The Grapes of Wrath
Summary
The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanizedâand sometimes outragedâmillions of readers. At once naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck's, The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps the most American of American classics. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation during the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. From their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of this new America, Steinbeck creates a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, tragic but ultimately stirring in its insistence on human dignity.
©1939 John Steinbeck (P)2011 Penguin
Whole Heart, Whole Horse
Summary
Many horse trainers, even those who espouse the so-called natural horsemanship approach, take the position that horses who fail to obey a human's request are doing so as much out of perversity as ignorance. That's not Mark Rashid's view. In his words, "If we understand that horses can't separate the way they feel from the way they act, then we can start to see that unwanted behavior isn't bad behavior at all. More times than not, it's just the horse expressing the way he feels at that particular moment in time.... How we perceive that information dictates how we respond to it. Whole Heart, Whole Horse focuses on this idea, covering such subjects as gathering information from the horse, turning rider/trainer mistakes into positive experiences, developing realistic boundaries between you and your horse, understanding how and why horses release energy from real or perceived traumas, and reaching a comfortable balance point between horse and rider. Rashid analyzes developing softness, consistency, dependability, trust, and peace of mind in both horses and humans, as well as how to become a leader whom your horse will willingly want to follow and work with. Full of examples that extend beyond the training pen, Whole Heart, Whole Horse offers good sense and information that will make you a more astute, capable, and sensitive horseman and person.
©2009 Mark Rashid (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Steve Jobs
Summary
Featuring a new epilogue read by the author. From the author of the best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, this is the exclusive biography of Steve Jobs. Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years - as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues - Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the 21st century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted. Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple's hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.
©2011 Walter Isaacson (P)2011 Simon & Schuster
Flash Boys
Summary
2015 Audie Award Finalist for Non-Fiction From the number-one New York Times best-selling author of Liar's Poker and "one of the country's most popular business journalists" (The New York Times) Michael Lewis, comes an engaging new book about Wall Street. Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of Boomerang, The Big Short, The Blind Side, Moneyball, and many others, returns to the financial world to give listeners a ringside seat as the biggest news story in years prepares to hit Wall Street.
©2014 Michael Lewis (P)2014 Simon & Schuster
Broken Bond
Summary
Nothing is what I thought it was. Not even me. Everything changed the night I ran from Uncle Clint. And everything changed again the night he tracked me down. The four alphas whoâve each claimed me as their mate kept their promise to protect me. They came for me. They saved me. For one beautiful, blissful moment, the five of us were united, joined more closely than Iâve ever been with anyone. And then, in the space of a single heartbeat, my world turned upside down. Witches threaten the borders of shifter lands, insurrection brews within the packs, but the greatest danger of all might come from...me. Will my potential mates accept me now that they know the truth? Or will our bond be broken before it even has a chance to fully form? Broken Bond is the second book in the Claimed by Wolves series, a reverse-harem paranormal shifter romance. It contains cursing, violence, growly alpha males, steamy sex, and a heroine who finds her strength in the midst of it all.
©2020 Callie Rose (P)2020 Callie Rose
Boomerang
Summary
From the #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Big Short, Liarâs Poker and The Blind Side! The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a pinata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. The trademark of Michael Lewisâs best sellers is to tell an important and complex story through characters so outsized and outrageously weird that youâd think they have to be invented. (Youâd be wrong.) In Boomerang, we meet a brilliant monk who has figured out how to game Greek capitalism to save his failing monastery; a cod fisherman who, with three daysâ training, becomes a currency trader for an Icelandic bank; and an Irish real estate developer so outraged by the collapse of his business that he drives across the country to attack the Irish Parliament with his earth-moving equipment. Lewisâs investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American listener to a comfortable complacency: Oh, those foolish foreigners. But when Lewis turns a merciless eye on California and Washington DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.
©2011 Michael Lewis (P)2011 Simon & Schuster
Skeleton Crew
Summary
Narrated by Stephen King, Matthew Broderick, Michael C. Hall, Paul Giamatti, Will Patton, Norbert Leo Butz, Lois Smith, Dylan Baker, Kyle Beltran, Dana Ivey, Robert Petkoff, David Morse, and Frances Sternhagen. The master at his scarifying best! From heart-pounding terror to the eeriest of whimsy - tales from the outer limits of one of the greatest imaginations of our time! In "The Mist", a supermarket becomes the last bastion of humanity as a peril beyond dimension invades the earth. Touch "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands", and say your prayers. There are some things in attics that are better left alone - things like "The Monkey". The most sublime woman driver on earth offers a man "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" to paradise. A boy's sanity is pushed to the edge when he's left alone with the odious corpse of "Gramma". If you were stunned by Gremlins, the Fornits of "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" will knock your socks off. Trucks that punish and beautiful teen demons who seduce a young man to massacre; curses whose malevolence grows through the years; obscene presences and angels of grace - here, indeed, is a night-blooming bouquet of chills and thrills.
