The Chris Voss Show

Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End by Bart D. Ehrman

The Plans He Has For Me: A 12-Week Daily Devotional for Freedom from Alcohol by Rose Ann Forte

Are you ready to change your relationship with alcohol?

Rose Ann Forte was, and she knew she needed an approach that was more meaningful.

And she wanted a fresh start that kept her motivated!

The Plans He Has for Me is a twelve-week guided devotional that will teach you:

What stepping away from alcohol really does for the body and mind

How to positively change the language you use to talk about drinking

How to feel hopeful instead of shameful or restricted

How to refocus your attention on what really adds value to your life

How to stop living in the past, and be a forgiving support system to others!

So how does it work? And what makes this approach different?

Each day you’ll receive biblical guidance in the form of scripture, encouragement, and a daily prayer.

The messages are short, but powerful.

“The mindful minutes were what I found most affecting…these minutes should be lingered over when possible and considered. You may find surprising wisdom after letting them steep for a time in your mind.” – Portland Book Review

Trust that you’ll also find inspiration to create new habits, and motivation to stay the course!

God has a much better plan for you – one of endless possibilities, hope and good health.

Maybe You Should Give Up: 7 Ways to Get Out of Your Own Way and Take Control of Your Life by Byron Morrison

After years of being his own worst enemy, Byron Morrison knows exactly how frustrating the never-ending cycle of hard work, expectation, and minimal results can be. Maybe You Should Give Up is Morrison’s answer to the question: how can anyone achieve their dreams if hard work isn’t enough?

It seems like every self-help book and personal development program is the same these days, preaching that if someone just does more and pushes harder, they can achieve the life of their dreams. This expectation doesn’t often work with long-term results, which leaves many people to face the unfortunate reality of never reaching their goals.

Why? Because despite their good intentions, they get in their own way, sabotaging themselves and becoming the biggest stumbling block in the way of their success.

Tired of going ‘round in circles, Byron Morrison realized he needed to do something different. He gave up—not on his goals and dreams, accepting a life of mediocrity lying on the couch—but on being controlled by fear. He gave up living in the past. He gave up comparing himself to others. He gave up on being so hard on himself. And he gave up putting off his happiness.

And it worked. He was able to get out of his own way and finally take control of his life.

Maybe You Should Give Up explains how to throw out the rule book, break the mold and do something different. Byron Morrison’s approach helps readers identify 7 areas of their life that cause them to get in their own way and keep them stuck in a self-destructive cycle; he models how to give up on what holds a person back—to finally take control of the life they want and deserve.

The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science by Alan Lightman

From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams comes a rich, fascinating answer to the question, Can the scientifically inclined still hold space for spirituality?

Gazing at the stars, falling in love, or listening to music, we sometimes feel a transcendent connection with a cosmic unity and things larger than ourselves. But these experiences are not easily understood by science, which holds that all things can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules. Is there space in our scientific worldview for these spiritual experiences?

According to acclaimed physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, there may be. Drawing on intellectual history and conversations with contemporary scientists, philosophers, and psychologists, Lightman asks a series of thought-provoking questions that illuminate our strange place between the world of particles and forces and the world of complex human experience. Can strict materialism explain our appreciation of beauty? Or our feelings of connection to nature and to other people? Is there a physical basis for consciousness, the most slippery of all scientific problems?

Lightman weaves these investigations together to propose what he calls “spiritual materialism”— the belief that we can embrace spiritual experiences without letting go of our scientific worldview. In his view, the breadth of the human condition is not only rooted in material atoms and molecules but can also be explained in terms of Darwinian evolution.

What is revealed in this lyrical, enlightening book is that spirituality may not only be compatible with science, it also ought to remain at the core of what it means to be human.

Malady of the Mind: Schizophrenia and the Path to Prevention by Jeffrey A. Lieberman

Of the many myths and misconceptions that obscure our understanding of schizophrenia, the most pernicious is that there is no effective treatment or cure. Though that may have been true in the past, the current reality couldn’t be more different: today’s treatments have the potential to be game-changing—and often lifesaving.

This powerful portrait of schizophrenia, the most malignant and mysterious mental illness, by renowned psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, interweaves cultural and scientific history with dramatic patient profiles and clinical experiences to impart a revolutionary message of hope. For the first time in history, we can effectively treat schizophrenia, limiting its disabling effects—and we’re on the verge of being able to prevent the disease’s onset entirely.

In this rigorously researched, profoundly compelling biography of schizophrenia, Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman draws on his four-decade career to illuminate the past, present, and future of this historically dreaded and devastating illness. From his vantage point at the pinnacle of academic psychiatry, informed by extensive research experience and clinical care of thousands of patients, Dr. Lieberman explains how the complexity of the brain, the checkered history of psychiatric medicine, and centuries of stigma combined with misguided legislation and health care policies have impeded scientific advances and clinical progress. Despite this, there is reason for optimism: by offering evidence-based treatments that combine medication with psychosocial services and principles learned from the recovery movement, doctors can now effectively treat schizophrenia by diagnosing patients at a very early stage, achieving a mutually respectful therapeutic alliance, and preventing relapse, thus limiting the progression of the illness. Even more auspiciously, decades of work on diagnosis, detection, and early intervention have pushed scientific progress to the cusp of prevention—meaning that in the near future, doctors may be able to prevent the onset of this disorder.

