slow to react in a rapidly changing business landscape. They are all trying to be more innovative and agile, more "start-up like". One of the easy ways to do this is through acquiring or partnering with a start-up. While it was once rare to find a large corporation listed among shareholders on a start-up cap table, corporate venture capital (CVC) now makes up 25 percent (about $18 billion) of all venture capital dollars in North America. To tap into this growing source of capital, start-ups need to understand how corporations operate and what they are looking to gain in these relationships.

The Startup Gold Mine reveals how the world's largest and most prestigious brands make innovation decisions, including new product launches, vendor/start-up partnerships, and even billion-dollar acquisitions - and how start-ups can take advantage of corporate's strengths and weaknesses to their benefit. Author Neil Soni draws on his experience as an entrepreneur and in external innovation with premier brands like Estée Lauder, MAC, and Smashbox to share the hidden inner workings of large companies as well as how start-up founders and employees can use this knowledge to close the biggest deals of their lives. 

If you've ever wanted to learn how some start-up founders manage to partner with a brand like UnderArmour, get acquired by a behemoth like General Motors, or sell their services to Bacardi, The Startup Gold Mine shares all that and much more, including: 

* How to understand who your large company counterpart is, what they are incentivized to do, and how to get them to take actions that benefit your start-up
* Why the "Innovator's Dilemma" is leading large companies to seek out insurance policies that come in the form of partnerships with start-ups
* A complete start-to-finish playbook for getting a deal done with a large company, from first connection to getting paid
* A troubleshooting guide for common land mines start-ups run into when trying to work with large companies
* How to navigate the convoluted corporate innovation landscape without blowing a fortune on conferences and consultants

The Startup Gold Mine

THE STARTUP GOLD MINE by Neil Soni

Order Audiobook - https://amzn.to/2oLDvSf

Narrated by Van Tracy.

Wow your customers . . . with "less." Cut costs - it's a common corporate refrain. But if you constantly slash expenditures, what happens to innovation? How can you stay competitive and satisfy customers? Costovation solves the dilemma of how to spend less and innovate more. 

The audiobook's revolutionary approach broadens the definition of innovation beyond products to the business model itself. With costovation, you let go of assumptions, take a fresh look at the market, and relentlessly focus on what customers really want. Consider Planet Fitness - it grew to 7.3 million members by concentrating on casual exercisers. Those folks don't care about frills. They want easy, low-cost access to good equipment. Although it's inexpensive to run, Planet Fitness ranks highest in gym satisfaction. Gourmet grocer, Picard, sells only frozen food. With less perishable inventory, they compress costs while delighting a discerning but busy clientele. 

Packed with examples and interactive exercises, the book explores cost innovation strategies that work for big and small companies alike. From open innovation and cost-sharing to simplifying products and turning waste into new offerings - listeners learn how rivals are carving out niches, protecting positions, and dominating industries. Innovation and cost-cutting are not opposites. Combined, they expose untapped opportunities to outsmart and underspend competitors.

COSTOVATION by Stephen Wunker

Download Audiobook - https://amzn.to/2YSLz3z

Narrated by Arnell Powel and Ron Butler.

If the name Randal Pinkett sounds familiar, it may be because Pinkett was the first African American winner on The Apprentice. When he won, this black man also became the only contestant to be asked to share his victory - with a white woman. The request (and Pinkett's subsequent refusal) set off a firestorm of controversy that inevitably focused on the issue of race in the American workplace and in society. For generations, African Americans have been told that to succeed, they need to work twice as hard as everyone else. But as millions of black Americans were reminded by Pinkett's experience, sometimes hard work is not enough. 

Black Faces in White Places is about "the game" - that is, the competitive world in which we all live and work. The audiobook offers 10 revolutionary strategies for playing, mastering, and changing the game for the current generation, while undertaking a wholesale redefinition of the rules for those who will follow. It is not only about shattering the old "glass ceiling" but also about examining the four dimensions of the contemporary black experience: identity, society, meritocracy, and opportunity. Ultimately, it is about changing the very concept of success itself. 

Based on the authors' considerable experiences in business, in the public eye, and in the minority, the audiobook shows how African American professionals can (and must) think and act both entrepreneurially and "intrapreneurially", combine their collective strengths with the wisdom of others, and plant the seeds of a positive and lasting legacy.

Black Faces in White Places: 10 Game-Changing Strategies to Achieve Success and Find Greatness

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BLACK FACES IN WHITE PLACES by Randal D. Pinkett, Jeffrey A. Robinson, Philana Patterson

Harper Audio proudly traces its roots back to 1952, when Dylan Thomas first recorded for our Caedmon label. For more than five decades, HarperAudio/Caedmon has been synonymous not only with distinguished poets reading their works, but also with equally distinguished authors and readers performing classic and contemporary texts.

BLACK FACES IN WHITE PLACES by Randal D. Pinkett, Jeffrey A. Robinson, Philana Patterson

HarperAudio US

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