Showing results by narrator "Alex Boyles" in All Categories

When his father takes a new job in Massachusetts, Ben Moroney must leave behind his best friend Tony, a western banded gecko named Lenny, and worst of all, the Arizona desert home he has loved and explored. Ben’s adjustment to his new environment is not going well until he unexpectedly finds a kindred spirit in his eccentric fifth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Tibbets. She introduces him to the rare and elusive Eastern spadefoot toads that make their home on her rural property. When Ben discovers that Mrs. Tibbets’s land may be sold to developers, he knows he has to do something.

Russ Griffin has always wanted to be a fantastic medium. Growing up in the town of St. Hilaire, where most residents make their living by speaking to the dead, means there’s a lot of competition, and he’s always held his own. But Russ knows the town he loves is corrupt, and he’s determined to save it before the sinister ruling body, The Guild, ruins all he’s ever wanted.

Shortly after her brother, Stormy, is convicted of the brutal murder of a classmate, seventeen-year-old Lizzy Greiner is found dead in an abandoned mountain shack, the result of an apparent suicide by fire. Next to Lizzy’s charred body, investigators find several of her journals, safely stored inside a fireproof box. It soon becomes evident that these journals contain a narrative that Lizzy wanted the police to read, the truth that she wanted them to know.

Valora Rigmore understands pressure. As the Chosen One (resident telekinetic, superstar, and model girlfriend), her life revolves around it. According to an ancient prophesy, Valora is destined to fight Erys, a terrifying individual with the power to control monsters. Valora is worshipped at school, in the press, and by her parents, but as the battle with Erys looms near, the cracks in her perfect façade are beginning to show.

Starting off at the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida and exploring the feuding subcultures around the cryonics industry, Peter Ward immerses himself into an eccentric world of startups, scam artists, scientific institutions, and tech billionaires to deliver this deeply reported, nuanced, and sometimes very funny exploration of the race for immortality—and the potentially devastating consequences should humanity realize its ultimate dream.

First a Canadian Rockies avalanche kills their parents. Then Children’s Services threatens to separate them. That’s when the three Gunnarsson kids decide to run away into the mountains and fend for themselves until the oldest turns 18 and becomes their legal guardian. Not many would dare. But Jon, Korka, and Aron’s parents ran a survival school. Turns out their plan is full of holes.

This is a collection of twenty-three original interviews with stars of the silent screen, with biographical information and a filmography included for each. Interviewed are Lew Ayres, William Bakewell, Lina Basquette, Madge Bellamy, Eleanor Boardman, Ethlyne Clair, Junior Coghlan, Joyce Compton, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Dorothy Gulliver, Maxine Elliott Hicks, Dorothy Janis, George Lewis, Marion Mack, Patsy Ruth Miller, Lois Moran, Baby Marie Osborne, Muriel Ostriche, Eddie Quillan, Esther Ralston, Dorothy Revier, David Rollins, and Gladys Walton.

Sam is a charismatic actress with big plans for her future. Rosalyn Shew is the smartest girl in school - but she’s a loner and likes it that way. Then there's Christian Powell, the darling of the soccer team. He’s not the best at communication, which is why he and Sam broke up after dating for six months, but he makes up for it by being genuine and kind, which is why they're still best friends. When Christian falls for Ros on sight, their first interaction is a disaster, so he enlists Sam's help to get through to her.

In the 25th century, the effects of overpopulation and global warming on Earth have led to the formation of human colonies on the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere in the solar system, yet the limited number of viable places forces humanity to look to the stars. A crash program has been developed to send Protos 1, a giant multigenerational starship, to a newly discovered Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star.

A few hundred years into the future, a wave of space colonization follows a disastrous earlier attempt to inhabit nearby extrasolar planets. It is guided by a new computational method based on massive data-driven sociocultural and socio-epidemiological modeling and using novel biological computers, fed with data on Earth’s history of successes and failures.

Paul Adams is the shortest kid at his high school, and the school bullies relentlessly pick on him. He spends the entire day wishing school would end so he can escape to his favorite sport of rock climbing. Lily Small is athletic, attractive, and, despite her last name, is actually very tall. Another kid, who looks almost like a grown man, introduces himself with a long Polynesian name, but says everyone calls him "Big," and he seems to like the nickname! As they get to know each other, Paul, Big, and Small discover they have a lot in common as outsiders in their high school.