A must-read for fans of medical histories, psychology, and those whose lives have been affected by schizophrenia, this revelatory work offers a comprehensive scientific portrait, crucial insights, sound advice for families and friends, and most importantly, hope for sufferers now and in the generations to come.

Investing in a Recession – Time to Think about Gold by Simon Popple

Brookvillecapital.com

Bayou Beloved (Butterfly Bayou) by Lexi Blake

When a woman returns home to Louisiana’s Butterfly Bayou, her high school crush finally notices she exists, in a small-town contemporary romance from New York Times bestselling author Lexi Blake.

Quaid Havery always planned to follow in his father’s footsteps. He went to law school and then came home to take over his dad’s legal practice. Being the only lawyer in small-town Papillon, Quaid is pretty sure he’s seen everything. After all, he was once asked to sue an alligator for defamation of character. He’s prepared for anything the town can throw at him, until he encounters Jayna Cardet. She’s gorgeous, smart, funny, and unlike any woman he’s met before….Except he has.

Jayna never thought she’d return to Papillon, but when her life gets turned around she must learn to live in the close-knit community again. She certainly never dreamed she would practice law in her little town, but she finds herself in the courtroom, and the opposing counsel is her former high school crush, Quaid. It wouldn’t be so bad if the man had developed a beer belly, but Quaid is more handsome than ever. And instead of ignoring her like he did in high school, he’s made it plain that he wants to get to know her.

Thus begins a courtship destined to end in a wedding or a war. Either way, the locals are popping some corn and eagerly awaiting the outcome.

The World Itself: Consciousness and the Everything of Physics by Ulf Danielsson

There is a wonderfully weird but real world out there, and we are a part of it. It is time for physics to take life seriously.

Can we ever truly comprehend the universe before we fully understand consciousness and the wonders, and limits, of the mind? Ulf Danielsson, an acclaimed theoretical physicist who has dedicated his career to probing the deepest mysteries of nature, thinks not. As he dismantles the arguments of esteemed mathematicians and scientists, who would substitute their mathematical models for reality and equate the mind to a computer, he makes a lucid and passionate case that it is nature, full of beauty and meaning, which must compel us. In challenging established worldviews, he also takes a fresh look at major philosophical debates, including the notion of free will.

Fearless, provocative, and witty, The World Itself is essential reading for anyone curious about the profound questions surrounding life, the universe, and everything.

Creators Take Control: How NFTs Revolutionize Art, Business, and Entertainment by Edward Lee

A leading legal scholar offers a compelling new theory to explain the meteoric rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their impact on art, business, entertainment, and society, and explains how they are revolutionizing our understanding of ownership.

If you buy an NFT, do you own anything? Critics say no. Then why are people spending so much money to own them—to the tune of $27 billion in 2021? And why are big businesses and venture capital firms investing hundreds of millions to develop NFTs for people’s use in the metaverse, a purely imaginary world?

In Creators Take Control, Edward Lee offers a compelling new theory he calls “Tokenism” that answers these perplexing questions. Using vivid examples, Lee lucidly explains how NFTs operate—and how they fundamentally change our understanding of ownership. Tokenism is an artistic, cultural, and technological movement that creates value in a new kind of ownership of a new type of property—symbolized by a virtual token—through a process of technological abstraction and artificial scarcity effectuated by NFTs. Ownership becomes virtual. What Cubism did in radically changing the twentieth-century perspective of creating and viewing art through cubes, Tokenism does today in altering our perspective of owning art and other things through tokens. Both movements radically reimagine what’s possible.

Creators and businesses have seized upon this profound transformation. In a short time, they have developed a new market for digital art, important new rights for creators, innovative business models based on decentralized collaboration, and a new type of interactive ownership that enables identity, community, and patronage through NFTs. These innovations are just the start of revolutionary changes to society. Lee shows how NFTs create a new form of decentralized intellectual property, or De-IP. Comparable to the movement to decentralized finance (DeFi), De-IP empowers creators to take control of their artistic productions and livelihood.

Lee’s intellectual tour de force is filled with practical insights—and hope—for fostering creativity and a Virtual Renaissance for the ages.

About the Author Edward Lee is a leading legal expert on NFTs and intellectual property. He is a professor of law and co-director of Illinois Tech Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Center for Design, Law, and Technology, the first U.S. institution devoted to research of creativity, technology,…

They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan

The revolutionary guide that challenged businesses around the world to stop selling to their buyers and start answering their questions to get results; revised and updated to address new technology, trends, the continuous evolution of the digital consumer, and much more

In today’s digital age, the traditional sales funnel―marketing at the top, sales in the middle, customer service at the bottom―is no longer effective. To be successful, businesses must obsess over the questions, concerns, and problems their buyers have, and address them as honestly and as thoroughly as possible. Every day, buyers turn to search engines to ask billions of questions. Having the answers they need can attract thousands of potential buyers to your company―but only if your content strategy puts your answers at the top of those search results. It’s a simple and powerful equation that produces growth and success: They Ask, You Answer.

Using these principles, author Marcus Sheridan led his struggling pool company from the bleak depths of the housing crash of 2008 to become one of the largest pool installers in the United States. Discover how his proven strategy can work for your business and master the principles of inbound and content marketing that have empowered thousands of companies to achieve exceptional growth.

They Ask, You Answer is a straightforward guide filled with practical tactics and insights for transforming your marketing strategy. This new edition has been fully revised and updated to reflect the evolution of content marketing and the increasing demands of today’s internet-savvy buyers. New chapters explore the impact of technology, conversational marketing, the essential elements every business website should possess, the rise of video, and new stories from companies that have achieved remarkable results with They Ask, You Answer.

