Showing results by narrator "George Newbern" in All Categories

Tech billionaire Miles has more money than he can ever spend and everything he could dream of - except time. Now facing a terminal illness, Miles knows he must seize every minute to put his life in order. Somewhere out there, Miles has children. And they might be about to inherit both the good and bad from him - possibly his fortune, or possibly something more deadly. So Miles decides to track down his missing children. But a vicious killer is one step ahead of him. One by one, people are vanishing.

In Bookends, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon offers a compilation of pieces about literature - age-old classics as well as his own - that presents a unique look into his literary origins and influences, the books that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading.

When did “parenting” become a verb? Why is it so hard to parent, and so rife with the possibility of failure? Sitcom families of the past—the Cleavers, the Bradys, the Conners—didn’t seem to lose any sleep about their parenting methods. Today, parents are likely to be up late, doomscrolling on parenting websites. In Long Days, Short Years, Andrew Bomback—physician, writer, and father of three young children—looks at why it can be so much fun to be a parent but, at the same time, so frustrating and difficult to parent.

After resigning from his agency under an ethical cloud, forty-six-year-old Dan Cahill commits himself to rebuilding his relationship with Megan, the college-aged daughter in Las Vegas he has long neglected. She persuades a reluctant Cahill to join the student-led campaign of a popular professor competing in the Nevada presidential primary against impossible odds. As they face powerful forces conspiring to clear the field, Cahill's deep-seated disdain for electoral politics collides with Megan's higher ideals.

Fred is the sole offspring of Lenny Snyder, the famous (or notorious) pied piper of the counterculture, and in middle age he hates being reminded of it. But neither can he ignore any longer his psychedelically bizarre childhood. From infancy, for instance, he was called Freedom (in fact his given name) not only by those who should have known him but also by members of the burgeoning movement led by his father, who happily exploited having his wife and his toddling, then walking and talking, and finally observant son in tow.

The world is on the brink of apocalypse. Zero Day has come. The only thing more terrifying than millions of spiders is the realisation that those spiders work as one. But among the government, there is dissent: do we try to kill all of the spiders, or do we gamble on Professor Guyer's theory that we need to kill only the queens?

Grad to Grown-Up: 68 Tips to Excel in Your Personal and Professional Life is a unique self-help book that offers a roadmap to kickstart your future. Rags-to-riches author and CEO Gene Rice and his high school English teacher daughter Courtney Bejgrowicz demystify adulthood by sharing critical information alongside professional and personal successes and failures. The five sections—life, job search, career, personal finance, and health and relationships—provide real-world insights that are often overlooked in formal education.

What connects Paleolithic bone flutes to the invention of computer software? Or the Murex sea snail to the death of the great American city? How does the bag of crisps you hold in your hand help tell the story of humanity itself? In his brilliant new work on the history of innovation, international best-seller Steven Johnson argues that the pursuit of novelty and wonder has always been a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change.

“You’re going up the Valley". Black didn’t know its name, but he knew it lay deeper and higher than any other place Americans had ventured. You had to travel through a network of interlinked valleys, past all the other remote American outposts, just to get to its mouth. Everything about the place was myth and rumor, but one fact was clear: There were many valleys in the mountains of Afghanistan, and most were hard places where people died hard deaths. But there was only one Valley. It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst.

Mysterious noises keep waking up the Wimbledon family. "That's very odd," says Mr. Wimbledon each time, but when he returns from checking on the sounds, he's always reassuring: "It's only Stanley; he's fixing the oil tank." "It's only Stanley; he's clearing the bathtub drain." But what Stanley the dog is actually doing while his oblivious family goes back to bed is deliciously absurd: He's preparing for an interplanetary trip! And guess who's going along for the ride!

Recently recovered from his epic bicycle journey that took him from the Delaware shore to the Oregon coast, distinguished climate scientist David Goodrich sets out on his bike again to traverse the Western Interior Seaway - an ancient ocean that once spread across half of North America. When the waters cleared a geologic age ago, what was left behind was vast flat prairie, otherworldly rock formations, and oil shale deposits.

Tony Wolf, a troubled man and the FBI’s most esteemed undercover agent, is back after mysteriously vanishing without a trace. A specialist at infiltrating criminal organizations and taking them down from the inside, he lives his life in the shadows. But when he’s forced into the open during the rescue of two kidnapped children, Wolf becomes caught up in a massive federal manhunt. Faced with a traitorous agent and a ruthless, renegade biker gang he has crossed paths with before, Wolf finds himself in danger.

She’s being attacked, losing her footing as she falls to the dusty ground littered with pine needles. Scurrying like a crab, she attempts to stand and then nothing. A cold sweat trickles down Slater Montgomery’s spine. It’s been years since he’s felt them - years since he’s seen them. The visions which nearly destroyed his childhood. Back then, ignorance and getting high were his allies, providing a false sense of security. Now? He can’t get her out of his head. The girl of his dreams. Except, Slater knows this is no dream.

Ray Parisi is in trouble. Fired from his anchor job at ESPN after one too many public humiliations, Ray is holed up in a motel and in dire need of a break. His ex is engaged and shacking up with another guy in his old house, a Cambodian bookie wants to kill him, and he's wanted by the New York State Police. A few days before the Fourth of July, he unexpectedly receives an inheritance from his long-lost father, and it seems like all of his problems might be solved.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, and that becomes even more apparent when trying to analyze the science of politics. Pulling from an array of disciplines including social science, behavioral science, and mathematics, this audiobook analyzes key factors in the process of electing a leader: from dissecting those qualities considered to be ideal, to how potential leaders are portrayed, to voter behavior, to the voting process - casting, collecting, and counting the votes.

In this remarkable memoir, Jeremy Norton marshals twenty-two years of professional experience to offer, with compassion and critique, an extraordinary portrayal of emergency responders. Trauma Sponges captures in arresting detail the personal and social toll the job exacts, as well as the unique perspective afforded by sustained direct encounters with the sick, the dying, and the dead.

For a little girl named Susan, Christmas could be any other day. She doesn't believe in Santa Claus or magic or miracles of any kind. Then, one day, she meets Kris Kringle. As she doubtfully tells him which gifts she wishes for most, deep down Susan finds herself hoping that, just maybe, he is the real thing. Based on the original holiday classic, Miracle on 34th Street: A Storybook Edition is a heartwarming story about generosity, imagination, and the spirit of Christmas.

Ever since the cops revoked his private investigator's license, Charlie Bradshaw has been adjusting to life as a regular senior citizen. But reading, sitting around the house, and making amateur home repairs is a far cry from his past life as Saratoga Springs' most successful everyman detective. So when Charlie discovers the sprawled corpse of Saratoga Springs' biggest nuisance on his sidewalk, the ex-P.I. is torn.

Another bucolic fall in Northern New Hampshire, and the semester is under way at Bishop's Hill Academy. But the school year starts off less than tranquil. The new headmaster, Jim Hawthorne, has liberal ideas that the staff finds far from welcome. Serene on the surface, the ivy-clad, tree-lined campus gives few clues to the school's history of special privileges, petty corruptions, and hidden allegiances. But as autumn advances, the affable smiles and pretenses of virtue wear thin. And as winter closes in, students, teachers, and staff get an education in savagery and murder.

Llama just ate a doughnut—the most scrumptious, most sprinkled doughnut in existence—and he needs to eat it again. The problem? He can’t. He has already eaten it! The solution? A pair of time-travel pants, of course! But when Llama goes way farther back than he intended, the dessert he winds up taking has an owner who’s more than willing to travel through time to retrieve it.