©2016 Stephen King (P)2016 Simon & Schuster Audio
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
Summary
Named to the American Library Associationâs Reference & User Services (RUSA) Listen List! Other narrators include: Cotter Smith, Will Patton, Edward Herrmann, Holter Graham, Frederick Weller, Mare Winningham, Craig Wasson, Thomas Sadoski, and Tim Sample. A master storyteller at his best - the O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story. Since his first collection, Nightshift, published 35 years ago, Stephen King has dazzled listeners with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the first time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it. There are thrilling connections between stories, including themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, and what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. "Afterlife" is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanors. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers he has supernatural powers: the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in "Obits"; the old judge in "The Dune", who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw written in the sand the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In "Morality", King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil's pact they can win. Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of King's finest gifts to his constant fan. "I made them especially for you," says King. "Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth."
©2015 Stephen King (P)2015 Simon & Schuster Audio
FaceOff
Summary
2015 Audie Award Finalist for Short Stories/Collections Edited by number-one New York Times best-selling author David Baldacci and including stories by Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, and more, this one-of-a-kind anthology pulls together the most-beloved characters from the best and most popular thriller series today. Worlds collide! In an unprecedented collaboration, 23 of the worldâs best-selling and most critically acclaimed thriller writers have paired their series characters - such as Harry Bosch, Jack Reacher, and Lincoln Rhyme - in an 11-story anthology curated by the International Thriller Writers (ITW). All of the contributors to FaceOff are ITW members and the stories feature these dynamic duos: Harry Bosch vs. Patrick Kenzie in "Red Eye", by Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly John Rebus vs. Roy Grace in "In the Nick of Time", by Ian Rankin and Peter James Slappy the Ventriloquist Dummy vs. Aloysius Pendergast in "Gaslighted", by R.L. Stine, Douglas Preston, and Lincoln Child And many more...
©2014 International Thriller Writers, Inc. All rights reserved (P)2014 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
Summary
Featuring David Sedaris's unique blend of hilarity and heart, this new collection of keen-eyed animal-themed tales is an utter delight. Though the characters may not be human, the situations in these stories bear an uncanny resemblance to the insanity of everyday life. In "The Toad, the Turtle, and the Duck", three strangers commiserate about animal bureaucracy while waiting in a complaint line. In "Hello Kitty", a cynical feline struggles to sit through his prison-mandated AA meetings. In "The Squirrel and the Chipmunk", a pair of star-crossed lovers is separated by prejudiced family members. Once again David Sedaris shows us the most outrageous, tender, absurd sides of ourselves in his "profoundly funny, well-crafted stories that somehow, magically, bring home a major point about fidelity or guilt or love...." (Christian Science Monitor).
©2010 David Sedaris (P)2010 Hachette Audio
The Face
Summary
He's Hollywood's most dazzling star, whose flawless countenance inspires the worship of millions and fires the hatred of one twisted soul. His perfectly ordered existence is under siege as a series of terrifying, enigmatic "messages" breaches the exquisitely calibrated security systems of his legendary Bel Air estate. The boxes arrive mysteriously, one by one, at Channing Manheim's fortified compound. The threat implicit in their bizarre, disturbing contents seems to escalate with each new delivery. Manheim's security chief, ex-cop Ethan Truman, is used to looking beneath the surface of things. But until he entered the orbit of a Hollywood icon, he had no idea just how slippery reality could be. Now this good man is all that stands in the way of an insidious killer - and forces that eclipse the most fevered fantasies of a city where dreams and nightmares are the stuff of daily life. Enter a world of marvelous invention, enchantment, and implacable intent, populated by murderous actors and the walking dead, hit men and heroes, long-buried dreams and never-dying hope. Traversing this extraordinary landscape, Ethan will face the secrets of his own tragic past and the unmistakable premonition of his impending violent death as he races against time to solve the macabre riddles of a modern-day beast. A riveting tour de force of suspense, mystery, and miraculous revelation, The Face is that rare novel that entertains, provokes, and uplifts at the same time. It will make you laugh. It will give you chills. It will fill you with hope.