Upon reading this book, you will know:

How to build trust with buyers through content and video. How to turn your web presence into a magnet for qualified buyers. What works and what doesn’t through new case studies, featuring real-world results from companies that have embraced these principles. Why you need to think of your business as a media company, instead of relying on more traditional (and ineffective) ways of advertising and marketing. How to achieve buy-in at your company and truly embrace a culture of content and video. How to transform your current customer base into loyal brand advocates for your company. They Ask, You Answer is a must-have resource for companies that want a fresh approach to marketing and sales that is proven to generate more traffic, leads, and sales.

The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II by Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma’s spellbinding account of three near-mythic figures—a Dutch fixer, a Manchu princess, and Himmler’s masseur—who may have been con artists and collaborators under Japanese and German rule, or true heroes, or something in between.

On the face of it, the three characters in this book seem to have little in common—aside from the fact that each committed wartime acts that led some to see them as national heroes, and others as villains. All three were mythmakers, larger-than-life storytellers, for whom the truth was beside the point. Felix Kersten was a plump Finnish pleasure-seeker who became Heinrich Himmler’s indispensable personal masseur—Himmler calling him his “magic Buddha.” Kersten presented himself after the war as a resistance hero who convinced Himmler to save countless people from mass murder. Kawashima Yoshiko, a gender-fluid Manchu princess, spied for the Japanese secret police in China, and was mythologized by the Japanese as a heroic combination of Mata Hari and Joan of Arc. Friedrich Weinreb was a Hasidic Jew in Holland who took large amounts of money from fellow Jews in an imaginary scheme to save them from deportation, while in fact betraying some of them to the German secret police. Sentenced after the war as a con artist, he was regarded regarded by supporters as the “Dutch Dreyfus.”

All three figures have been vilified and mythologized, out of a never-ending need, Ian Buruma argues, to see history, and particularly war, and above all World War II, as a neat story of angels and devils. The Collaborators is a fascinating reconstruction of what in fact we can know about these incredible figures and what will always remain out of reach. What emerges is all the more mesmerizing for being painted in chiaroscuro. In times of life-and-death stakes, the truth quickly gets buried under lies and self-deception. Now, when demagogues abroad and at home are assaulting the truth once more, the stories of the collaborators and their lessons are indispensable.

How I’ll Kill You by Ren DeStefano

Your next stay-up-all-night thriller, about identical triplets who have a nasty habit of killing their boyfriends, and what happens when the youngest commits their worst crime yet: falling in love with her mark.

Make him want you. Make him love you. Make him dead.

Sissy has an…interesting family. Always the careful one, always the cautious one, she has handled the cleanup while her serial killer sisters have carved a path of carnage across the U.S. Now, as they arrive in the Arizona heat, Sissy must step up and embrace the family pastime of making a man fall in love and then murdering him. Her first target? A young widower named Edison—and their mutual attraction is instant. While their relationship progresses, and most couples would be thinking about picking out china patterns and moving in together, Sissy’s family is reminding her to think about picking out burial sites and moving on.

Then something happens that Sissy never anticipated: She begins to feel protective of Edison, and before she can help it, she’s fallen in love. But the clock is ticking, and her sisters are growing restless. It becomes clear that the gravesite she chooses will hide a body no matter what happens; but if she betrays her family, will it be hers?

The Angel Makers: Arsenic, a Midwife, and Modern History’s Most Astonishing Murder Ring by Patti McCracken

The Angel Makers is a true-crime story like no other—a 1920s midwife who may have been the century’s most prolific killer leading a murder ring of women responsible for the deaths of at least 160 men.

The horror occurred in a rustic farming enclave in modern-day Hungary. To look at the unlikely lineup of murderesses—village wives, mothers, and daughters—was to come to the shocking realization that this could have happened anywhere, and to anyone. At the center of it all was a sharp-minded village midwife, a “smiling Buddha” known as Auntie Suzy, who distilled arsenic from flypaper and distributed it to the women of Nagyrév. “Why are you bothering with him?” Auntie Suzy would ask, as she produced an arsenic-filled vial from her apron pocket. In the beginning, a great many used the deadly solution to finally be free of cruel and abusive spouses.

But as the number of dead bodies grew without consequence, the killers grew bolder. With each vial of poison emptied, a new reason surfaced to drain yet another. Some women disposed of sickly relatives. Some used arsenic as “inheritance powder” to secure land and houses. For more than fifteen years, the unlikely murderers aided death unfettered and tended to it as if it were simply another chore—spooning doses of arsenic into soup and wine, stirring it into coffee and brandy. By the time their crimes were discovered, hundreds were feared dead.

Anonymous notes brought the crimes to light in 1929. As a skillful prosecutor hungry for justice ran the investigation, newsmen from around the world—including the New York Times—poured in to cover the dramatic events as they unfolded.

The Angel Makers captures in expertly researched detail the entirety of this harrowing story, from the early murders to the final hanging—the story of one of the most sensational and astonishing murder rings in all of modern history.

Collateral Damage (17) (Ali Reynolds Series) by J.A. Jance

Ali Reynolds and High Noon Enterprises face the dangerous consequences of one man’s desperate search for revenge in this unputdownable thriller from J.A. Jance, the New York Times bestselling author who “has been delivering must-read books for a long time” (The Real Book Spy).

