Audiobooks narrated by Jeff Cummings

The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles

The 3rd edition of The Amazon Way is one of the rare business leadership books giving actionable insights for innovation and business growth to be the basis for your digital transformation gameplan. The Amazon Way translates Amazon's unique culture and management practices into insights and opportunities, as only an Amazon executive and expert advisor could do for the Amazon Leadership Principles giving readers one of the essential business leadership books for the digital era. Peppered with humorous and enlightening firsthand anecdotes with Jeff Bezos from the author’s career at Amazon, this revealing business guide is also filled with the valuable lessons that have served Jeff Bezos’ “everything store” so well—providing expert advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, CEOs, and investors alike. The author was responsible for launching the Amazon Marketplace business and had accountability for the enterprises services business. Since leaving Amazon, Rossman has worked across every industry sector and with companies of all sizes to create business and product strategies, approaches to scale leadership, culture and innovation. It’s this combination of Amazon insider experience coupled with a vast portfolio of helping other businesses compete which make The Amazon Way a guide for anyone looking to compete in the digital era. The 3rd edition has many new and updated sections. This includes a new foreword from Tom Alberg, managing partner at Madrona Venture Group. Tom was on the board of directors at Amazon for 23 years. A new preface is included suggesting a vital strategy for Amazon and the leadership teams for all companies. The Amazon Way is on a short list of essential business leadership books and should be a key addition to business leadership programs to develop a culture of growth and innovation. If you are interviewing at Amazon or for current Amazon employees, The Amazon Way will be an invaluable asset for your success. The Amazon Way doesn't just explain the Amazon Leadership Principles, but gives tools, mechanisms and atomic habits to create change in a team or business. The leadership principles and examples include customer obsession, long-term thinking, think big, working backwards and the future press release, bias for action, earn trust and free cash flow. Praise for The Amazon Way 'In this new edition, John Rossman provides an updated, in-depth and invaluable view of the principles that are fueling Amazon's extraordinary business success. John's suggestion to add a new principle focused on the Golden Rule is a great one for every company, as, more than ever, we need business to serve the common good!' -- Hubert Joly, former chairman and CEO of Best Buy, author The Heart of Business - Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism 'In The Amazon Way, John Rossman brilliantly illuminates Amazon's secretive corporate culture, using HIS rare insider's perspective to show how Jeff Bezos has created unique systems that facilitate good decision making at all levels of his company' -- Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound

John Rossman (Author), Jeff Cummings (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Last Good Dog

Years ago, LAPD detective Michael Gideon and his German shepherd K-9 partner, Sirius, walked through fire to save Los Angeles from serial killer Ellis Haines, known as the Weatherman. Now, they prepare for a final showdown with their mortal foe. It's been a year of change for Gideon and Sirius. Both are new parents, but for the two of them, the joys of fatherhood have to wait. After a few months of silence, the All-In Killer has begun his murderous spree again—and his latest victim died only miles from Gideon's doorstep. The All-In Killer has made it no secret that his homicidal countdown will end only with the deaths of Gideon and Sirius. When Gideon decides he can no longer hide the encroaching threat from his wife, they prepare together for the approaching storm. While Gideon chases down a new lead that might prove his suspicion that the All-In Killer has been communicating with Ellis Haines, an ecoterrorist bomber strikes California, and a recently retired deputy US marshal and her bomb-sniffing dog go missing. Gideon and Sirius join in that manhunt, doing what they do best—saving lives.

Alan Russell (Author), Jeff Cummings (Narrator)

Audiobook

Unthinkable

From international bestselling author Brad Parks comes a new thriller about an ordinary man who may be able to save the world as we know it—but to do so, he must make an impossible choice. Nate Lovejoy is a self-proclaimed nobody, a stay-at-home dad who doesn’t believe he’s important to anyone but his wife and their two daughters. So it’s a shock when members of a powerful secret society kidnap and spirit Nate away to a mansion at the behest of their leader, Vanslow DeGange, who claims to know the future. He’s foreseen that a billion people could die—unless Nate acts. It seems improbable, especially given what DeGange says will set this mass casualty incident in motion: a lawsuit against the biggest power company in Virginia, being brought by Nate’s wife, Jenny. Nate quickly smells a scam being perpetrated by the power company. But at every turn, it becomes apparent there’s more to DeGange’s gift than Nate wants to acknowledge. A billion people really could die, and Nate might be the only one who can save them. All he has to do is the unthinkable.

Brad Parks (Author), Amanda Stribling, Jeff Cummings (Narrator)

Audiobook

Vidal in Venice

Discover Venice through the vibrant and personal observations of Gore Vidal. Listen as he walks the storied streets, recounting the city’s rich history and exploring his own family ties to the area. Filled with insightful impressions of Venice’s culture, fine art, and architecture, this audiobook is an unforgettable adventure by one of America’s most significant writers.