©2003 Dean Koontz (P)2003 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
Alex Cross's TRIAL
Summary
From his grandmother, Alex Cross has heard the story of his great uncle Abraham and his struggles for survival in the era of the Ku Klux Klan. Now, Alex passes the family tale along to his own children in a novel he's written - a novel called Trial. As a lawyer in turn-of-the-century Washington, D.C., Ben Corbett represents the toughest cases. Fighting against oppression and racism, he risks his family and his life in the process. When President Roosevelt asks Ben to return to his home town to investigate rumors of the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan there, he cannot refuse. When he arrives in Eudora, Mississippi, Ben meets the wise Abraham Cross and his beautiful daughter, Moody. Ben enlists their help, and the two Crosses introduce him to the hidden side of the idyllic Southern town. Lynchings have become commonplace and residents of the town's black quarter live in constant fear. Ben aims to break the reign of terror - but the truth of who is really behind it could break his heart. Written in the fearless voice of Detective Alex Cross, Alex Cross's Trial is a gripping story of murder, love, and, above all, bravery.
©2009 James Patterson (P)2009 Hachette
The Program
Summary
The series that started it all! In this powerful follow-up to his action-packed thriller The Kill Clause, Gregg Hurwitz, the new maestro of pulse-pounding suspense, ratchets up the excitement with another sensational pause resister featuring Tim Rackley, a driven lawman motivated by honor, morality, and a deep sense of justice. Called back into the fold of the US Marshals Service, Tim is tasked with retrieving Leah Henning, the daughter of a powerful Hollywood producer, from a mind-control cult. As Tim wends his way deep undercover into an insidious operation called The Program, he confronts a brand of mind-warping manipulation beyond his worst expectations. Tim becomes enmeshed with a diverse band of characters - from the charismatic, messianic leader T. D. Betters to a cult reject burnout to the intelligent yet highly vulnerable Leah herself - and finds himself caught in a shadowy landscape of lies, manipulation, and terror. At stake: innocent minds - maybe even his own.
©2004 Gregg Hurwitz (P)2004 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
The Tiger Rising
Summary
From the best-selling author of Because of Winn-Dixie comes the moving story of an 11-year-old boy, Rob Horton, who finds a caged tiger in the woods behind the hotel where he lives with his father. With the help of his new friend, Sistine Bailey, Rob must decide what to do with his discovery and at the same time come to terms with his past.
©2001 Kate DiCamillo (P)2006 Random House, Inc. Listening Library, an imprint of the Random House Audio Publishing Group
The Teacher's Funeral
Summary
The year is 1904, and Russell is 15. Though he dreams of leaving small-town Indiana to become part of a large farm crew in the Dakotas, he's forced to stay in school, where his sister Tansy has just become the new teacher. Through the autumn, Russell observes the strange goings-on in the classroom, including a fight for Tansy's affection between a rough-and-tumble guy named Glenn and Russell's own best friend, Charlie. (Both will need to compete with a city slicker named Eugene who's in the area trying to sell an amazing new invention called the automobile.) By Thanksgiving, Tansy has become a full-fledged teacher and Russell has resigned himself to the student life. In the last chapter, we learn which man ultimately won Tansy's heart, and also who Russell ended up marrying.
©2004 Richard Peck (P)2004 Random House, Inc. Listening Library, an imprint of the Random House Audio Publishing Group
Argo
Summary
The true account of the 1979 rescue of six American hostages from Iran On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and captured dozens of American hostages, sparking a 444-day ordeal and a quake in global politics still reverberating today. But there's a little-known footnote to the crisis: six Americans escaped. And a midlevel agent named Antonio Mendez devised an ingenious yet incredibly risky plan to rescue them. Armed with foreign film visas, Mendez and an unlikely team of CIA agents and Hollywood insiders - directors, producers, actors - traveled to Tehran under the guise of scouting locations for a fake film called Argo. While pretending to find the perfect scenery and backdrops, the team succeeded in contacting the escapees and smuggling them out of Iran without a single shot being fired. Antonio Mendez finally details the mind-bogglingly complex and dangerous operation he led more than three decades ago. A true story of secret identities and international intrigue, Argo is the gripping account of the history-making collusion between Hollywood and high-stakes espionage.