After spending twenty years behind bars, Frank Muñoz, a disgraced former cop, is out on parole and focused on just one thing: revenge. The wife who abandoned him after his arrest, the mistress who ratted him out for abetting a money-laundering scheme, the detectives who presided over his case all those years ago—they all have targets on their backs.

About: Judith Ann Jance is an American author of mystery novels. She writes three series of novels, centering on retired Seattle Police Department Detective J. P. Beaumont, Arizona County Sheriff Joanna Brady, and former Los Angeles news anchor turned mystery solver Ali Reynolds.

TapRootElla.com

Iago Zapletal, Co-Founder and CHO of Head Office at SXSW 2023

HEADOFFICE.SPACE

Dr. M. Reza Mizani, Founder/Chairman of LASO Health at SXSW 2023

Hayes Kanyike, Gainsapp Creator & Founder at SXSW 2023

Mygainsapp.com

How Far Do You Want to Go. Lessons from a Common-Sense Billionaire by John Catsimatidis

Billionaire entrepreneur John Catsimatidis, owner and CEO of the Red Apple Group, reveals how his instincts and common sense have propelled him to massive business success in this detailed account of an incredible rags-to-riches story.

Liam Sharpe – Actor, Filmmaker, Writer and Linguist on The Head of Joaquín Murrieta on Amazon Prime Video

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Actor, filmmaker, and linguist Liam Sharpe is poised to be one of the most talked about antagonist of 2023, playing the role of “Oliver” as one of the leads for Amazon’s first Latin American Western, ‘The Head of Joaquín Murrieta.” The well-traveled language expert and thespian also founded Sharpe Studios working out of the Bay area and has worked on countless projects including filmmaking, podcasting, photography videography, voiceover work and more.

“The Head of Joaquín Murrieta” tells the story of a historical Mexican figure who gave battle to the Americans during the Gold Rush. On the newly drawn border between Mexico and the United States, an all-out war was waged due to the Gold Rush, the series is fueled by greed, anger and xenophobia. In New California, a group of immigrants, bandits and natives join forces, thus creating the myth of the Latin American Robin Hood: Joaquín Murrieta.

Initiating one of Amazon’s most ambitious titles ever in Latin America, “La cabeza de Joaquín Murrieta,” is the region’s first Western Amazon Original series, Amazon Prime Video announced Tuesday. Set in 1851 around the Mexico-US border, the series episodes are directed by Humberto Hinojosa Ozcariz (“El Candidato,” “Luis Miguel, The Series”) and David Pablos, fresh of his success with “Dance of the 41,” and director of “The Chosen Ones,” selected for Cannes’ Un Certain Regard). Liam brings to life the villain ‘Oliver’ the main antagonist in this gritty wild west series.

Growing up in the Bay area, Liam was exposed to many cultures and backgrounds at a young age and sparked his love for learning languages. Now fluent in 7 languages including English, German, Spanish, Portages, French, Italian and Mandarin, Liam learned the majority of the languages between the ages of 14-20. Liam abroad as a teen in Germany, and then traveled to Ecuador and taught at an alternative school when he was 18 before moving to China at 19 where he learned Mandarin. Liam would eventually graduate from UC Santa Cruz and begin working as an electrical design engineer for a solar company before moving to Germany to earn his masters.

The Power of Wonder: The Extraordinary Emotion That Will Change the Way You Live, Learn, and Lead by Monica C. Parker

An eye-opening journey through the magical, yet surprisingly little-understood, human emotion that is wonder.

From the first tickle of curiosity to an unexpected shift in how we perceive the world, there isn’t a person who hasn’t experienced wonder, and yet the why and how of this profoundly beneficial emotion is only just beginning to be scientifically examined. This inspiring book from thought leader Monica Parker explores the power of wonder to transform the way we learn, develop new ideas, drive social change, and ultimately become better humans.

The Power of Wonder takes readers on a multidisciplinary journey through psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, literature, and business to share some of the surprising secrets behind the mechanics of wonder and guides readers in bringing more of it into their lives. From art and architecture, to love and sex, to sleep and psychedelics, you will learn about the elements and elicitors of wonder, and how it can transform our bodies and brains. Whether it’s taking a daily “wonder walk” or discovering a new absorbing intellectual pursuit, this book shows us how to become more wonderprone and reconnect with a reverence for the world and all the magic in it.

Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China’s Forbidden City by Adam Brookes

The gripping true story of the bold and determined museum curators who saved the priceless treasures of China’s Forbidden City in the years leading up to World War II and beyond.

Spring 1933: The silent courtyards and palaces of Peking’s Forbidden City, for centuries the home of Chinese emperors, are tense with fear and expectation. Japan’s aircrafts drone overhead, its troops and tanks are only hours away. All-out war between China and Japan is coming, and the curators of the Forbidden City are faced with an impossible question: how will they protect the vast imperial art collections in their charge? A difficult and monumental decision is made: to safeguard the treasures, they will need to be evacuated.

The magnificent collections contain a million pieces of art—objects that carry China’s deepest and most ancient memories. Among them are irreplaceable artefacts: exquisite paintings on silk, vanishingly rare Ming porcelain, and the extraordinary Stone Drums of Qin, which are adorned with 2,500-year-old inscriptions of crucial cultural significance.

For sixteen terrifying years, under the quiet leadership of museum director Ma Heng, the curators would go on to transport the imperial art collections thousands of miles across China—up rivers of white water, across mountain ranges, and through burning cities. In their search for safety the curators and their fragile, invaluable cargo journeyed through the maelstrom of violence, chaos, and starvation that was China’s Second World War.

