Showing results by narrator "Brian Troxell" in All Categories

The summer of 2012 has become the Summer of 43 - as in the summer of R. A. Dickey, the 37-year-old knuckleball pitcher who wears Number 43 on the mound for the New York Mets. As his knuckleballs flutter and drop through the strike zone, befuddling batters and producing a 12-1 record by the All Star break, Dickey has become one of the greatest feel-good stories of baseball history: the man who found redemption, after years of adversity, by mastering one of the strangest and most difficult pitches in the game.

A soulful journey, a brother's promise, safe water, self-reliance and dignity. This is the story of H2OpenDoors, a Rotary International project started by Jon Kaufman in 2012. Science, service, and adventure converge here, taking you to all parts of the globe on expeditions that inspire villages and schools to become self-sustaining within one year.

Kit McQueen nearly died in Spanish-held Florida, but with the help of a brash Irish adventurer he made his way north. Now he wants nothing more than to live in peace with his family. But the War of 1812 is raging all around him, and no McQueen can refuse his country's call. To help turn the tide of war, he accepts a mission: to capture or kill the adventurer-turned-traitor who saved his life. Tracking his quarry to the Alabama Territory, McQueen finds more than he bargained for....

There's nowhere to hide when everybody you know or meet is trying to kill you. Scotty Desmond's day begins like any other until his boss calls him into the office, pulls out a gun, and starts shooting at him. Scott manages to escape the surprise assassination attempt, but everyone else he meets - colleagues, friends, and strangers alike - is similarly obsessed with killing him.

The liberal democratic order that seemed so stable in North America and Western Europe has become precarious. James E. Cronin argues that liberalism has never been secure and that since the 1930s the international order has had to be crafted, redeployed, and extended in response to both victories and setbacks.

In this presidential contest of diametric opposites, nothing is certain on the path to the polls - except that every word matters. Direct from the candidates, from point and counterpoint to wit and wisdom, an unvarnished conversation on the issues captivating the American electorate.

Michael Stuyvesant was dying. A wealthy, courteous, and controlled man, all he wanted was to get to Denver to visit his children for one last Christmas. But sometimes even money, good manners, and a compulsive desire for order are not enough. God, the weather, a gigantic shopping-mall Santa Claus, and a pregnant girl who called herself Cheyenne - "like the city. And a river, too. And a mountain and an Indian tribe. I looked it up" - had other plans for him.

What’s there left to say about Tim Tebow? He’s brilliant and appalling, inspiring and annoying - a straightforward young man who somehow played and prayed his way into being the most enigmatic figure in American sports. In the essay-length Kindle Single "The Gospel According to Tim", Joseph Bottum argues that Tebow strikes a nerve because he has slipped beyond all the usual categories of our wink-and-nudge culture of irony. And he’s done that mostly by being simply who he is: not a football-playing theologian but, in essence, a mystic.

"Stay away" - Those are the two words written on the forehead of every pedophile murdered in the San Francisco Bay Area. Joshua Theaker is tasked with finding the killer whose killing methods involve strange weapons. Theaker and local law enforcement find it hard to agree on where the trail goes, while the local FBI is distracted by child kidnappings. For Theaker, there is a pattern among the victims. But just when Theaker thinks he is getting closer to the killer, he strikes again. And again.

Clayton Burroughs is the Sheriff of Bull Mountain and the black sheep of the Burroughs clan. In the past, the family ran moonshine and farmed marijuana; now they're the dominant suppliers of methamphetamine. So when an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms shows up in Clayton's office with a plan to shut them down, his agenda will pit brother against brother and set Clayton on a path to self-destruction.

The most cutting-edge research on peanut allergy prevention, diagnosis, and treatment is here! Did you know that avoidance of peanuts early in life may actually lead to peanut allergy, the opposite of what was originally believed? Researchers now believe that continued early avoidance of peanut may be behind the steady growth of peanut allergy in the United States and other countries. This surprising new research is among the cutting edge information you’ll find in the third edition of The Peanut Allergy Answer Book.

In this groundbreaking book, T.J. Waters has turned his experience collecting and analyzing competitive intelligence for the CIA into effective strategies for businesses wanting to stay on the leading edge of their industries. The book describes a practical process from planning (identifying competitive threats and determining the resources needed to counter them) through implementation (creating an organizational strategy) to execution (collecting key information and turning it into bottom-line results).

From acclaimed literary biographer of Kurt Vonnegut and Harper Lee comes the life story of a song, one of the most iconic ever written: John Lennon's "Imagine". "Twenty-two lines of graceful, plain-spoken faith in the power of a world to repair and change itself," said Rolling Stone. Only 183 seconds long, the simple melody and poetry captured the wounded hopefulness of its moment - and transcended its time to inspire generations that followed.

A hilarious novel set amid the Merchant Marine Academy. Commodore Dickey, the pompous second in command at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, desperately wants the top job, presently occupied by the skirt chasing Admiral Johnson. Dickey goes into cahoots with Mogie Mogelefsky, the imperious, bullying mayor of neighboring Great Neck to oust Johnson. When they succeed in exposing him in yet another peccadillo, Mogie suddenly reneges on their deal.

The power to solve your problems is within you - with the right sense of belief, the mind's ability to create success, happiness, and health is limitless. At least that's the philosophy of self-help author Eric Newborn, whose books and lectures have spawned a legion of devoted followers who swear that his ideas have pulled their lives from the brink. But after the traumatic loss of his wife, Eric is left to face the darker side of his own teachings, living as a recluse in the home they shared on Martha's Vineyard, struggling to reconcile his worldview with the pain he has suffered. It's a fundamental question that haunts him: Why?

The famous astrophysicist Paul Swenson creates five perfect clones in his own image. The Swenson clones are the target of criticism, hostility and abuse from a frightened public that does not understand their strange existence. However, they must survive, for Paul Swenson has cloned them in order to accomplish an important task. This is the story of their loves and battles, triumphs and terrors, as they struggle to save their futures and the collective destiny they were created for...

1800’s American West—a place where men find themselves in harsh and cruel circumstances and where lives are short lived. Traveling independently on the expansive road through the west, cowboy and Westerner Tomas H. Elkman is a man of the times. To ease the loneliness of the trail while searching for gainful employment, Elkman warily teams up with a fight-prone, good-timing gambler by the name of Jefferson McGredy. This strange pairing of men is hired to deliver an assemblage of horses to a ranch in the untamed northern territory.

Call Me Ghost is a military thriller where trust is broken, brother is pitted against brother, and two brothers are given the task to right the wrong caused by the actions of another brother who, during a fight, kills their team leader. Both brothers have different ideas on how best to resolve the conflict. One brother wants to resolve it within the confines of the law, while the other brother's idea of justice is more of an eye for an eye.

Huddy Marr, the proprietor of Bluff City Pawn shop in Memphis, is good at what he does: he knows jewelry, he knows guns and guitars. But the neighborhood is changing: A blood bank is set to open across the street from the retail space he leases from his brother Joe, and Huddy wants to move to a less seedy part of town. A pawn shop should stay right on the edge of seedy.When a longtime client dies, his widow calls Huddy to come appraise his considerable gun collection.

The future is big right now - for perhaps the first time, our society is more focused on what is going to happen in the future than what is happening right now. In Trees on Mars: Our Obsession with the Future, cultural critic and indie entrepreneur Hal Niedzviecki asks how and when we started believing we could and should "create the future." What is it like to live in a society utterly focused on what is going to happen next?