Showing results by narrator "Gary Bennett" in All Categories

Hope is much more than wishful thinking. Science tells us that it is the most predictive indicator of well-being in a person's life. Hope is measurable. It is malleable. And it changes lives. In Hope Rising, Casey Gwinn and Chan Hellman reveal the latest science of hope using nearly 2,000 published studies, including their own research. Based on their findings, they make an impassioned call for hope to be the focus not only of our personal lives, but of public policy for education, business, social services, and every part of society.

In the bleak, not-too-distant future, most people who could fled to the virtual reality OVR World Online. Zachary "Zee" Jones will never be able to afford to become a player of the game. After committing a crime in order to save his mother's life, he was arrested and included in the Inmate Player Program. Even without perception filters to limit his pain, it was better than the alternative. He has the opportunity to earn more money in a five-year sentence then he could have in his entire life as a hospital janitor.

It was looking like Lady Luck had quite a grudge against him. In fact, at this point merely crashing the multi-billion-dollar ship he had helped design would have felt like winning the lottery compared to his current dilemma. If only he were so lucky. Things had started off all right - that is, until a freak wormhole unexpectedly swallowed his ship, leaving him stranded on an unknown planet far, far from home.

When Grazyna Zaluski's marriage takes an ugly turn, she finds herself isolated in a remote corner of Wyoming. Her husband's family controls almost everyone and everything in the county . . . including the courts. Is divorce an option for a young immigrant living in the United States on a visa? Will her husband simply sweep away the problem of Grazyna, or even—quite literally—bury it?

Gary Foster's The Shift is not about what to eat or not eat. It’s not about when to eat. It’s about building thinking habits, proven through science, that help you lose weight.

Sam Halloran is ambitious, a bit desperate, and running from an ugly past. He has a family to support, and everything hinges on his job as a newly minted auditor. But when he is assigned to his first public company audit, he discovers something no one else did. Fraud...massive fraud! That's when the walls start to close in. As Sam struggles with what to do and confronts the pain of his past, the company's smart, seductive accounting manager becomes both ally and temptation.

He had survived a spaceship crash, alien slave traders, space pirates, and fierce gladiatorial combat. Hell, he’d even faced an actual fire-breathing dragon and lived, but now, he was presented with an even greater challenge. Domestic living, captive on a strange world. Charlie almost had to laugh at his changing circumstances, having seen it all since a wormhole spat him out in a distant galaxy. He learned to fight, he learned to use magic, he even learned to kill - to survive at all costs.

Enjoying his childhood, he paid no attention to the world, its secrets, or to those around him. Little did he know that his ignorance would be his undoing. Now, as an outcast looked down upon everyone, he has to endure humiliation as he stares into the eyes of the one who took everything from him. Life had taught him that the strong wouldn't hesitate to stab the weak in the back. But what if he became one of the strong?

Charlie thought building a spaceship had been tough, so being king should be a piece of cake. Unfortunately, it was like a cake made of cement. Hard to swallow, and just might kill him. It was good being king, or so Charlie had believed. After an abrupt crash arrival, people had finally stopped trying to kill him - for the most part, anyway - and his new subjects respected him. Or feared him. It was sort of hard to tell, what, with the ginormous dragon who had eaten the previous king standing right behind him.

There is no shortage of spells out there. Some books highlight thousands of spells, but do any of them actually work? And how well do they work? I don't mean just getting a result - I mean getting a result that matters, a result that will impact your life or the lives of those you work for. The Elements of Spellcrafting provides the most effective and efficient ways to get things done with magic, identifying and explaining 21 keys to successful sorcery - a best practices of sorcery.

Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America and winner of countless awards—including the Hugo, Nebula, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker—Harlan Ellison proved once more that he was both unpredictable and irrepressible in this second collection of innovative science fiction. Again, Dangerous Visions—the middle installment in a planned three anthology series—includes award-winning stories from incomparable writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Piers Anthony, Dean Koontz, and James Tiptree, among many others.

Sports fandom isn’t what it used to be. Owners and executives increasingly count on the blind loyalty of their fans and too often act against the team’s best interest. Sports fans are left deliberating not only mismanagement but also political, health, and ethical issues. In Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports Industrial Complex at Its Own Game, sportswriter and lifelong sports fan Craig Calcaterra outlines endemic problems with what he calls the sports-industrial complex.

They came. They didn’t do much sight-seeing before they conquered and marked the human Omegas. They call themselves the Regha Horde. We call them the Hordesmen. And Hunger is my new boss.

Like poop on your shoe, bad luck had a knack for sticking Charlie wherever he went. And it sure did stink. Wormholes to a distant galaxy? Done it. Alien slavery? Yup. Forced gladiatorial combat? That too. Space pirate and eventual rebel leader? Check. Rising to the pinnacle of power as Dragon King? Uh-huh. Charlie, it seemed, had seen and survived it all, and at long last it looked like he’d finally earned himself a little peace and quiet. That is until a whole new threat reared its ugly head.

The suspect's family turns to Tony Valenti for help. The case is a bewildering maze, with multiple potential killers and a mountain of contradictory evidence that points both to and away from the ex. Is he innocent? Even Tony isn't sure. Tony is fully immersed in the battle to win the case when a lethal terror from his past surfaces and shakes his faith in himself. Now desperate to protect himself and his family as he fights to free his client, Tony fears that he is being pulled in too many directions to save anyone. He'll need every trick he knows to get everyone out alive.

Could a magic wielding astronaut fight off an alien invasion with just his vampire assassin and space dragon friends? Amazingly, Charlie thought they might actually pull it off... that is if Lady Luck decided to play nice for a change. Unfortunately, knowing his fortunes, the odds of that were slim to none. The aliens were coming, that much was certain. What they could do to stop them, however, remained up in the air. Having joined forces with the mighty AIs overseeing the planet and its defenses, at least their toys had been upgraded accordingly. 

Is a witch throwing curses your way? Something scary scratching at your window in the night? Then, I've got just the charm for you. Mostly, though, I find things. Lost treasures, missing loved ones...if you need something found, I'm your guy. So, when a grieving father hired me to track down a family heirloom stolen by a sticky-fingered hobgoblin, I was happy to help.

The Fever Hordesman sits outside my house, wailing punny lyrics while beating a rock rhythm on his armor, and I'm late for work. My omega heat’s coming on early, throwing a monkey wrench into my single-minded plan to ignore his single-minded quest to mate me. I have to admit - privately - his strong jaw, full mouth, and a scent that can send over a dozen omegas into heat, make my girly bits quiver. Just a little.

The Mexican civil war had been grinding on for so long that the United States resorted to using private contractors—mercenaries—to prop up the failing Mexican Army. One of the many things the Mexican Army failed to protect was Pangaea, the famed animal park in remote northeast Mexico, a symbol of rampant capitalism. All the creatures inside were killed at the time. At least, that's what was reported.

The Empire is dead! And Captain Josiah Bleys, smuggler and charmer though he may be, is likely to soon follow unless he is willing to at least pretend to be something he loathes: a hero. His "pal" Chief Ragnar Kane, one of the Emperor's finest warriors, likewise harbors no aspirations toward gallantry, just increasing his kill count. Fate, however, has other plans.