Showing results by narrator "Andrew Joseph Perez" in All Categories

On an afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. Dazed soldiers and worried citizens could only watch as the flames engulfed the museum's castle. Rare objects and valuable paintings were destroyed. The flames at the Smithsonian were not the first—and certainly would not be the last—disaster to upend a museum in the United States. The Museum explores the concepts of "crisis" as it relates to museums, and how these historic institutions have dealt with challenges ranging from depression and war to pandemic and philosophical uncertainty.

Efren “Chino” Flores has just moved back to the Bay Area from Seattle, jumping from sublet to sublet. In Washington, he was a beloved middle school biology teacher with a loving wife and a child on the way until a stunning loss changed his life. Now he’s working temp jobs and struggling to put himself back out into the world. But there to nurture Chino is a coterie of new and old friends and lovers who form a protective web around him.

In The Spirituality of Dreaming, leading dream scholar and expert Dr. Kelly Bulkeley brings us a set of time-honored methods to stimulate innate dreaming capacities and amplify their impact in our waking lives. Relying on years of research, data analysis, and interviews, Bulkeley offers wisdom and strategies from "big dreamers"—people who have vivid, intense dreams and remember them.

A hot, motionless afternoon. Enero and El Negro are fishing with Tilo, their dead friend's teenage son. After hours of struggling with a hooked stingray, Enero aims his revolver into the water and shoots it. They hang the ray's enormous corpse from a tree at their campsite and let it go to rot, drawing the attention of some local islanders and igniting a long-simmering fury toward outsiders and their carelessness.

Chipping a board is a natural part of skateboarding. Novice or pro, you'll see folks riding chipped boards as symbols of their stubborn dedication toward a deck, a toy, and aging bodies that will also reach their inevitable end. In Chipped, José Vadi personalizes and expands upon this symbol. Written after finishing his debut collection Inter State, Vadi used these essays to explore his own empathy in aging, and to elaborate on the impact skateboarding has had on culture, power, and art.

While the Western was dying a slow death across the cultural landscape, it was blazing back to life as a video game in the early twenty-first century. Rockstar Games' Red Dead franchise, beginning with Red Dead Revolver in 2004, has grown into one of the most critically acclaimed video game franchises of the twenty-first century. Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the Video Game West offers a critical, interdisciplinary look at this cultural phenomenon at the intersection of game studies and American history.

The United States Hispanic segment represents the most prominent demographic growth in the country, and a huge and untapped business opportunity for companies willing to move away from preconceived notions and market effectively to Hispanic customers. This book shows you how.

AI is at the forefront of everyone's minds: from students and artists, to CEO's and service workers. But what exactly is AI, and how does it influence our everyday lives? And more than that, what does it mean for our future? Is there a way for us to retain our "humanness" in a world ever-reliant on tech? This groundbreaking book argues that the key technology we use to make strategic, political, and ethical decisions is flawed.

Enormous legal cross-border flows of people, goods, and finance are embedded in the region's history and prompted by the need to respond to new opportunities and challenges that originate on the other side. In Border Economies, James Gerber examines how the interactivity and sensitivity of communities to conditions across the border differentiates them from communities in the interiors of Mexico and the United States. Gerber explains what makes the region not only unique but uniquely interesting.

War is hell, and the conflict tearing the world apart may be humankind's last. Set adrift on a makeshift raft in the middle of the South Pacific, the sole survivor of a sabotaged space-shuttle flight, undersecretary of state Calvert Roberts is certain his life is coming to an end. But fate intervenes, depositing him dehydrated and half starved on the beach of an uncharted island with a giant M etched into a cliff wall. At first it appears to be paradise, but Eden has a dark side: Here, Dr. Mortimer Dart is playing God.

A quintessential American dream story from a Mexican entrepreneur who shares the tale of building a multi-million-dollar business from scratch, complete with both success and failure, and always a vision of hope.

Written by a monk-turned-leadership-guru, Mindfulness For the Wandering Mind offers unique insight on how you can focus your mind, become more resilient, respond better to conflict, and build stronger professional (and personal) relationships. It's all possible when you begin to understand how your mind works and take control of this complicated mechanism. This book will show you how to identify and close the "apps" that are constantly running in your own mind, so you can eliminate distractions and find greater peace and productivity in your daily life.

When true crime podcaster Mercy St. Claire's best friend Alice gets kidnapped, it plunges her into the terrible realities of cold cases in a broken America. She turns to her beloved professor, retired criminalist Mark Thoreau, to try and find Alice, but grief, passion, and a descending darkness of terrible truths push them to take comfort in each other while killers go free. Nobody has answers.

Relit features sixteen original stories by award-winning Latinx YA authors that revamp classics, myths, and fairytales to center the multilayered Latinx experience through fantasy, science fiction, and a dash of magic. Pride and Prejudice is launched into outer space, Frankenstein is plunged into the depths of the ocean, and The Great Gatsby floats to an island off the coast of Costa Rica. A shape-shifter gives up her life to save the boy she loves from an evil bruja. La Ciguapa covets a little mermaid’s heart of gold. Two star-crossed teens fall in love while the planet burns around them.

True crime social media sensations and citizen sleuths Mercy St. Claire and Chizzy Williams are working themselves sick trying to solve DC's numerous cold cases. Meanwhile, retired criminalist Mark Thoreau is nursing a broken heart and a bottle of bourbon, and local reporter Tohru Iwasaki is serving as the inspiration for a mystery novel.

Weaving between preparations for his father’s funeral and memories of life on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Obed Silva chronicles his father’s alcoholism—a lifelong love that ended only at his death at the age of forty-eight, having poisoned himself one Carta Blanca at a time. Addiction respects no borders; the havoc Silva’s father wreaked on his family not only followed them north, where mother and son moved to escape his violent drunken rages, but would make itself felt even from the grave.

Magical break-ins abound...The two nearby stores owned by supernaturals are broken into. The Fix ‘n’ Find, my store, is not. What I have instead are suspicious magical handprints on the front windows. Combine that with a weird set of glasses that let the wearer see every type of magic and we have a serious conundrum. Luckily, my ex-fiancé Violetta, is a powerful witch and willing to help me figure out what could possibly be going on. Find out what some magical items and good old-fashioned spell work can uncover in the Spectacle Stealing Supernatural.

My life is one giant cycle of group deniability...As a magic-less son of a witch owning a store full magical objects isn’t easy. But with my unhelpful Rottweiler Bailey and a handful of supernatural staff, we’ve sold everything from elfin wedding china to a life-size dwarven statue we don’t like to talk about. Everything is going smoothly until a goblin customer starts coughing up a disgusting green goo. Little did I know as I watch that liquid spew from his mouth that his presence and that goo was going to send my life into a tailspin.

The semiannual supernatural auction is a great way to get rid of valuable items, fast. I'm grateful I can use this opportunity to get rid of not only the Geysers: Volume 8, but the weird vortex compact I still haven't been able to open. My luck runs out when, before the auction starts, someone sets fire to the building. In fact, someone uses that fire as a cover to steal some of the more expensive antiques being sold at the auction. By the time Blake and several other officers arrive, it becomes clear that our thief might not be the only one stealing artifacts from the auction.

When a volume eight of Geysers Journals falls into my lap, I'm left with a conundrum. Do I hold onto it and try to get the most money out of it I possibly can, shoring up my finances for at least a year? Or do I get rid of it as quickly as possible in an effort to avoid any more attempts on my life?