Gore Vidal (Author), Jeff Cummings (Narrator)

Audiobook

Palimpsest: A Memoir

This explosively entertaining memoir abounds in gossip, satire, historical apercus, and trenchant observations. Vidal’s compelling narrative weaves back and forth in time, providing a whole view of the author’s celebrated life, from his birth in 1925 to today, and features a cast of memorable characters—including the Kennedy family, Marlon Brando, Anais Nin, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Gore Vidal (Author), Jeff Cummings (Narrator)

Audiobook

Scorched Grounds

From bestselling author Debbie Herbert comes a chilling, fast-paced story about family tragedy and confronting what terrifies us most. In the eighteen years since her father went to prison for killing her mother and brother, Della Stallings has battled a crippling phobia. Her fear only grows when her father’s released. She still believes he killed her family, but the police don’t have enough evidence to arrest him again. When new grisly murders occur—each bearing the telltale signs that seem to implicate her father—Della begins to wonder if the real murderer is still out there. Could her father have been framed? To find the truth, Della must face her greatest fears and doubts—not only to find justice for her family but to ensure her own survival.

Debbie Herbert (Author), Adam Verner, Christopher Lane, Jeff Cummings, Megan Tusing (Narrator)

Audiobook

Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia

Gore Vidal has been described as the last “noble defender” of the American republic. In Imperial America, Vidal steals the thunder of a right wing America—those who have camouflaged their extremist rhetoric in the Old Glory and the Red, White, and Blue—by demonstrating that those whose protest arbitrary and secret government, those who defend the bill of rights, those who seek to restrain America’s international power, are the true patriots. “Those Americans who refuse to plunge blindly into the maelstrom of European and Asiatic politics are not defeatist or neurotic,” he writes. “They are giving evidence of sanity, not cowardice, of adult thinking as distinguished from infantilism. They intend to preserve and defend the Republic. America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.”

Gore Vidal (Author), Jeff Cummings (Narrator)

Audiobook

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated

In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed then too controversial to publish), Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of “evil-doers?”

Gore Vidal (Author), Jeff Cummings (Narrator)

Audiobook

United States: Essays 1952-1992

Gore Vidal’s reputation as America’s finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabakov, and Montaigne (a previosly uncollected essay from 1992). State of the union deals with politics and public life: sex, drugs, money, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, The Holy Family (his essay on the Kennedys), Nixon, and finally Monotheism and its Discontents , a scathing critique of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In state of being, we are given personal responses to people and events: recollections of his childhood, E. Nesbit, Tarzan, Tennessee Williams, and Anais Nin.

Gore Vidal (Author), Jeff Cummings (Narrator)

Audiobook

Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta

When Gore Vidal’s New York Times bestseller Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace was published, the Los Angeles Times described Vidal as the last defender of the American republic. In Dreaming War, Vidal continues this defense by confronting the Cheney-Bush junta head-on in a series of devastating essays that demolish the lies American Empire lives by, unveiling a counter-history that traces the origins of America’s current imperial ambitions to the experience of World War Two and the post-war Truman doctrine. And now, with Cheney-Bush leading us into permanent war, Vidal asks whose interests are served by this doctrine of pre-emptive war? Was Afghanistan turned to rubble to avenge the 3,000 slaughtered on September 11? Or was “the unlovely Osama chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan?” After all, he was abruptly replaced with Saddam Hussein once the Taliban were overthrown. And while “evidence” is now being invented to connect Saddam with 9/11, the administration are not helped by “stories in the U.S. press about the vast oil wealth of Iraq which must—for the sake of the free world—be reassigned to U.S. consortiums.”

Gore Vidal (Author), Jeff Cummings (Narrator)

Audiobook

L.A. Woman

LAPD detective Michael Gideon and his K-9 partners try to outmaneuver not one but two serial killers, while investigating the suspicious death of a woman who belonged to a cult. When a woman in Bel Air dies of a rattlesnake bite, the case doesn’t seem to fit the usual purview of LAPD’s Special Cases Unit. But Carrie Holder was no ordinary LA woman. She was a member of the city's latest cult, the Church of the Gate, which counts Hollywood's movers and shakers among its devotees. Investigating the cult's secrets takes Detective Michael Gideon, his German shepherd K-9 partner, Sirius, and pit bull rescue Emily across Los Angeles's canyons, neighborhoods, and movie studio lots—but all the while, an even darker threat looms closer. The All-In Killer has left a trail of victims across the Southwest, but he's no longer content to couch his threats in poker clues—the latest crime scene leaves no doubt that he's coming for Gideon, and Sirius, too. With the FBI pressuring Gideon to visit Ellis Haines, aka the Weatherman, for insights on the case, can Gideon outwit not one but two serial killers?

Alan Russell (Author), Jeff Cummings (Narrator)

Audiobook

Julian: A Novel

The remarkable bestseller about the fourth-century Roman emperor who famously tried to halt the spread of Christianity, Julian is widely regarded as one of Gore Vidal’s finest historical novels. Julian the Apostate, nephew of Constantine the Great, was one of the brightest yet briefest lights in the history of the Roman Empire. A military genius on the level of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a graceful and persuasive essayist, and a philosopher devoted to worshipping the gods of Hellenism, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity that provoked his murder at the age of thirty-two, only four years into his brilliantly humane and compassionate reign. A marvelously imaginative and insightful novel of classical antiquity, Julian captures the religious and political ferment of a desperate age and restores with blazing wit and vigor the legacy of an impassioned ruler.

Gore Vidal (Author), David De Vries, George Newbern, Jeff Cummings, Malcolm Hillgartner (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Jeff Cummings