Told for the first time in English and playing out across a vast historical canvas, this is the exhilarating story of a small group of men and women who, when faced with war’s onslaught on civilization, chose to resist. Fragile Cargo reminds us of the enduring power of beauty in a world beset by conflict and violence.

Rule of 3, How Elite Leaders Win by Atlas Aultman

Leaders-kit.com

To be released in June 2023, this is the pre-purchase of the Rule of 3 book that changes how leaders look at leadership. Atlas Aultman has decades of experience successfully leading selectively manned military and innovation teams in combat, White House, and Special Operations mission sets. This book can be consumed in as little as 10 minutes and be ready to apply, or you can enjoy the stories that help paint the picture. Atlas hasn’t written a leadership book that hasn’t become a bestseller, this one will be no exception. Get your copy first, pre-order today.

Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created by Nick Tabor

An evocative and epic story, Nick Tabor’s Africatown charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution.

In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon.

That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates’ direct descendants. After many decades of neglect and a Jim Crow legal system that targeted the area for industrialization, the community is struggling to survive. Many community members believe the pollution from the heavy industry surrounding their homes has caused a cancer epidemic among residents, and companies are eyeing even more land for development.

At the same time, after the discovery of the remains of the Clotilda in the riverbed nearby, a renewed effort is underway to create a living memorial to the community and the lives of the slaves who founded it.

The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History by Joel Warner

The captivating, deeply reported true story of how one of the most notorious novels ever written—Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom—landed at the heart of one of the biggest scams in modern literary history.

“Reading The Curse of the Marquis de Sade, with the Marquis, the sabotage of rare manuscript sales, and a massive Ponzi scheme at its center,felt like a twisty waterslide shooting through a sleazy and bizarre landscape. This book is wild.”—Adam McKay, Academy Award–winning filmmaker

Described as both “one of the most important novels ever written” and “the gospel of evil,” 120 Days of Sodom was written by the Marquis de Sade, a notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat who waged a campaign of mayhem and debauchery across France, evaded execution, and inspired the word “sadism,” which came to mean receiving pleasure from pain. Despite all his crimes, Sade considered this work to be his greatest transgression.

The original manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom, a tiny scroll penned in the bowels of the Bastille in Paris, would embark on a centuries-spanning odyssey across Europe, passing from nineteenth-century banned book collectors to pioneering sex researchers to avant-garde artists before being hidden away from Nazi book burnings. In 2014, the world heralded its return to France when the scroll was purchased for millions by Gérard Lhéritier, the self-made son of a plumber who had used his savvy business skills to upend France’s renowned rare-book market. But the sale opened the door to vendettas by the government, feuds among antiquarian booksellers, manuscript sales derailed by sabotage, a record-breaking lottery jackpot, and allegations of a decade-long billion-euro con, the specifics of which, if true, would make the scroll part of France’s largest-ever Ponzi scheme.

Told with gripping reporting and flush with deceit and scandal, The Curse of the Marquis de Sade weaves together the sweeping odyssey of 120 Days of Sodom and the spectacular rise and fall of Lhéritier, once the “king of manuscripts” and now known to many as the Bernie Madoff of France. At its center is an urgent question for all those who cherish the written word: As the age of handwriting comes to an end, what do we owe the original texts left behind?

About the Author Joel Warner is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Esquire, Wired, Newsweek, Men’s Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, Popular Science, and Slate, among others. He currently serves as managing editor of the investigative news outlet The Lever and previously worked as a staff writer at International Business Times and Westword. He is also co-author of The Humor Code. He lives with his family in Denver, Colorado.

A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline by J. David McSwane

Propublica.org

Side Hustle & Flow: 10 Principles to Live and Lead a More Productive Life in Less Time by Cliff Beach

Ten chapters, chronicling Cliff’s journey in music from getting kicked off “American Idol” to finding success with his hit song “Confident”. It tells people how to start doing more passion projects while continuing to work their day job. It describes a detailed and realistic approach, unlike those which promise that you can become a multi-millionaire with minimal effort. Rather than setting lofty, unobtainable goals, Cliff embodies the “every man”, taking slow and strategic, methodical steps to my version of success, which the readers can also aspire to and achieve in their own right.

Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry by Kathleen McLaughlin

A “haunting” (Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even) and deeply personal investigation of an underground for-profit medical industry and the American underclass it drains for blood and profit.

Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she’d found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America’s most vulnerable.

So begins McLaughlin’s ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the $20-billion-a year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing an industry that targets America’s most economically vulnerable for immense profit.

Assigned to work in China, McLaughlin hesitated to utilize that country’s scandal-plagued plasma supply—outbreaks throughout the 1990s and early 2000s struck thousands with blood-borne diseases as impoverished areas of the country were milked for blood with reckless abandon. Instead, McLaughlin becomes her own runner, hiding American plasma in her luggage during trips from the United States to China. She finishes the job, but never could get the plasma story out of her head. Suspicions become certainties when a source from the past, a visiting Chinese researcher, warns McLaughlin of troubling echoes between America’s domestic plasma supply chain and the one she’d seen spin out into chaos in China.

Blood Money shares McLaughlin’s decade-long mission to learn the full story of where her medicine comes from. She travels the United States in search of the truth about human blood plasma and learns that twenty million Americans each year sell their plasma for profit—a human-derived commodity extracted inside our borders to be processed and packaged for retail across the globe. She investigates the thin evidence pharmaceutical companies have used to push plasma as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin. And she unearths an American economic crisis hidden in plain sight: single mothers, college students, laid-off Rust Belt auto workers, and a booming blood market at America’s southern border, where collection agencies target Mexican citizens willing to cross over and sell their plasma for substandard pay.

