Showing results by narrator "Aaron Abano" in All Categories

If we judge the West by the state of its families, the West is sick. Millions of children barely see their parents, or for only a few minutes a day. One in two families break down, for better or worse. The casualties throng the family courts. Our maladjusted system has made the ideal of 'mom' and 'dad' - i.e. a loving, constant, adult presence in a child's infancy - a rarity. To speak of the 'maternal instinct' still elicits scorn or embarrassment from some feminists, who continue to mock 'holy motherhood'.

History was made at the 2015 Belmont Stakes when American Pharoah won the Triple Crown, the first since Affirmed in 1978. As magnificent as the champion is, the team behind him has been all too human while on the road to immortality. Written by an award-winning New York Times sportswriter, American Pharoah is the definitive account not only of how the ethereal colt won the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes, but how he changed lives. Through extensive interviews, Drape explores the making of an exceptional racehorse, chronicling key events en route to history.

It was a time when music fans copied and traded recordings without permission. An outraged music industry pushed Congress to pass anti-piracy legislation. Yes, that time is now; it was also the era of Napster in the 1990s, of cassette tapes in the 1970s, of reel-to-reel tapes in the 1950s, even the phonograph epoch of the 1930s. Piracy, it turns out, is as old as recorded music itself. In Democracy of Sound, Alex Sayf Cummings uncovers the little-known history of music piracy and its sweeping effects on the definition of copyright in the United States.

Magdalena has an unsettling gift. She sees writing on the body of everyone she meets - names, dates, details both banal and profound - and her only relief from the onslaught of information is to take off her glasses and let the world recede. Mercifully, her own skin is blank. When she meets Neil, she is intrigued to see her name on his cheek. He's in Paris for the summer, studying a medieval pilgrimage to the rocky coast of Spain, where the body of Saint Jacques was said to have washed ashore, covered in scallop shells.

The End of Copycat China helps business executives and investors understand how China's economy is shifting from one based on heavy investment to one based on services and consumption by providing insight that helps shape effective strategy.

Embers is an epic paranormal adventure/romance about an 18-year-old girl who discovers that she's immune to fire - and any other injury - when she's in a horrific car crash that kills her parents. Following a violent episode with her aunt's boyfriend, Ember flees Ohio to live with an old relative in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Ember's exuberance at escaping a bad home life soon turns to trepidation when she learns that she's a Watcher, a descendant of angels.

Rann falls for the beautiful and equally brilliant Stephanie Kung, who lives in Paris with her Chinese father and has not seen her American mother since she abandoned the family when Stephanie was six years old. Both Rann and Stephanie yearn for a sense of genuine identity. Rann feels plagued by his voracious intellectual curiosity and strives to integrate his life of the mind with his experience in the world. Stephanie struggles to reconcile the Chinese part of herself with her American and French selves.

Book View Cafe celebrates its fifth anniversary with an anthology of our favorite stories. From the fantasy and science fiction of our roots to steampunk, romance, historical and mainstream; from humor to life's hardest challenges, across the spectrum from light to dark.

In Are Men Animals?, anthropologist Matthew Gutmann argues that predatory male behavior is in no way inevitable. Men behave the way they do because culture permits it, not because biology demands it. To prove this, he embarks on a global investigation of masculinity. Exploring everything from the gender-bending politics of American college campuses to the marriage markets of Shanghai and the women-only subway cars of Mexico City, Gutmann shows just how complicated masculinity can be.

During the early summer of 1967, inseparable teenage beauties Sissy Morgan and Zaza Mulligan wander among the vacation cottages in the community of Boundary, drinking and smoking and swearing, attracting the attention of boys and men. First one and then the other go missing, and both are eventually found dead in the forest. Have they been the victims of freak accidents? Or is someone hunting the young women of Boundary? And if there is a hunter, who might be next?

Here Edgeofsports.com sportswriter Dave Zirin shows how sports express the worst, as well as the most creative and exciting, features of American society. Zirin explores how Janet Jackson's Super Bowl flash-time show exposed more than a breast, why the labor movement has everything to learn from sports unions, and why a new generation of athletes is no longer content to "play one game at a time" and is starting to get political.

After hearing voices among an eerie copse of trees in the woods, 17-year-old Curtis must confront his worst fear: that he has inherited his father's mental illness. A desperate search for answers leads him to discover Gravenhearst, a labyrinth mansion that burned down in 1894. When he locks eyes with a steely Victorian girl in a forgotten mirror, he's sure she's one of the fire's victims. If he can unravel the mystery, he can save his sanity...and possibly the girl who haunts his dreams.

Ember must stop the apocalypse from happening, but at what cost? The Angels of destruction have arrived, and only Ember stands in the way of their mission to carry out God's wrath and annihilate his enemies. When the barrier between celestial creatures and humans beings is broken and Angels descend to Earth, Ember soon learns there's a fine line between good and evil. As she faces a world full of monsters and magic, a terrifying darkness rises and threatens to destroy everything she's fighting for.

Old Silk Road is a prescient, powerful novel of the Afghan war by someone who's been there. Norman "Doc" Rodgers suspects he won't make it out of this one alive. He's a young combat medic in Afghanistan, eager to avenge his father's death in the World Trade Center and make sense of a new world that feels like it's fallen to pieces. Haunted by hallucinatory encounters, his only solace is a barely concealed addiction to the precious opiates he's supposed to dole out sparingly to those beyond aid.

A funny and poignant memoir that delves into the magic, fails, and meaning of fatherhood. Humorist and family man Jason Good is an only child with an atypical story to tell. His isn't the usual rant about how hard it is to be a modern father or a tale about a damaging relationship with his father. Jason grew up with a charismatic, communicative, affectionate, and frustrated political science professor for a father - a man who taught him most everything about how to be a dad, how to live.

A back-alley murder carries André Derain from the streets of New Orleans to the sun-drenched hell of the Cayman Islands. It's quiet in the Garden District, and André Derain can't sleep. After a lifetime as a fashion photographer in New York and the French Quarter, he needs noise, excitement, action - and he's about to get more than he can handle. A call comes in from the New Orleans homicide department, tipping Derain off to a grisly shooting on Tchoupitoulas Street. He grabs his camera and charges out the door.

On a steamy spring morning, Dusty Parker - part-time pastor, part-time search-and-rescue team member, and full-time administrator of a school for troubled boys - joins the search for a missing teenage girl. He partners with volunteer and inner-city schoolteacher Grace Sinclair, and what they find bonds them in ways neither could have expected. As they begin to build their lives together, a visitor from the past causes Dusty and Grace to further open their hearts and home.

Highly skilled Search and Rescue (SAR) team leader Honor Mackenzie works almost as hard at guarding the dark secrets of her past as she does when training SAR dogs. As for widowed Sun reporter Matt Phillips, not even his former SAR work is as important as protecting his 10-year-old twin boys. When a jumbo jet crashes outside Baltimore one cold night, their respective jobs put them face to face at the grisly scene.

If he had only answered that last phone call from the World Trade Center.... Minutes before two jumbo jets changed US history, New York police officer Austin Finley ignored the call from his brother, who'd been bugging him for days. Trying to live with his one regret causes hatred and bitterness to consume Austin, and when counselor Mercy Samara recommends desk duty, Austin resigns. Haunted by her own memories of 9/11, Mercy takes a job as a school counselor in Baltimore.

Don DiMarco has a very good life - a family he loves, a comfortable lifestyle, passions and interests that keep him amused. He also thought he had time, but that turned out not to be the case. Faced with news that might have immediately felled most, Don now wonders if he has time enough.