Showing results by author "A. Rivers" in All Categories

Barry Murray's life is simple: run his bar, keep his employees happy, and remain alone. For most of his life, it's been easy, but he allows himself one exception: his favorite pop star, Lila Wilde. For years, he's listened to her albums when going through the toughest parts of his life. So when he finds her panicking in the alley behind his bar, all of his walls come tumbling down and he opens up to her in a way he's never done with anyone else. Fate keeps making their paths cross, and he's falling for her, hard. But when he offers to give her everything, she says no.

It is almost impossible to imagine today, but in the late 19th and early 20th century there were places where land was cheaper than food and more plentiful than water. During the homesteading period of the 1860s-1880s, the government typically offered land grants of 160 acres to any farmer who could get it cultivated within a certain amount of time. With that much land to make productive, and a limited number of years to get it cleared and planted, men would do whatever it took to get their crops in.

Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm II, who occupied the throne of the German Empire for more than 30 years from June 1888 to November 1918, remains as much an enigma in death as he was in life. Over 70 years after his death in 1941, the mention of his name still sparks unsettled debates among historians. Was he the duty-bound, hands-on leader and passionate pro-British reformer who ruled in challenging times, seemingly mild in comparison to Hitler?

Shirley Temple remains the most famous child star of all time, but even this designation fails to reflect the magnitude of her popularity during the era in which she worked. While it is true that she was not the first child actor to reach Hollywood fame, she was the first - and to this day, perhaps the only - star who rose to the very pinnacle of the Hollywood elite before she even turned 10 years of age. For this reason, it is no exaggeration to view Shirley as the progenitor for all of the child actors that succeeded her.

Emerging from the desert flats of southern Iraq can be seen the remains of a large mound, approximately 1750 feet x 1750 feet in size, surrounded by several smaller mounds. Known today as Tell Abu Shahrain, or in the ancient world as Eridu, this site contains some of best examples of the Ubaid culture, and it was one of the first urban centers of civilization in southern Mesopotamia, if not the first itself.

Don't tell a soul, but I walked away from my NHL career for one reason: Josie Richards. Fifteen years younger, yet she owns me in ways no one could understand. She's my enemy on ice—a figure skating ice queen with a rebellious streak that makes more than my palm twitch. But after her ice skating accident, she's broken. Fear controls her now, and I'm done watching her drawn in it. I'm her new coach—on and off the ice—and I'll drag her back to the top if it's the last thing I do. What didn't I expect? Knocking her up. I thought raising my niece prepared me for fatherhood.

Parenting - 14 Gospel Principles is a bible study based on the book by Paul David Tripp. It uses the topics in the book as a guideline, but spends most of the time in the scriptures.Bible Study Lead by Tony Craver

Mysterious Polynesia: The Myths, Legends, and Mysteries of the Polynesians chronicles some of these remarkable stories, as well as lingering mysteries across the region. You will learn about Polynesia like never before.

Of the many campaigns during the Middle Ages, few are as remarkable or seemingly impossible to win at the start as the First Crusade (1095-99), and the true crowning achievement of that crusade, which resulted in two centuries of Western European Christian states in the Middle East and the permanent firing of the European imagination, was the conquest of Jerusalem on July 15, 1099 after three weeks of siege.

The United Nations is one of the most famous bodies in the world, and its predecessor, the League of Nations, might be equally notorious. In fact, President Woodrow Wilson's pet project was controversial from nearly the minute it was conceived. At the end of World War I, Wilson's pleas at the Paris Peace Conference relied on his 14 Points, which included the establishment of a League of Nations.

Though scarcely mentioned in the world of early 21st century politics, Manchuria represented a key region of Asia during the first half of the 20th century. Once the heartland of the fierce Manchu empire, this northeastern Chinese region's rich natural resources made it a prize for nations in the process of entering the modern age, and three ambitious nations in the midst of such a transformation lay close enough to Manchuria to attempt to claim it: Japan, Russia, and China.

Riley and Oliver are finally together. Things should be perfect, but Riley struggles with the ghosts of her past while Oliver finds himself trapped in a workplace legal battle, which puts him face-to-face with someone he'd rather forget. While Riley wonders if she is good enough, Oliver knows she's the one for him, but they have a lot of work to do if they want to figure out how to merge their very different lives into one. Does love persevere under any conditions? Or will it crumble under the weight of someone's past?

Darcy Fletcher has been struggling to find her purpose in life. She’s run out of general classes and still doesn’t know what her major should be. Perhaps taking a job as a nanny this fall will be a better use of her time than college. At least she’ll be making money instead of wasting it. The new high school coach, Evan Porter, has decided that small-town Sugar Creek is where he wants to raise his five-year-old daughter. Unfortunately, he needs extra help during the football season. One of the Sugar Mamas sets him up with a nanny.

After going through three elderly leaders in three years, Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen as the new General Secretary of the Soviet Union at the relatively youg age of 54 in March 1985. Gorbachev hoped to build the Soviet economy to relieve the persistent shortages of consumer goods it faced, which were caused by enormous military spending of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev tried to introduce some economic reforms, but they were blocked by communist hardliners. Gorbachev then came to the belief that the Soviet economy could not improved without political reform as well.

One of his biographers called him "a complex man: a born leader, a brilliant soldier, a devoted husband, a proud father; intelligent, instinctive, brave, compassionate, vain, egotistical, and arrogant." As that description suggests, every account of Erwin Rommel's life must address what appears to be its inherent contradictions.

It's a sure sign of fame when a man is known simply by his first name, and Mao Zedong, often referred to simply as Mao or Chairman Mao, was one of the most influential men of the 20th century. He was also arguably the most controversial; as the founder of the People's Republic of China, Mao rose from being a communist revolutionary to successfully overthrowing a regime and transforming China into a communist powerhouse in Asia.

Nikola Tesla was one of history’s greatest scientists, and though he is best known for his pioneering work with electricity, the fact that he is mostly remembered solely for that actually does a disservice to his legacy.

As the oft-repeated and invariably accurate pearl of wisdom goes, a dog truly is man's best friend. For a long time, people have almost universally loved dogs, and it seems to have been that way for at least tens of thousands of years. When affection is abundantly and consistently expressed, this pure, unspoken, wholesome love is one that is very much requited, and then some. This bond can be demonstrated by the mere existence of pet keepers who unironically refer to themselves as “dog parents,” not merely “dog owners”.

Three years ago, I divorced him. Took my broken heart and left. Now I'm back, asking for something so crazy he's almost guaranteed to say no. I met the love of my life when I was twenty. A simple collision of gazes and I fell hard. He caught me. Kept me. Protected me. Until a devastating loss tore us apart. Now, I need him again. Seth Isles may be built like a tank, with a track record that has made him one of the country's most sought-after MMA coaches, but to me he signifies security.

It's all fun and games to them - especially when someone gets hurt. One god of mischief and mayhem. One god of fur and fang. And the god of death himself. They've all been out to get me since the school year began, but this semester, the Rabbit's got some tricks up her sleeve. It's time to take these three vicious gods down a peg, or 10, and there's no better route to revenge than directly through the heart.