©2012 Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio (P)2012 Penguin Audiobooks
The New York Stories
Summary
Collected for the first time, the New York stories of John O'Hara, "among the greatest short story writers in English, or in any other language" (Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker) Collected for the first time, here are the New York stories of one of the 20th century's definitive chroniclers of the city - the speakeasies and highballs, social climbers and cinema stars, mistresses and powerbrokers, unsparingly observed by a popular American master of realism. Spanning his four-decade career, these more than 30 refreshingly frank, sparely written stories are among John O'Hara's finest work, exploring the materialist aspirations and sexual exploits of flawed, prodigally human characters and showcasing the snappy dialogue, telling details, and ironic narrative twists that made him the most-published short story writer in the history of the New Yorker.
©1932 John O'Hara (P)2014 Penguin Audio
Hold Your Breath
Summary
From the best-selling author of All Is Not Forgotten and Donât Look for Me comes a sharp, compulsive thriller about a young woman who narrowly escapes a violent crime and the psychiatrist helping to recover her memory of the suspect. Gabby Ashford has just survived an attempt on her life. Detectives have connected her story to two other cases in the area: Professional women drugged at a bar, brought to their homes, and drowned in their bathtubs. Gabby, who miraculously woke up in her own bathtub unharmed, could be the key to finding a serial killer on the loose - but she has no memory of the attack. Gabby admits herself to a high-end rehabilitation center to recover and to seek the help of a psychiatrist renowned for his work with memory recovery. As Dr. Forrester works with Gabby - interviewing not only her but her overbearing fiance´e, her emotionally fragile brother, and the local detective working the case - questions about Gabbyâs story, her past, and the ethics of memory recovery emerge. Dr. Forrester, the central voice of Walkerâs breakout debut All Is Not Forgotten, is a fascinating and deeply complicated character, barreling toward the truth of the case at hand while wrestling with the demons of his own past. Shocking and succinct, Hold Your Breath will have you on the edge of your seat from the first minute to the last.
©2020 Wendy Walker (P)2020 Audible Originals, LLC.
Next
Summary
Is a loved one missing some body parts? Are blondes becoming extinct? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species? Humans and chimpanzees differ in only 400 genes; is that why an adult human being resembles a chimp fetus? And should that worry us? There's a new genetic cure for drug addiction - is it worse than the disease? We live in a time of momentous scientific leaps; a time when it's possible to sell our eggs and sperm online for thousands of dollars or test our spouses for genetic maladies. We live in a time when one fifth of all our genes are owned by someone else, and an unsuspecting person and his family can be pursued cross-country because they happen to have certain valuable genes within their chromosomes. Devilishly clever, Next blends fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where nothing is what it seems, and a set of new possibilities can open at every turn. Next challenges our sense of reality and notions of morality. Balancing the comic and bizarre with the genuinely frightening and disturbing, Next shatters our assumptions and reveals shocking new choices where we least expect. The future is closer than you think. Get used to it.
©2006 Michael Crichton (P)2006 HarperCollins Publishers
All Is Not Forgotten
Summary
It begins in the small, affluent town of Fairview, Connecticut, where everything seems picture perfect. Until one night when young Jenny Kramer is attacked at a local party. In the hours immediately after, she is given a controversial drug to medically erase her memory of the violent assault. But in the weeks and months that follow, as she heals from her physical wounds, and with no factual recall of the attack, Jenny struggles with her raging emotional memory. Her father, Tom, becomes obsessed with his inability to find her attacker and seek justice while her mother, Charlotte, prefers to pretend this horrific event did not touch her carefully constructed world. As Tom and Charlotte seek help for their daughter, the fault lines within their marriage and their close-knit community emerge from the shadows where they have been hidden for years, and the relentless quest to find the monster who invaded their town - or perhaps lives among them - drive this psychological thriller to a shocking and unexpected conclusion.
©2016 Wendy Walker (P)2016 Macmillan Audio
Purity
Summary
A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom. Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life. Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world - including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong. Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters - Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers - and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time. This audiobook includes a bonus conversation with the author.
