Showing results by narrator "LJ Ganser" in All Categories

It's the fall season and time for Ossie to make his annual southern migration from Portland, Maine to his winter nest down in Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Ossie meets up with a variety of whimsical and zany friends, but needs to navigate around obstacles, foes, severe weather, poacher,s and pollution if he is to reach his southern home. At an air show, Ossie meets a female osprey named Onida....

After two decades of research on founders, a best-selling book on the subject, and experience teaching and mentoring thousands of students in this field, Noam Wasserman is a prominent authority on startups. Hearing from countless readers and students that his insights helped them with important life decisions, beyond the incubator and boardroom, Wasserman brings us a new book that applies to everyday life his research on the methods of successful startup founders.

Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. Some historians have charged that slaveholders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation's founding. The acclaimed political historian Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers' work. Far from covering up a crime against humanity, the Constitution restricted slavery's legitimacy under the new national government.

Since the first humans looked up and saw the sun swallowed by darkness, our species has been captivated by solar eclipses. Astronomer and anthropologist Anthony Aveni explains the history and culture surrounding solar eclipses, from prehistoric Stonehenge to Babylonian creation myths, to a confirmation of Einstein's theory of general relativity, to a spectacle that left New Yorkers in the moon's shadow, to future eclipses that will capture human imaginations.

Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat, is having a record-breaking season in his first year as a New York Yankee. Larger than life on the field and off, Ruth is about to discover what the Chicago White Sox players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series are learning - baseball heroes are not invulnerable to scandal. With suspicion in the air, Ruth's 1918 World Series win for the Boston Red Sox is now being questioned. Under scrutiny by the new baseball commissioner and enmeshed with gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein, Ruth turns for help to Speed Cook, now a promoter of Negro baseball.

Historians tell the stories of tragic and untimely presidential deaths, but often forgotten are the near misses. JFK and his fellow servicemen spent six days on a desert island with only coconuts to eat after a deadly attack during WWII. Abe Lincoln was forced to take a train trip in disguise while America's first female detective worked to foil an early assassination attempt. And when Andrew Jackson was attacked by an upset citizen who had been stalking him for months, frontiersman Davey Crockett was the one to save him.  

Shale gas extraction - commonly known as fracking - is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is personal. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet - whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the land beneath our feet - is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent.

Following Ratf--ked, his “extraordinary timely and undeniably important” (New York Times Book Review) expose of how a small cadre of Republican operatives rigged American elections, David Daley emerged as one of the nation's leading authorities on gerrymandering. In Unrigged, he charts a vibrant political movement that is rising in the wake of his and other reporters' revelations.  

There is an underground telephone network in this country. Al Gilbertson, creator of the "blue box", discovered it the very day news of his own arrest hit the papers. That evening his phone began ringing. Phone phreaks from Seattle, from Florida, from New York, from San Jose, and from Los Angeles began calling him and telling him about the phone-phreak network. He'd get a call from a phone phreak who'd say nothing but, "Hang up and call this number".

Hurricane Sandy ravages the Jersey Shore while simultaneously providing the backdrop for a horrible crime. A serial killer takes advantage of the night's ferocity and inflicts his own damage. The madman then disappears, leaving a famed FBI agent broken in the process. Frank Sorello retires from the Bureau only to be drawn back into the game after a best-selling novel by a new author raises suspicions about details inside the book. Is the homicidal maniac announcing his return or is it purely a coincidence?

In Sidewalking, David L. Ulin offers a compelling inquiry into the evolving landscape of Los Angeles. Part personal narrative, part investigation of the city as both idea and environment, Sidewalking is many things: a discussion of Los Angeles as urban space, a history of the city's built environment, a meditation on the author's relationship to the city, and a rumination on the art of urban walking.

When a down-on-his-luck educational administrator arrives at the makeshift bus shelter of Cow Eye Junction, he finds a drought-stricken town and its community college on the precipice of institutional ruin. Struggling to navigate this strange world of bloated calf scrota, orgiastic math instruction, and onrushing regional accreditors, Charlie must devise a plan to lead Cow Eye Community College through the perils of continuous improvement to the triumphant culmination of world history.

"There are some people that walk around on two feet and others like me that run on all four." Newbie Johnson tries to understand the meaning of this statement while learning about friendship, loss, and love as a small town teenager. The Art Of Raising Hell is a coming of age story set in the 1970s that centers around four teenagers and their involvement with a larger-than-life character named Lonny Nack.

It was the U.K.'s worst rail disaster in years. On the morning of October 5, 1999, two rush-hour commuter trains collided just outside London. Hundreds were feared dead. Though he was traveling in the front-most carriage, the novelist Andrew Rosenheim survived the crash. In The Secrets of Carriage H, Rosenheim recalls in heart-pounding detail the events of that day and opens up about the emotional rollercoaster that consumed him for months thereafter.

It begins as a statistical oddity: a spike in children born with acute speech delays. Physically normal in every way, these children never speak and do not respond to speech; they don't learn to read, don't learn to write. As the number of cases grows to an epidemic level, theories spread. Maybe it's related to a popular antidepressant; maybe it's environmental. Or maybe these children have special skills all their own.

In The Tenants (1971), Bernard Malamud brought his unerring sense of modern urban life to bear on the conflict between blacks and Jews then inflaming his native Brooklyn. The sole tenant in a rundown tenement, Henry Lesser is struggling to finish a novel, but his solitary pursuit of the sublime grows complicated when Willie Spearmint, a black writer ambivalent toward Jews, moves into the building.

Granted unprecedented access to the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, including the judges, the probation officers, and the children themselves, Edward Humes creates an unforgettable portrait of a chaotic system that is neither saving our children in danger nor protecting us from adolescent violence. Yet he shows us there is also hope in the handful of courageous individuals working tirelessly to triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds.

Dylan Barstow has finally crossed the line. After getting caught on a late-night joyride in a stolen car, Dylan is shipped off to live with his ex-Marine uncle for the summer. But Uncle Todd has bigger plans for Dylan than push-ups and early-morning jogs. Deep in the steamy jungles of Papua New Guinea, there's a WWII fighter plane named SECOND ACE that's been lost for years, a plane that Dylan's own grandfather barely escaped from with his life. In all this time, no one has ever been able to track down SECOND ACE - but now Dylan and his uncle are going to try.

Author J. T. Petty has won critical praise for his witty series featuring the exciting escapades of Clemency Pogue: accidental fairy killer, friend to a hobgoblin, and occasional savior of the land of Make-Believe. In this fun adventure, Clemency gets caught up with some of Make-Believe's most interesting denizens, the Scrivener Bees.

The 19th addition of this annual anthology exhibits a collection of short fiction from award-winning Southern authors and rising stars including Edward P. Jones and Silas House. Each story’s derivation is explained in an illuminating note from the author following the rich and entertaining tales.