Showing results by narrator "David Stifel" in All Categories

When Knights attack the town of Skystead, seventeen-year-old Pela is the only one to escape. Her mother and the other villagers are taken, accused of worshiping the False Gods. They will pay the ultimate price – unless Pela can rescue them. Pela has never left the safety of her town, let alone touched a sword. What chance does she have against the ruthless Knights of Alana? She’s not a hero. But she knows one. Her uncle Devon was a mighty warrior once, in times when magic filled the world. Age has withered his strength and he retired long ago, but maybe he will answer the call of family.

From the legendary antagonism between Athens and Sparta during the Peloponnesian War to the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars of the twentieth century, the past is littered with long-term strategic rivalries. History tells us that such enduring rivalries can end in one of three ways: a series of exhausting conflicts in which one side eventually prevails, a peaceful and hopefully orderly transition, or a one-sided collapse. However, in spite of a wealth of historical examples, the future of state rivalries remains a matter of conjecture.

The northwestern third of the Commonwealth of Virginia finally broke away in 1863 to form the Union's 35th state. In Seceding from Secession: The Civil War, Politics, and the Creation of West Virginia, authors Eric J. Wittenberg, Edmund A. Sargus, and Penny L. Barrick chronicle those events in an unprecedented study of the social, legal, military, and political factors that converged to bring about the birth of the West Virginia.

A century since the departure of the Gods, the Three Nations are now united beneath the Tsar. Magic has been outlawed, its power too dangerous to remain unchecked. All Magickers must surrender themselves to the crown, or face imprisonment and death. Alana's mundane life has just been torn apart by the emergence of her brother's magic. Now they must leave behind everything they’ve ever known and flee – before the Tsar’s Stalkers pick up their trail. Tasked with hunting down renegade Magickers, the merciless hunters will stop at nothing to bring them before the Tsar’s judgement.

Alan, Tommy, Rick, Donald and Bernard were inseparable best friends living in the small, coastal Massachusetts town of Potter's Cove. A circle of five, their world was simple and happy until the day Tommy was struck by a car and killed. Nothing was ever the same. They were never the same. Years later, as the four survivors - all unhappy, unsuccessful and marking time - approach their 40th birthdays, Bernard suddenly commits suicide....

Blessed - or perhaps cursed - with a fiery temper, a strong will, and a blatant disregard for his brother's wishes, Lord Andrew de Montforte's only desire is to be left alone. But after being caught in a compromising position with tempting Lady Celsiana Blake, the brilliant and brooding scientist/inventor is forced into marriage in this fast-paced, jocular tale in which a supporting cast of beloved pets, the warm and eccentric de Montforte brothers, and the Machiavellian influence of the mighty duke of Blackheath once again play a role...

The question of how falling cats land on their feet has intrigued humans since at least the middle of the 19th century. In this playful and eye-opening history, physicist, and cat parent Gregory Gbur explores how attempts to understand the cat-righting reflex have provided crucial insights into puzzles in mathematics, geophysics, neuroscience, and human space exploration....

Jan Gross' hugely controversial Neighbors was a historian's disclosure of the events in the small Polish town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, when the citizens rounded up the Jewish population and burned them alive in a barn. The massacre was a shocking secret that had been suppressed for more than 60 years, and it provoked the most important public debate in Poland since 1989. Part history, part memoir, The Crime and the Silence is the journalist's account of these events.

"These are the times that try men's souls." With these words, Thomas Paine began a series of 13 extraordinary pamphlets reporting on the American Revolution. Part newsfeed, part op-ed, these pieces were widely circulated in the States and in Britain during the war. They reported on the progress of the war, argued for the reasons for the war, made recommendations on the conduct of the war, and taught citizens of a new country just what their obligations and duties were in support of their new country. A sobering series of lessons on beginning American civics 101.

Best-selling author Norman Cantor delivers this compact but magisterial survey of the ancient world - from the birth of Sumerian civilization around 3500 BC in the Tigris-Euphrates valley (present-day Iraq) to the fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476. In Antiquity, Cantor covers such subjects as Classical Greece, Judaism, the founding of Christianity, and the triumph and decline of Rome.

When the father he never knew shows up at his house in the middle of the night, beaten and his body mutilated, with only a vague explanation of what happened to him, Somerton County Deputy John Lee Quarrels suspects there's more to the story than he is being told. And when his father just as mysteriously disappears two days later, John Lee knows there is trouble in store for him.

For years, the Jackson family has vacationed at Rowena Wandigaux Lee's old Victorian house on Gull Island, a place of superstition and legend off the southern coast of the U.S. One particular summer, young Beau follows his cousin Sumter into a hidden shack in the woods - and christens this new clubhouse "Neverland." The rundown shack in the woods is the key to an age-old mystery, a place forbidden to all. But Neverland becomes the place where children begin to worship a creature of shadows, which Sumter calls "Lucy."

A century since the departure of the Gods, the Three Nations are now united beneath the Tsar. Magic has been outlawed, its power too dangerous to remain unchecked. All Magickers must surrender themselves to the crown, or face imprisonment and death. Alana's mundane life has just been torn apart by the emergence of her brother's magic. Now they must leave behind everything they’ve ever known and flee – before the Tsar’s Stalkers pick up their trail. Tasked with hunting down renegade Magickers, the merciless hunters will stop at nothing to bring them before the Tsar’s judgement.

A classic tale of doomed romance, Longfellow's classic epic poem reminds us that man's inhumanity to man and refugees have been with us many centuries. The story of how the Cajuns came to Louisiana is only a part of this moving, evocative poem. Two lovers separated by a cruel fate stand against a canvas of America in the making.

From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean.

Alana has been captured. She expected an agonizing death to follow, but instead, she now finds herself a guest of the Tsar. Locked away amidst untold wealth and luxury, it isn’t long before she learns the reason she was spared – her entire life has been a lie. Her true identity lurks within, chained by magic, but with promises of untold power. It terrifies her, and yet…she must know the truth.

Life has been difficult lately for Somerton County Deputy Sheriff John Lee Quarrels. He's on the trail of a sexual predator, his love life is in turmoil, his soon-to-be ex-wife just served him with divorce papers, someone has stolen his police car and is using its radio to broadcast offensive jokes, a 350-pound redneck named Baby Bubba just tried to brain him with a shovel, and all of that happened before John Lee shot the dead guy.

The First Battle of the Marne produced the so-called Miracle of the Marne, when French and British forces stopped the initial German drive on Paris in 1914. Hundreds of thousands of casualties later, with opposing forces still dug into trench lines, the Germans tried again to push their way to Paris and to victory. The Second Battle of the Marne (July 15 to August 9, 1918) marks the point at which the Allied armies stopped the massive German Ludendorff Offensives.

When the powerful Lucien de Montforte, the Duke of Blackheath, arrives home to find a dangerous and vengeful woman waiting for him in his bed with pistol in hand, the master manipulator never dreams that he has finally met his match. But thanks to his scheming family's successful attempts to force a wedding, the wicked and wily duke finds himself entangled in a web of his own making in this spectacular conclusion to Danelle Harmon's critically acclaimed de Montforte Brothers series!

Taking his lead from his subject, Gershom Scholem - the 20th-century thinker who cracked open Jewish theology and history with a radical reading of Kabbalah - Prochnik combines biography and memoir to counter our contemporary political crisis with an original and urgent reimagining of the future of Israel.