©2015 Jonathan Franzen (P)2015 Macmillan Audio
Warren Beatty
Summary
âWhatever you have read or heard about me through articles or gossip, forget it. I am nothing like that Warren Beatty. I am nothing like what you have read.â (Warren Beatty) Warren Beatty guarded his privacy even before he became a movie star, when he burst onto the screen in 1961 as the earnestly handsome all-American boy in Splendor in the Grass. When he started acting, Beatty kept secret the fact that actress Shirley MacLaine, already a star, was his older sister. Over time, he has cultivated a mystique, giving few interviews and instructing others not to talk about him. Until now. Through years of groundbreaking research, lauded biographer Suzanne Finstad gained unprecedented access to Beatty's family, close friends, and film colleagues, including such luminaries in the arts and politics as Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, Leslie Caron, Robert Towne, Mike Nichols, and Senators John McCain, George McGovern, and Gary Hart. Weaving hundreds of these candid interviews, photographs from private albums, personal letters, diaries, and the previously unpublished papers of the late Natalie Wood and mentors such as directors Elia Kazan and George Stevens, playwrights Clifford Odets and William Inge, and agent Charles Feldman, Warren Beatty unveils the real Beatty, a complex, sensitive visionary torn between the "fairly puritanical, football-playing boy" from Virginia and his Hollywood playboy image. Finstad paints a rich, fascinating portrait of the secretive film legend, taking us back to the âunrealized geniusâ parents who molded arguably the most famous brother and sister in Hollywood history, tracing the family influences and events in Beattyâs past that directly inspired McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Ishtar, Dick Tracy, Bugsy, Love Affair, and Bulworth and led to his political activism, culminating in a near-bid for the White House. Finstad constructs the definitive, myth-shattering account of Beattyâs evolution from Hollywoodâs enfant terrible to producer of the revolutionary Bonnie and Clyde, launching him as the premier actor/director/writer/producer of his generation, the only person to twice earn Oscar nominations in all five major categories. Here also is the truth about Beatty the lover, setting the record straight on his storied relationships with iconic actresses and beauties. Finstadâs astute insights illuminate Beattyâs private struggle to attain happiness, his complicated bond with his sister, Shirley, and the deeper reasons why, at 54, the archetypal bachelor married actress Annette Bening. Stunningly researched, engrossing, and exquisitely detailed, Warren Beatty: A Private Man gives us a new understanding of the enigmatic, fiercely intelligent star who embodies the American dream. Please note: This is the abridged edition. An unabridged version is also available.
©2005 Suzanne Finstad, Inc. (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
Among the Missing
Summary
In this haunting, bracing new collection, Dan Chaon shares stories of men, women, and children who live far outside the American Dream, while wondering which decision, which path, or which accident brought them to this place. Chaon mines the psychological landscape of his characters to dazzling effect. Each story radiates with sharp humor, mystery, wonder, and startling compassion. Among the Missing lingers in the mind through its subtle grace and power of language.Â
©2001 Dan Chaon (P)2001 Random House, Inc.
The Poseidon Adventure
Summary
The inspiration for the 2006 Warner Bros. film, Poseidon, Paul Gallico's The Poseidon Adventure is an intense and dramatic story about a gigantic ocean liner and its unimaginable final journey. When a rogue wave capsizes the luxury cruise ship, a small group of survivors find themselves unlikely allies in a battle for their lives. As the unstable vessel rapidly fills with water, each must draw on skills and strengths they didn't even know they possessed, fighting against time for their own survival and for each other.
©1969 Paul Gallico (P)2006 HarperCollinsPublishers
Welcome to the Monkey House
Summary
Kurt Vonnegut is a master of contemporary American Literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as a "true artist" ( The New York Times) with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He is, as Graham Greene has declared, "one of the best living American writers". Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.
©1950 -1968 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (P)2006 HarperCollins Publishers
1st to Die
Summary
Four women - four friends - share a determination to stop a killer who has been stalking newlyweds in San Francisco. Each one holds a piece of the puzzle: Lindsay Boxer is a homicide inspector in the San Francisco Police Department, Claire Washburn is a medical examiner, Jill Bernhardt is an assistant D.A., and Cindy Thomas just started working the crime desk of the San Francisco Chronicle. But the usual procedures aren't bringing them any closer to stopping the killings. So these women form a Women's Murder Club to collaborate outside the box and pursue the case by sidestepping their bosses and giving one another a hand. 1st to Die is the start of a blazingly fast-paced and sensationally entertaining new series of crime thrillers.
