Showing results by narrator "robert fass" in All Categories

In 490 BCE Pheidippides ran for 36 hours straight from Athens to Sparta to seek help in defending Athens from a Persian invasion in the Battle of Marathon. In doing so he saved the development of Western civilization and inspired the birth of the marathon as we know it. Even now, some 2,500 years later, that run stands enduringly as one of greatest physical accomplishments in the history of mankind.

Selected testimonies to living history-speeches, letters, poems, songs-offered by the people who make history happen, but are often left out of history books: women, workers, nonwhites. Featuring introductions to the original texts by Howard Zinn. New voices featured in this 10th Anniversary Edition include Chelsea Manning, speaking after her 35-year prison sentence; Naomi Klein, speaking from the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Liberty Square; a member of Dream Defenders, a youth organization that confronts systemic racial inequality; and more.

A mouthwatering testament to the healing power of food, My Place at the Table is a moving coming-of-age story of how a gay man emerges from a wounding childhood, discovers himself, and finds love. Published here for the first time is Lobrano’s “little black book,” an insider’s guide to his thirty all-time-favorite Paris restaurants.

Our narrator, Francisco Goldberg, has been living and working in Mexico City as a journalist for over a decade, but has recently returned to New York City in hopes of "going home again". It's been five years since the end of his last relationship and he is falling in love again. Soon he is beckoned back to Boston by the high school girlfriend who was witness to his greatest youthful humiliations, and his mother, Yolanda, around whom his story orbits like a dark star.

Every town has at least one beloved if misunderstood eccentric, and Beanie Bradsher belongs to Mayhew Junction. Some - LouWanda Crump, for example - would call Beanie a spectacle, but Beanie just marches - and dresses - to the beat of a different drum.

Wealth? Fitness? Career success? How can we possibly place these above true and lasting well-being? Drawing from works of fiction and poetry, Western philosophy, Buddhist beliefs, scientific research, and personal experience, Ricard weaves an inspirational and forward-looking account of how we can begin to rethink our realities in a fast-moving modern world. With its revelatory lessons and exercises, Happiness is an eloquent and stimulating guide to a happier life.

Before Adam Walsh there were no faces on milk cartons, no Amber Alerts, no National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, no federal databases of crimes against children, no pedophile registry. His 1981 abduction and murder, unsolved for over a quarter of a century, forever changed America.

First published in 1967, Stop-Time was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern American autobiography, a brilliant portrayal of one boy’s passage from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Here is Frank Conroy’s wry, sad, beautiful tale of life on the road; of odd jobs and lost friendships, brutal schools and first loves; of a father’s early death and a son’s exhilarating escape into manhood.

For all its good intentions, Who Moved My Cheese? basically reduces us to mice in a maze sniffing after cheese. Harvard Business School professor Deepak Malhorta uses a fable involving a different set of mice in a maze—mice who question everything—to help readers see how they underestimate their ability change the rules, overcome the constraints they face, and control their own destiny.

When Victor Villaseñor stood at the podium and looked at the group of teachers amassed before him, he became enraged. He had never spoken in public before. His mind was flooded with childhood memories filled with humiliation, misunderstanding, and abuse at the hands of his teachers. With his heart pounding, he began to speak of these incidents. To his disbelief, the teachers before him responded to his embittered recollection with a standing ovation. Many could not contain their own tears.

In 1908, Hazel Drew was found floating in a pond in Sand Lake, New York, beaten to death. The unsolved murder inspired rumors, speculation, ghost stories, and, almost a century later, the phenomenon of Twin Peaks. Who killed Hazel Drew? Like Laura Palmer, she was a paradox of personalities - a young, beautiful puzzle with secrets. Perhaps the even trickier question is, Who was Hazel Drew? The investigation that followed her brutal murder was fraught with red herrings, wild-goose chases, and unreliable witnesses.

From Cixin Liu, the New York Times best-selling author of The Three-Body Problem, To Hold Up the Sky is a breathtaking collection of imaginative science fiction.

Eugene “Geno” Miles is living out his final days in a nursing home, bored, curmudgeonly, and struggling to connect with his new nursing assistant, Angel, who is understandably skeptical of Geno’s insistence on having lived not just one life but many—all the way back to medieval Spain, where, as a petty thief, he first lucked upon true love only to lose it, and spend the next thousand years trying to recapture it.

Sudden Death begins with a brutal tennis match that could decide the fate of the world. The bawdy Italian painter Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Quevedo battle it out before a crowd that includes Galileo, Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw Europe into the flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII behead Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into the most sought-after tennis balls of the time.

Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion - effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else's beating inside your chest?

Madrid, 1980. Juan de Vere, nearly finished with his university degree, takes a job as personal assistant to Eduardo Muriel, an eccentric, once-successful film director. Urbane, discreet, irreproachable, Muriel is an irresistible idol to the young man. But Muriel's voluptuous wife, Beatriz, inhabits their home like an unwanted ghost, and on the periphery of their lives is Dr. Jorge Van Vechten, a family friend implicated in unsavory rumors that Muriel now asks Juan to investigate.

In 1945, with their thousand-year empire falling around them and the Allies on their heels, the Nazis hide a sealed chest in the dark, forbidding waters of the Finstersee—a lake surrounded by the brooding peaks of the Austrian Alps. There it lies for 21 years, almost forgotten, until a British agent decides to raise it from the depths. The secrets he uncovers are far-reaching and lethal, and in Salzburg, Bill Mathison, a New York attorney on the trail of a missing colleague, finds himself drawn into the shadowy underworld of international espionage.

C. J. Box, #1 New York Times best-selling author of the hugely popular Joe Pickett series, selects the best short mystery and crime fiction of the year in this annual “treat for crime-fiction fans” (Library Journal).

Living Wicca takes a philosophical look at the questions, practices, and differences within Witchcraft. Learn the meanings of over 120 Wiccan symbols and how you can magically use them. Discover the power of Wiccan prayers throughout the day and how you can use them to make yourself aware that the Gods and Goddess are everywhere. Learn how to create your own rituals and symbols, develop a book of shadows, and even become a high priest or priestess.

Conflict is both a sweeping history of the evolution of warfare up to Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, and a penetrating analysis of what we must learn from the past—and anticipate in the future—in order to navigate an increasingly perilous world. In this deep and incisive study, General David Petraeus, who commanded the US-led coalitions in both Iraq and Afghanistan and former CIA director, and the prize-winning historian Andrew Roberts, explore over 70 years of conflict, drawing significant lessons and insights from their fresh analysis of the past.