Showing results by narrator "JD Jackson" in All Categories

Wisdom and musings on creativity and life from one of the world’s most beloved musicians, producers, and mentors, Quincy Jones. 12 Notes is a self-development guide that will affirm that creativity is a calling that can and should be answered, no matter your age or experience.

It’s easy to be pessimistic about the fate of democracy in multi-ethnic societies. At the end of the Second World War, fewer than one in 25 people living in the UK were born abroad; now it is one in seven. The history of humankind is a story of us versus them, and the project of diverse democracies is a relatively new one—it is, in other words, a great experiment. How do identity groups with different ideologies and beliefs live together? Is it possible to embark on a democracy with shared values if our values are at odds?

Author and entrepreneur Dennis Kimbro combines best-selling author Napoleon Hill's law of success with his own vast knowledge of business, contemporary affairs, and the vibrant culture of black America to teach you the secrets to success used by scores of black Americans, including Spike Lee, Jesse Jackson, Dr. Selma Burke, Oprah Winfrey, and many others. The result is inspiring, practical, clearly written, and totally workable.

When Bryan, Jaidee, Victor and Jane team up to compete at a full-contact escape room, it seems simple. Hold your nerve through six terrifying challenges, collect all the red envelopes, win a huge cash prize. But the real horror is unfolding outside of the game, in a series of deceits and misunderstandings fuelled by obsession and prejudice. And by the end of the night, one of the contestants will be dead.

Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends - and their amazing links to recent discoveries.

The Nickel Boys is Colson Whitehead's follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning best seller The Underground Railroad, in which he dramatises another strand of United States history, this time through the story of two boys sentenced to a stretch in a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college.

Tarana Burke and Dr Brené Brown bring together a dynamic group of Black writers, organisers, artists, academics and cultural figures to discuss the topics the two have dedicated their lives to understanding and teaching: vulnerability and shame resilience.

A dying world, shattered by a broken machine. A desperate flight, their only hope for refuge. A robotic race, ally and destroyer alike. The Republic of Exilium has grown in strength and confidence at the far end of the galaxy from the rest of mankind, sending out scout ships to survey the worlds around them as they try to learn more about the mysterious Construction Matrix AIs. Finding one of the genocidal rogues of that mysterious “race” in the process of destroying an inhabited world, Captain Octavio Catalan takes his ship into a desperate battle.

Amid rising gang violence, the crack epidemic, and police brutality, a group of unlikely voices cut through the chaos of late 1980s Los Angeles: N.W.A. Led by a drug dealer, a glammed-up producer, and a high school kid, N.W.A. gave voice to disenfranchised African Americans across the country. And they quickly redefined pop culture across the world. Their names remain as popular as ever: Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and Ice Cube. Dre soon joined forces with Suge Knight to create the combustible Death Row Records.

Isaac Lestroud, admiral of the Exilium Space Fleet, has spent the last three years working with Ambassador Amelie Lestroud to build an alliance against the Rogue Matrices, AIs bent on converting every world into a paradise, regardless of whether anyone lives on it. As Isaac hunts the Rogue that destroyed one of their allies’ homeworlds, Amelie begins negotiations with a potential new ally that could tip the balance. 

Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, How Beautiful We Were tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations to the villagers are made-and ignored. The country's government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest only. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back.

Richard Pryor journeys from his childhood in a family that worked in whore-houses and bars, through to his years in Hollywood - the money, the women, the drugs - and the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.

Captain Isaac Gallant is the only son of the dictator of the Confederacy, his career slowed by a dozen measures to protect his reputation and safety alike - but he has no intention of being a pampered child. He is determined to do his duty. An attempt to force his crew to acknowledge their own duties puts his ship in a unique position to intervene when an overwhelming rebel attack is launched on one of the Confederacy’s most critical facilities. 

Whether you know it or not, you have the authority to change the world through prayer. When God said, “Let mankind rule over all the earth,” He was arranging the dominion of the world so that the partnership of mankind was essential for the accomplishment of His purposes. Through his unique perspective on this often-misunderstood subject, best-selling author Dr. Myles Munroe takes the mystery out of prayer, providing practical answers for difficult questions about communicating with God.

When six-year-old Reginald Lewis overheard his grandparents discussing employment discrimination against African Americans, he asked, “Why should white guys have all the fun?" This self-assured child would grow up to become the CEO of Beatrice International and one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever. At the time of his death in 1993, his personal fortune was estimated in excess of $400 million and his vast commercial empire spanned four continents.  

Isaac Gallant is the heir apparent to the First Admiral. Unwilling to let his mother’s tyranny stand, he joins the rebellion and leads his ships into war against the might of his own nation. Betrayal and failure, however, see Isaac Gallant and his allies captured. Rather than execute her only son, the First Admiral instead decides to exile them, flinging four million dissidents and rebels through a one-shot wormhole to the other end of the galaxy. There, Isaac finds himself forced to keep order and peace as they seek out a new home without becoming the very dictator he fought against.

Meet...wait, we don't actually know his name. What we do know about him is he's an author. He moves from airport to bookshop to chain hotel, on tour for his new best seller Hell of A Book. And, as people keep telling him, it's a hell of a book. Some of these people may or may not be real - because the other thing to know about him is he has, let's say, an overactive imagination.

In Playing for Keeps, David Halberstam takes the first full measure of Michael Jordan's epic career, one of the great American stories of our time. A narrative of astonishing power and human drama, brimming with revealing anecdotes and penetrating insights, the audiobook chronicles the forces in Jordan's life that have shaped him into history's greatest basketball player and the larger forces that have converged to make him the most famous living human being in the world. 

At the March on Washington, Josephine Baker reflected on her life and her legacy. She had spent decades as one of the most successful entertainers in the world, but, she told the crowd, 'I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too'. Inspired by these words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a stirring meditation on Black performance in the modern age, in which culture, history and his own lived experience collide. 

Goliath explores the city of New Haven as a primal biblical epic flung into the future. What happens to the people who get pushed out? A David and Jonathan story that throws listeners into the history and sins of the Connecticut metropolis, this ambitious, sprawling novel weaves together disparate narratives—a space-dweller looking at New Haven as a chance to reconnect with his spiraling lover; a group of civil servants attempting to renew the promises of Earth’s crumbling cities; a journalist attempting to capture the violence of the streets—into a richly urgent mosaic.