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'.

Highliners are the elite of the fishing world, the skippers and crews who make the biggest catches—salmon, king crab, halibut, shrimp—and deliver them first to the bustling canneries of Kodiak and Dutch Harbor. For these men—and for their women—the safe eight-hour day does not exist. It never will. Some fishermen get rich, many die broke. But they find a special joy in their work that can never be matched by the easier world of the landsman.

When treachery and violence destroy Elen’s homeland, a power begins to rise inside her. But it will take more than that untested magic to avenge her family, unite her people, and reclaim their land. Her enemy receives power from an evil source: the wicked sorceress Morgaine LeFay, who will stop at nothing to destroy King Arthur and his knights of Camelot. And she plans to use Elen to work for her own vile purpose.

The daughter of the steward of Cambryn, Lynet has seen the damage that following one’s heart can do. Now the threat of war looms over her land. Desperately searching for a way to restore peace to her home and honor to her family, Lynet and her sister decide that Lynet will seek the help of the last heir to the ancient royal house of Cambryn: the High Queen Guinevere.

In order to provide protection and stability for her fractious kingdom, Laurel Carnbrea, queen of Cambryn, must marry Sir Agravain, knight of the Round Table and nephew of King Arthur, a man she has never met and about whom she knows nothing. But Laurel is determined to keep her people united, even if it means marrying a man widely believed to be heartless.

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.

By turns epic and intimate, Telling Our Way to the Sea is both a staggering revelation of unraveling ecosystems and a profound meditation on our changing relationships with nature - and with one another. When the biologists Aaron Hirsh and Veronica Volny, along with their friend Graham Burnett, a historian of science, lead twelve college students to a remote fishing village on the Sea of Cortez, they come upon a bay of dazzling beauty and richness.

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.

Saul Bellow was easily angered, prone to argument, and palpably vulnerable to criticism, but according to his son, his young father was also emotionally accessible, often soft, and possessed of the ability to laugh at the world's folly and at himself. This memoir gives equal weight to the young Saul Bellow - the rebellious, irreverent, and ambitious young writer - who raised Greg, and the older Saul Bellow, famous and fiercely private. It paints a very human portrait of a man who hid behind parabolic stories, jokes, metaphors, and partial truths, never letting the public see his true self.

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.

Humankind is on the precipice of the apocalypse. As the Demons grow bolder and the walls between the planes of existence weaken, Ember is forced to develop her powers as quickly as possible, and she seeks out a powerful earth Watcher to continue her supernatural lessons. Her glimpse of the future demands she fight the dark forces spreading across the earth. But her new mentor has his own agenda, making her question everyone and everything she ever trusted.

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.

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.