In 2015, Joel and Rebekah were married. Seven months later, Joel's dad was diagnosed with stage-four stomach cancer. A month after that, at the age of 26, Rebekah was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. What do you say? What do you do? These questions and many others are answered in this book. The answers come from real life, learned in the trenches and valleys of fighting cancer and learning to love through it. You will discover how a tragedy can turn into a triumph.

What’s a 16-year-old boy to do when he learns that his stepmother and a local judge have murdered his father and now plan to kill him, too? Well, when it’s 1906, and you can play pretty good second base, you join a barn-storming baseball team making its way across Kansas. It also helps that the team is the Kansas City National Bloomer Girls. After all, who’d look for a runaway boy disguised as a girl on a women’s team that competes against town-ball teams of male players? Of course, it’ll take more than long hair, a Spalding glove, and a quick bat to stay alive.

They had settled a bloody score and put the turncoat McAfferty to rest in the snowbound Rockies. Slowly, painfully, the wounded Paddock and Scratch found their way back to the Crow village, where they were welcomed as brother and son. The people of Chief Arapooesh offered rest, healing, and home to the mountain men. Then a misunderstanding over a beautiful Crow woman drove the friends apart, propelling Scratch into the unforgiving wilderness on a lonely, dangerous quest. Paddock, too ill to travel, was at first unable to follow, unable to explain.

He came off the frontier: a buffalo hunter, a gambler, a loner. In Abilene, he won a saloon at cards and earned the fear of a lawless town. From then on, Jake Kincaid would not be stopped. He began a rampage of ambition and deal-making that forever changed a land called Kansas and the Indian Territories. But along the way, the deeds and misdeeds of Jake Kincaid affected more than the frontier - they shaped the lives of his two sons. One who became a lawman. One who became an outlaw. Both destined to come face-to-face behind blazing guns....

Born a slave, Jim Beckwith forged his own path to freedom as a mountain man. But when a wealthy trading company owner offered to pay him to live among the Crow Indians, Beckwith accepted the deal - and discovered another way of life that changed him forever. Here in the Wind River Mountains, amidst blood feuds and blood brothers, he became Bloody Hand, a man sworn to take a hundred scalps - and destined to become the People’s greatest warrior - in a life-or-death struggle that shaped the fate of a nation.

The Osage Indians lost their ancestral freedom on a windswept reservation in Oklahoma. Now, in the Roaring Twenties, the land is spewing black gold; oil has been found, and every Osage owns a share of the rights. Soon Osage tribal members are being killed for their oil royalties while a corrupt sheriff turns his back on the murders, Special Agent Frank Gordon organizes and undercover operation while working openly with frontier legend US marshal Will Proctor.

The story of George Washington’s first crisis of the fledgling republic: In the war’s waning days, the American Revolution neared collapse when Washington’s senior officers were rumored to be on the edge of mutiny. A Crisis of Peace provides a fresh look at the end of the American Revolution while speaking to issues that concern us still: the fragility of civil-military relations, how even victorious wars end ambiguously, and what veterans and civilians owe each other.

Deadwood, Dakota Territory, was filled with luckless miners, diggers, and more than its share of lawlessness, and more often than not, there was nothing Marshal Fred Nolan and his two deputy marshals, Wentworth and Grubb, could do. So when a teen hustler, known as "Gitalong" because of his crippled leg, was hoorawed by a trio of Texas drovers, the law wasn’t called in. Besides, two strangers had come to Gitalong’s aid, confronting the drovers and forcing them to give Gitalong three silver dollars. While it was the most money he'd ever had, he knew it would only bring him trouble.

The extreme drought in the US Southwest has brought the issues of water use and management to the forefront of media attention. Historically, arguments over water rights have plagued this area since the days of John Wesley Powell, and disputes mark the relations between states, city-dwellers, farmers, and environmentalists to this day. Add to that the challenges of climate change, which is altering rainfall patterns the world over, and the imperative to rethink water-management policies becomes acute.