Two Different Sales at Audible.com

Right now there are two different sales at Aubible.com.

The first sale has all the books from 8 different series on sale for $7.95 a book. I read all of the Split Infinity series as a teen and and all of the Vorkosigan Series a few years ago before I started reviewing. The first is a mix of humorous series that splits between a science fiction and a fantasy world.  The second is a classic epic Science Fiction series.  A little humor, a lot of intrigue.

• Apprentice Adept (Piers Anthony)
• Butcher’s Boy (Thomas Perry)
• John Rain (Barry Eisler)
• The Modern Scholar (Various)
• Psy-Changeling (Nalini Singh)
• Tall, Dark, and Dangerous (Suzanne Brockmann)
• Miles Vorkosigan (Lois McMaster Bujold)
• My Blood Approves (Amanda Hocking)

Church 3.0: Upgrades for the Future of the Church (Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series) by Neil Cole - $4.16

9 hrs and 12 minutes – no reviews

An expert practitioner answers to questions about the burgeoning organic church movement

Neil Cole’s best-selling book Organic Church described the fastest growing segment of contemporary Christianity-the so-called organic church. Now in this next-step book, he answers questions about how to deal with theological and organizational issues that come up. He talks about issues such has what to do with finances, children, heresy, leader training, and rituals and ordinances. Without the top-down structure of a denomination, even people who are proponents of this small, house-church model worry that they are not doing it right.

Viral Churches: Helping Church Planters Become Movement Makers (Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series) by Ed Stetzer and Warren Bird - $4.16

5 hrs and 59 minutes – no reviews

A groundbreaking guide for multiplying the impact of church plants

Based on a study that was commissioned by the Leadership Network, this book reveals the best practices in church planting and uncovers the common threads among them. A much-needed resource, this book will inform, guide, and even catalyze today’s many church planting leaders. The authors clearly show leaders how to plant churches that create a multiplication movement and offer inspiration for them to do so. The book addresses their questions about what to do next in their church planting strategies, in light of research on what’s actually working best.

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall Stross – $4.16

10 hrs and 38 minutes – 26 of 41 reviews are 4 or 5 star

At the height of his fame, Thomas Alva Edison was hailed as “the Napoleon of invention” and blazed in the public imagination as a virtual demigod. Newspapers proclaimed his genius in glowing personal profiles and quipped that “the doctor has been called” because the great man “has not invented anything since breakfast.”

Starting with the first public demonstrations of the phonograph in 1878 and extending through the development of incandescent light, power generation and a distribution system to sustain it, and the first motion picture cameras – all achievements more astonishing in their time than we can easily grasp today – Edison’s name became emblematic of all the wonder and promise of the emerging age of technological marvels.

But as Randall Stross makes clear in this critical biography of the man who is arguably the most globally famous of all Americans, Thomas Edison’s greatest invention may have been his own celebrity. Edison was certainly a technical genius, but Stross excavates the man from layers of myth-making and separates his true achievements from his almost equally colossal failures. How much credit should Edison receive for the various inventions that have popularly been attributed to him – and how many of them resulted from both the inspiration and the perspiration of his rivals and even his own assistants? How much of Edison’s technical skill helped him overcome a lack of business acumen and feel for consumers’ wants and needs?

This bold reassessment of Edison’s life and career answers these and many other important questions while telling the story of how he came upon his most famous inventions as a young man and spent the remainder of his long life trying to conjure similar success. We also meet his partners and competitors, presidents and entertainers, his close friend Henry Ford, the wives who competed with his work for his attention, and the children who tried to thrive in his shadow – all providing a fuller view of Edison’s life and times than has ever been offered before. The Wizard of Menlo Park reveals not only how Edison worked, but how he managed his own fame, becoming the first great celebrity of the modern age.

Faith Under Fire: An Army Chaplain’s Memoir by Roger Benimoff and Eve Conant – $4.16

7 hrs and 42 minutes – 2 of 2 reviews are 4 or 5 star

“Running away from God doesn’t work. I had tried.” -Roger Benimoff

As he left for his second tour of duty as an Army chaplain in Iraq, Roger Benimoff noted in his journal: I am excited and I am scared. I am on fire for God…He is my hope, strength, and focus.

But not long after returning to Iraq, the burdens of his job – the memorial services for soldiers killed in action, the therapy sessions after contact with the enemy, the perilous excursions “outside the wire” while under enemy fire – began to overwhelm him. Amid the dust, heat, and blood of Iraq, Benimoff felt the pillar of strength he’d always relied on to hold him up – his faith in God – begin to crumble.

Benimoff’s spiritual crisis heightened upon his return home to Fort Carson, Colorado. He withdrew emotionally from wife and sons, creating tensions that threatened to shatter the family. He was assigned to work at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he counseled returning soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder–until he was diagnosed himself with PTSD.Unable to make sense of the senseless, Benimoff turned to his journal. What did it mean to believe in a God who would allow the utter horror and injustice of war? Did He want these brave young men and women to die? In his darkest moment, Benimoff wrote: Why am I so angry? I do not want anything to do with God. I am sick of religion. It is a crutch for the weak.

Finding himself in the role of patient rather than caregiver, connecting as an equal with his fellow sufferers, and revisiting scriptural readings that once again rang with meaning and truth, he began his most decisive battle: for the love of his family and for the chance to once again open his heart to the healing grace of God.

Intimate and powerful, drawing on Benimoff’s and his wife’s journals, Faith Under Fire chronicles a spiritual struggle through war, loss, and the hard process of learning to believe again.