©2001 by James Patterson (P)2001 by Time Warner AudioBooks
Seizure
Summary
Senator Ashley Butler is a quintessential Southern demagogue whose support of traditional American values includes a knee-jerk reaction against virtually all biotechnologies. When he's called to chair a subcommittee introducing legislation to ban new cloning technology, the senator views his political future in bold relief; and Dr. Daniel Lowell, inventor of the technique that will take stem cell research to the next level, sees a roadblock positioned before his biotech startup. The two seemingly opposite personalities clash during the senate hearings, but the men have a common desire. Butler's hunger for political power far outstrips his concern for the unborn; and Lowell's pursuit of gargantuan personal wealth and celebrity overrides any considerations for patients' well-being. Further complicating the proceedings is the confidential news that Senator Butler has developed Parkinson's disease, leading the senator and the researcher into a Faustian pact. In a perilous attempt to prematurely harness Lowell's new technology, the therapy leaves the senator with the horrifying effects of temporal lobe epilepsy, seizures of the most bizarre order. Torn from the headlines, Seizure is a cautionary tale for a time where biotechnology pulls us into a promising yet frightening new world.
©2003 Robin Cook (P)2003 Putnam Berkley Audio
The Last Goodbye
Summary
Sleeping with a client's gorgeous girlfriend may have been the gutsiest move in Jack Hammond's formerly booming law career, but it wasn't the smartest. Booted from his elite law firm, Jack now scrapes by as a court-appointed attorney, his client list a revolving door of small-time drug offenders and petty thieves. When his friend, a computer whiz and former addict who'd brought his life back from the brink, is found dead in his apartment, Jack knows something is very wrong. Where the cops see just another overdose, Jack sees a murder. Investigating the case, he learns that his friend was obsessed with a beautiful singer, who also happens to be half of the most popular power couple in Atlanta. Talented and privileged, the spellbinding Michelle Sonnier is plagued by secrets. Against his better judgment, and in a disturbing echo of his past, Jack is pulled further and further into her world, where he discovers more suspicious deaths, all pointing toward a mysterious cover-up. The Last Goodbye is a riveting thriller with a thunderously beating heart, a masterful page-turner that probes the meaning of love and the burdens of the past.
©2003 Reed Arvin (P)2003 HarperCollins Publishers
Sutton
Summary
Born in the slums of Brooklyn, in the first year of the 20th century, Willie Sutton came of age at a time when banks were out of control. If they werenât taking brazen risks, they were shamelessly seeking bailouts. Trapped in a cycle of bank panics, depressions and soaring unemployment, Sutton saw only one way out. So began the career of Americaâs most successful bank robber. Sutton became so good at breaking into banks, and such a master at breaking out of prisons, police called him one of the most dangerous men in New York, and the FBI put him on its first-ever Most Wanted List. But the public rooted for Sutton. When he was finally caught for good in 1952, crowds surrounded the jail and chanted his name. Blending vast research with vivid imagination, Pulitzer Prize winner J.R. Moehringer brings Willie Sutton blazing back to life. In Moehringerâs retelling, it was more than need or rage at society that drove Sutton. It was one unforgettable woman. And when Sutton finally walked free, he immediately set out to find her. Poignant, comic, fast-paced and fact-studded, Sutton tells a story of economic pain that feels eerily modern, while unfolding a story of doomed love that is forever timeless.
©2012 J.R. Moehringer (P)2012 Hyperion
How Starbucks Saved My Life
Summary
In his 50s, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a big house in the suburbs, a loving family, and a top job at an ad agency with a six-figure salary. By the time he turned 60, he had lost everything except his Ivy League education and his sense of entitlement. First, he was downsized at work. Next, an affair ended his 20-year marriage. Then, he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, prognosis undetermined. Around the same time, his girlfriend gave birth to a son. Gill had no money, no health insurance, and no prospects.  One day as Gill sat in a Manhattan Starbucks with his last affordable luxury, a latte, brooding about his misfortune and quickly dwindling list of options, a 28-year-old Starbucks manager named Crystal Thompson approached him, half joking, to offer him a job. With nothing to lose, he took it, and went from drinking coffee in a Brooks Brothers suit to serving it in a green uniform. For the first time in his life, Gill was a minority: the only older white guy working with a team of young African Americans. He was forced to acknowledge his ingrained prejudices and admit to himself that, far from being beneath him, his new job was hard. And his younger coworkers, despite having half the education and twice the personal difficulties he'd ever faced, were running circles around him. The backdrop to Gill's story is a nearly universal cultural phenomenon: the Starbucks experience. In How Starbucks Saved My Life, we step behind the counter of one of the world's best-known companies and discover how it all really works, who the baristas are, and what they love (and hate) about their jobs. Inside Starbucks, as Crystal and Mike's friendship grows, we see what wonders can happen when we reach out across race, class, and age divisions to help a fellow human being.
©2007 Michael Gates Gill (P)2007 Penguin Audio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.