McLaughlin’s findings push her to ask difficult questions about her own complicity in this wheel of exploitation, as both a patient in need and a customer who stands to benefit from the suffering of others. Blood Money weaves together McLaughlin’s personal battle to overcome illness as a working American with an electrifying exposé of capitalism run amok in a searing portrait that shows what happens when big business is allowed to feed unchecked on those least empowered to fight back.

Kathleen McLaughlin is an award-winning journalist who reports and writes about the consequences of economic inequality around the world. A frequent contributor to The Washington Post and The Guardian, McLaughlin’s reporting has also appeared in The New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The Economist, NPR, and more. She is a former Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and has won multiple awards for her reporting on labor in China. Blood Money is her first book.

Ori Inbar Co-Founder of AWE and Super Ventures Talks ChatGPT, AI, VR, XR and Metaverse Futures

Awexr.com Ori Inbar is a pioneer and champion of the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) industry since 2007, and is a sought-after thought leader, investor and adviser to numerous augmented reality startups and corporations. In 2009, Ori co-founded Ogmento, an AR games startup which in 2015 was acquired by Apple. In 2010 he co-founded AWE, the world’s largest community dedicated to advancing AR and VR via tradeshows, meetups, courses, and award competitions, In 2016 he founded Super Ventures, a fund dedicated to investing in early-stage AR startups.

Alain Dumonceaux of The Awakened Man

Theawakenedman.net

As the Purposeful Action (Men)tor for the Awakened Man movement, Alain Dumonceaux has been on a mission as the beacon for what it means to live an authentic life. For the past three decades, Alain has lived the highs of the Culinary Olympics to the lows of losing it all…almost twice. Today, Alain’s purpose is to guide men to rediscover their life’s mission starting with a purposeful action plan called: The Return of The King that sets the stage for their Hero’s Quest.

The Syrian Sunset by Howard Kaplan

A sweeping novel of international intrigue about the Syrian Civil War, the failure of the West to save the Syrian people, and how that inaction against the Russian incursion in Syria emboldened Vladimir Putin to attack Ukraine. In 2012, President Obama declared that if Assad used chemical weapons in Syria, that would cross a red line. A year later, Assad murdered a thousand people in East Damascus with sarin, and the West did not respond. Soon after, the Russians vastly augmented their presence in Syria, built a huge air base to add to their warm water port on the Syrian Mediterranean and from those runways bombed the Free Syrian Army across the breadth of Syria.

Based around these true events, THE SYRIAN SUNSET tells the tale of a fictional Syrian Military Intelligence general who wants a better Syria, and the events that led to the death of 500,000 civilians, 5 million people fleeing Syria, another 15 million being displaced internally.

Do This, Not That: Career: What to Do (and NOT Do) in 75+ Difficult Workplace Situations by Jenny Foss

Jobjenny.com

A must-have step-by-step guide on what to do (and what NOT to do) in the workplace featuring clear instructions and helpful scripts so you can deal with any unexpected situation at work.

How do you deal with a difficult boss who is always unavailable? How should you handle a coworker who never completes their portion of a project on schedule? How can you establish a strong work-life balance when starting a new job? The workplace can be full of challenging situations and no matter how passionate, frustrated, excited, or downright angry you feel, it’s important to stay polite and professional. Whether you struggle with finding the right words or simply aren’t sure how to approach a topic, Do This, Not That: Career is here to help!

This book gives you the tools you need to move forward productively so you can learn when to let go and move on. You’ll find more than 75 common workplace issues that cover everything from your first day on the job to your last. For each situation, discover what to do and what to avoid, then learn exactly how to make it happen. Find tips to reframe your thinking, simple scripts to help you figure out what to say, and even advice on your next steps depending on your initial response. Do This, Not That: Career is your one-stop-shop to handling any situation that work throws your way so you can prepare yourself for a successful career.

Mitch Hankins, Founder of The Debug Life

Thedebuglife.com

Mitch Hankins is a cloud-certified full-stack developer who speaks to professionals struggling to find meaning in life. He has developed his expertise by working with some of the largest organizations in the US, including Nasdaq and the US Military. With over a decade of professional experience, Mitch noticed he and his colleagues often struggled with feelings of isolation. This often led to an unfulfilled life where complacency and loneliness were the norms. Mitch can help anyone who feels disconnected to experience a fuller and more connected life.

Daniel James, Founder & CEO at Mint Performance Marketing

Mint-performancemarketing.com

David M. Ockert, Ph.D., Founder and Executive Director of the Parallax Center

Parallaxcenter.com

Burner (Gray Man) by Mark Greaney

Court Gentry is caught between the Russian mafia and the CIA in this latest electrifying thriller in the #1 New York Times bestselling Gray Man series.

When you kick over a rock, you never know what’s going to crawl out.

Alex Velesky is about to discover that the hard way. He’s stolen records from the Swiss bank that employs him, thinking that he’ll uncover a criminal conspiracy. But he soon finds that he’s tapped into the mother lode of corruption. Before he knows it, he’s being hunted by everyone from the Russian mafia to the CIA.

Court Gentry and his erstwhile lover, Zoya Zakharova, find themselves on opposites poles when it comes to Velesky. They both want him but for different reasons.

