Showing results by narrator "Todd Ross" in All Categories

In his signature style, John Hendrix tells the true story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor who makes the ultimate sacrifice in order to free the German people from oppression during World War II.

Mark Antonelli, a failed young writer looking down the barrel at 30, is planning a cross-country road trip. He buys a beat-up old tour bus. He hires a young army vet to drive it. He puts out an ad for others to join him along the way. But this will be a road trip like no other: His passengers are all fellow disheartened souls who have decided that this will be their final journey - upon arrival in San Francisco, they will find a cliff with an amazing view of the ocean at sunset, hit the gas, and drive out of this world.

A 23-year veteran of emergency medical services, paramedic Matthew Sias took a detour in his career to pursue the death-care business and found a complementarity between two seemingly divergent careers. Silent Siren: Memoirs of a Life Saving Mortician is the record of some of the more memorable calls he has responded to through the years.

In Then I Am Myself the World, Christof Koch explores the only thing we directly experience: consciousness. At the book's heart is integrated-information theory, the idea that the essence of consciousness is the ability to exert causal power over itself, to be an agent of change. Koch investigates the physical origins of consciousness in the brain and how this knowledge can be used to measure consciousness in natural and artificial systems.

Takumi and Leo are just starting to get used to life in their new world, when Claire’s father, Duke Eckenhart, pays a surprise visit to the Libert family’s country estate. “Allow me to teach you the way of the sword!” In a world rife with monsters, a little self-defense can go a long way. And so, Takumi takes up sword lessons—from the duke himself!

During a near-death experience, an end-stage terminal cancer patient had a profound, emotionally transformative experience in which she let go of all fear-she rallied and became cancer free in a few short weeks. A devout woman, body twisted, wasted, and brought to the brink of death by years of multiple sclerosis, heard a Voice, stood up, and walked-she was healed in minutes.

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras answers the question of why young people’s mental health is deteriorating as we become a more technologically advanced society. While enthralled with shiny devices and immersed in social media, our young people are struggling with record rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety, overdoses and suicide. Our immersion in toxic social media has created polarizing extremes of emotion and addictive dependency, while also acting as a toxic "digital social contagion”, spreading a variety of psychiatric disorders.

When a baby is discovered floating in a basket along the quiet canals of Venice, a guild of artisans takes him in and raises him as a son, skilled in each of their trades. Although the boy, Sebastien Trovato, has wrestled with questions of his origins, it isn’t until a woman washes ashore on his lagoon island that answers begin to emerge. In hunting down his story, Sebastien must make a choice that could alter not just his own future, but also that of the beloved floating city.

Desperate to simply survive, Birdie Clarkson was driven to a life in a house of ill repute. Now she longs only for escape. So when Reverend Isaiah Overly and his son, Ephraim, appear and offer a better life, she jumps at the chance. Ignoring the furious raging of the madam, Birdie climbs into the back of the preacher’s wagon. The men take her to Hope Hill, the haven the reverend and his wife, Ophelia, founded so women like Birdie can be taught skills to help them rise above their pasts.

Your search for something new and different in sci fi and fantasy ends here. Presenting this year's collection of fresh voices, fabulous worlds, and fantastic new characters. Each year, the Writers and Illustrators of the Future contests' blue-ribbon judges search the world to discover and introduce to you the very best new talent in sci-fi and fantasy.

The rain hasn't stopped for a week, and the 12 guests of the Blue Vein Tavern are trapped by flooded roads and the rising Skidwrack River. Among them are a ship's captain, tattooed twins, a musician, and a young girl traveling on her own. To pass the time, they begin to tell stories - each a different type of folklore - that eventually reveal more about their own secrets than they intended. As the rain continues to pour down - an uncanny, unnatural amount of rain - the guests begin to realize that the entire city is in danger, and not just from the flood.

Together, Takumi and Leo were successful in warding off the Orc attack on the village of Lange. A fake merchant they find there finally tells them what they need to know—the Yugard store in Ractos is selling diluted medicine to people. Takumi and company are outraged at the dark truths that come to light.

In the late 1970s when the government mandated we get the fat out of our food, the food industry responded by pouring more sugar in. The result has been a perfect storm, disastrously altering our biochemistry and driving our eating habits out of our control. To help us lose weight and recover our health, Robert Lustig presents personal strategies to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger, reward, and stress; and societal strategies to improve the health of the next generation.

Lucy Wakefield is a seemingly ordinary woman who does something extraordinary in a desperate moment: She takes a baby girl from a shopping cart and raises her as her own. It's a secret she manages to keep for over two decades - from her daughter, the babysitter who helped raise her, family, coworkers, and friends. When Lucy's now-grown daughter, Mia, discovers the devastating truth of her origins, she is overwhelmed by confusion and anger and determines not to speak again to the mother who raised her.

Creativity defines the human experience. It sparks achievement and innovation in art, science, technology, business, sports, and virtually every activity. It has fueled human progress on a global level, but it equally is the source of profound personal satisfaction for individual creators. And yet the origins of creative inspiration and the methods by which great creators tap into it have long been a source of mystery, spoken of in esoteric terms, our rational understanding shrouded in complex jargon. Until now.

Sleep. Memory. Pleasure. Fear. Language. We experience these things every day, but how do our brains create them? Your Brain, Explained is a personal tour around your gray matter. Neuroscientist Marc Dingman gives you a crash course in how your brain works and explains the latest research on the brain functions that affect you on a daily basis. You'll also discover what happens when the brain doesn't work the way it should, causing problems such as insomnia, ADHD, depression, or addiction.

From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. Whenever people gain more power to share information, the assumption goes, society prospers. Superbloom tells a startlingly different story. As communication becomes more mechanized and efficient, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony. Media technologies all too often bring out the worst in us.

One in ten American adults tried intermittent fasting last year, and they may be on to something. The latest research shows that fasting repairs cellular damage, improves the outcomes for chemotherapy patients, and helps with keeping a healthy weight, leading to a resurgence in recent years. Journalist Steve Hendricks’s The Oldest Cure in the World tells the history of fasting—from the ancient world (Jesus treated an epileptic with fasting) to its rediscovery centuries later.

Multiple times a day, in cities across the US and beyond, a simple yet powerful message is repeated by the well-meaning, the ignorant, and the bigoted: “don’t go”—avoid at all costs those Black and Brown disinvested neighborhoods that have become bywords for social disorder and urban decay. This book is a collection of intimate stories that uncover the hidden influence of both subtle and overt “don’t go” messages and the segregation they perpetuate in Chicago.

Not far from Seattle skyscrapers live 150-year-old clams, more than 250 species of fish, and underwater kelp forests as complex as any terrestrial ecosystem. For millennia, vibrant Coast Salish communities have lived beside these waters dense with nutrient-rich foods, with cultures intertwined through exchanges across the waterways. Transformed by settlement and resource extraction, Puget Sound and its future health now depend on a better understanding of the region's ecological complexities.