That’s a problem for tomorrow. Today they need to keep him and themselves alive. Right now, it’s not looking good.

Rohaan Khan, CEO & Founder of Orange Trail Discusses Marketing and Ads In 2023

Orangetrail.io

Never Far from Home: My Journey from Brooklyn to Hip Hop, Microsoft, and the Law by Bruce Jackson

Microsoft’s associate general counsel shares this story that is “as nuanced as it is hopeful” (Hakeem Jeffries, House Minority Leader) about his rise from childhood poverty in pre-gentrified New York City to a stellar career at the top of the technology and music industries in this stirring true story of grit and perseverance. For fans of Indra Nooyi’s My Life in Full and Viola Davis’s Finding Me.

As an accomplished Microsoft executive, Bruce Jackson handles billions of dollars of commerce as its associate general counsel while he plays a crucial role in the company’s corporate diversity efforts. But few of his colleagues can understand the weight he carries with him to the office each day. He kept his past hidden from sight as he ascended the corporate ladder but shares it in full for the first time here.

Born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Jackson moved to Manhattan’s Amsterdam housing projects as a child, where he had already been falsely accused and arrested for robbery by the age of ten. At the age of fifteen, he witnessed the homicide of his close friend. Taken in by the criminal justice system, seduced by a burgeoning drug trade, and burdened by a fractured, impoverished home life, Jackson stood on the edge of failure. But he was saved by an offer. That offer set him on a better path, off the streets and eventually on the way to Georgetown Law, but not without hard knocks along the way.

But even as he racked up professional accomplishments, Jackson is still haunted by the unchanged world outside his office.

From public housing to working for Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, and its founder, Bill Gates, to advising some of the biggest stars in music, Bruce Jackson’s Never Far from Home reveals the ups and downs of an incredible journey, how he overcame many obstacles and the valuable lessons learned along the way.

Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away with It by Elie Honig

CNN senior legal analyst and nationally bestselling author Elie Honig explores America’s two-tier justice system, explaining how the rich, the famous, and the powerful— including, most notoriously, Donald Trump—manipulate the legal system to escape justice and get away with vast misdeeds.

How does he get away with it? That question, more than any other, vexes observers of and participants in the American criminal justice process. How do powerful people weaponize their wealth, political power, and fame to beat the system? And how can prosecutors fight back?

In Untouchable, Elie Honig exposes how the rich and powerful use the system to their own benefit, revealing how notorious figures like Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby successfully eluded justice for decades. He demonstrates how the Trump children dodged a fraud indictment. He makes clear how countless CEOs and titans of Wall Street have been let off the hook, receiving financial penalties without suffering criminal consequences. This doesn’t happen by accident.

Over the four years of his administration, Donald Trump’s corruption seemed plain for all to see. The former president obstructed justice, flouted his responsibility to the Constitution, lied to the American people, and set the United States on a dark path to disunity and violence. Yet he has never been held accountable for any of his misdeeds. Why not?

Untouchable holds the answer. Honig shows how Trump and others use seemingly fair institutions and practices to build empires of corruption and get away with misdeeds for which ordinary people would be sentenced to years behind bars. It’s not just that money talks, Honig makes clear, but how it can corrupt otherwise reliable institutions and blind people to the real power dynamics behind the scenes.

In this vital, incisive book, Honig explains how the system allows the powerful to become untouchable, takes us inside their heads, and offers solutions for making the system more honest and fairer, ensuring true justice for all—holding everyone, no matter their status, accountable for their criminal misdeeds.

The Secret Files: Bill De Blasio, The NYPD, and The Broken Promises of Police Reform by Michael Hayes

An unprecedented breakdown of the NYPD’s powerful network of police unions, pro-police lawyers, and top brass who work relentlessly to shield police officers from any real accountability

For readers of long-form, hard-hitting journalistic exposés like We Own This City, a compelling look at how we do—and don’t—hold police responsible in America, by an award-winning progressive reporter covering the NYPD police beat

In 2018, reporter Michael Hayes uncovered a major story about how the NYPD was not only turning a blind eye to police misconduct, but also allowing hundreds of officers with severe misconduct charges to remain on the force. In the aftermath of that story, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio attempted to reform the department only to abandon his plans.

While de Blasio may have suffered a political setback, it’s New Yorkers who are the true victims of this failure to deliver accountability and transparency. The state has a law that specifically prevents the public from learning about concealed police records. New Yorkers are increasingly distrustful of the police after witnessing their loved ones being targeted, brutalized, and murdered with near impunity.

Hayes takes readers inside decades of police corruption and controversial laws, chronicling the stories of the families and activists who have had enough. He makes a compelling case for the limits of reform in the aftermath of the major Black Lives Matter rallies following the murder of George Floyd and growing calls to defund the police.

Rick Elmore, CEO and Founder of Simply Noted – Real Handwritten Notes to Scale

Simplynoted.com

Actor Daniel Baldwin on Loaded Deck Movie, iShook.com and Crypto Token Movie Funding’s New Frontier

Loadeddeckmovie.com

ishook.comishook.iomegatolia.com

City of the Dead (4) (City Spies) by James Ponti

In this fourth installment in the New York Times bestselling series from Edgar Award winner James Ponti, the young group of spies go codebreaking in Cairo in another international adventure perfect for fans of Spy School and Mrs. Smith’s Spy School for Girls.

Codename Kathmandu, better known as Kat, loves logic and order, has a favorite eight-digit number, and can spot a pattern from a mile away. So when a series of cyberattacks hits key locations in London while the spies are testing security for the British Museum, it’s clear that Kat’s skill for finding reason in what seems like randomness makes her the perfect candidate to lead the job.

And while the team follows the deciphered messages to Egypt and the ancient City of the Dead to discover who is behind the attacks and why, Kat soon realizes that there’s another layer to the mystery.

With more players, more clues, and involving higher levels of British Intelligence than ever before, this mission is one of the most complex that the group has faced to date. And it’s also going to bring about a change to the City Spies…

Our Fourth Age: A village elder’s story for young Homines sapientes about surviving their future history by Mr Terry Vernon Thiele

WHY THIS BOOK? Welcome to our Fourth Age. Our species already has survived three. For millennia we hunted. After the ice, we farmed. For the last eight generations, we manufactured. Our Fourth Age is upon us. We are at teetering on the brink of a technological meta-revolution the likes of which we can scarcely imagine, driven by nanotechnology, synthetic biology, 3D printing, automation, instantaneous-always-on-global communication, artificial intelligence, and cheap ubiquitous off-grid energy, to name just a few of the disruptors. It will redefine everything that we know and do … and may take our jobs. At the same time, we are undergoing societal upheavals on a scale never before seen. For the first time, most of us now live in cities. For the first time, the old outnumber the young. Within our children’s lifetimes, global population will peak and then start to decline. Half of all country populations are already declining. And the decline won’t stop…. Instinctively we fear the unknown . . . fear chaos. We formed groups that created cultural and societal norms to protect us from that primeval chaos. But all of those norms wither in the blast of the technological and societal changes that are accelerating us into a future our imaginations cannot grasp. For 7,000 generations, since anatomically “modern” humans emerged 200,000 years ago, children could look to their parents and grandparents for life lessons in how to confront the chaos. No more. The yesterday experiences of parents and grandparents will be of little help to today’s children in surviving tomorrow’s world. Our children have no cultural maps, no societal talismans, to guide them. Which leaves them with only their instincts to confront the chaos. Those instincts were crafted to enable us to survive in a world that we left millennia ago. That long-forgotten world hardwired us to overreact violently when we are frightened. Chaos is frightening. And chaos is about to engulf us. Welcome to our Fourth Age. Do we have the innate capacity to survive what is about to happen to us? This book explores that question for the sake of my grandchildren.

Guy Morris, Author of Intelligent Action Thriller Books

Guymorrisbooks.com

The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House by Chris Whipple

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Gatekeepers comes a revelatory, news-making look at how President Joe Biden and his seasoned team have battled to achieve their agenda—based on the author’s extraordinary access to the White House during two years of crises at home and abroad.

In January of 2021, the Biden administration inherited the most daunting array of challenges since FDR’s presidency: a lethal pandemic, a plummeting economy, an unresolved twenty-year war, and the aftermath of an attack on the Capitol that polarized the country. Waves of crises followed, including the fallout from a divisive Supreme Court, raging inflation, and Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Now, in The Fight of His Life, prizewinning journalist Chris Whipple takes us inside the Oval Office as the critical decisions of Biden’s presidency are being made. With remarkable access to both President Biden and his inner circle—including Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and CIA Director William Burns—Whipple pulls back the curtain on the internal power struggles and back-room compromises. Featuring shocking new details about how renegade Trump officials enabled the transfer of power, which key staffers really make the White House run (it’s probably not who you think), why Joe Biden no longer speaks freely around his security detail, and what he really thinks of Vice President Kamala Harris, the press, and living in the White House, The Fight of His Life delivers a stunning portrait of politics on the edge.

The Unhackable Internet: How Rebuilding Cyberspace Can Create Real Security and Prevent Financial Collapse by Thomas P. Vartanian

Like most aspects of modern existence, more and more of our financial lives have migrated to the digital realm. With the benefits of ease that our Internet allows us, that transition also raises numerous – and dangerous – threats to national security, our money, and the systems we use to store and transfer it. In TheUnhackable Internet, financial services and technology expert Thomas P. Vartanian exposes the vulnerabilities of the many networks that we rely on today as well as the threats facing the integrity of our national security and financial services sector.

From cyberattacks by foreign adversaries like China and Russia, the explosion of cryptocurrency, the advancement of ransomware, phishing, surveillance apps, spying software, and logic bombs, along with the increasing savvy and daring shown by Internet hackers, the next financial panic is likely to be delivered to us through use or abuse of technology. The Unhackable Internet describes how society can remake an Internet that was never conceived as a secure environment and badly tainted by the original sin of substandard coding. Vartanian argues for increasing the use of private and offline network infrastructures, controlling the ownership of Internet infrastructure, and imposing enhanced authentication, governance, and enforcement standards. This online universe would look more like our analog lives, authenticating all digital traffic to a real person and removing any virtual traveler that violated the new rules of the road.

The Unhackable Internet poses a challenge to America: take the lead and create a coalition of democratic nations to implement financial cyber strategies or be left with no counterweight short of military power to respond to those who weaponize technology. This comprehensive and compelling book makes it clear that nothing less than the control of global economies is up for grabs, and that how we use technology is our choice.

James Donatossian, Owner of Printech on Building a Multi-Million Dollar Business and Success

Printech.com

Thom Dennis Founder & CEO – Culture Change Coach and Facilitator

Serenityinleadership.com

Mansoor Ahmed, Founder and CEO of Heritage Kulfi

Heritagekulfi.com