Showing results by narrator "Paul Heitsch" in All Categories

Makayla Summerlin is excited to join her grandfather, Henry, in Hong Kong during a college break. She plans to help him sail the next leg of his journey around the world on the Defiance, but events take a frightening turn when her grandfather is kidnapped and the Defiance disappears! Unsure of what to do, Makayla reaches out to an old friend for help.

A riveting chronicle of the battle for chess supremacy and the brilliant, eccentric, extremely online grandmasters changing an ancient game. Every elite chess player dreams of becoming world champion, of wearing the wreath and going down in history. Yet for many of today's top grandmasters, that...

While the Galactic Conglomerate continues to fight the rising Darkkon threat, a working Yau A.I. is recovered from the wreckage of the recent battle, and it is the one lead the team has to dig deeper into the heart of the enemy's operation. Meanwhile, a treaty with the Vael Empire—the long-standing enemy of the conglomerate—may be the galaxy's only hope of defending itself against the Darkkon and their growing aggression. Pride must be swallowed and differences set aside to join forces in an alliance.

With the Borman suddenly out of commission and far beyond reach, cislunar space begins falling into chaos as critical satellites fail and valuable lunar mineral shipments begin disappearing in transit. Nothing is as it seems, and Marshall Hunter and the rest of the crew suspect none of it is by coincidence.

Despite the ups and downs of his personal life and professional career—even in the face of deafness—Beethoven remained remarkably consistent in his most basic convictions about his art. This inner consistency, writes the music historian Mark Evan Bonds, provides the key to understanding the composer's life and works. Discarding tired myths about the composer, Bonds proposes a new way of listening to Beethoven by hearing his music as an expression of his entire self, not just his scowling self.

Mick's oldest friend is in trouble. A seemingly successful boxing career has left him broke, battered, and about to lose his family. The sharks are circling for whatever scraps are left from the glory days, and now in his darkest hour, the people who said they would be there have turned their backs. He wants to fight for his family, but the years have taken their toll, and all his family sees is an angry old man with a failing memory.

As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn't seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. He spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer's greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with his memories of a difficult, complicated childhood.

The celebrated author of over twenty-five books, Vollmann's equally ambitious and prolific career as a photographer, printmaker, and painter reflects the artist's deep interest in people existing on the margins, a profound empathy for his subjects, and the humility and generosity to meet them on their terms. In Shadows of Love, Shadows of Loneliness, a series of essays commissioned especially for this book lays out Vollmann's views on what photographs can and should say.

Five years ago, astronaut Jack Templeton took the spacecraft Magellan to the farthest reaches of our solar system, never to be heard from again. Until now. When the Magellan suddenly reappears where an undiscovered planet was suspected to be, it poses more questions than answers. How did Jack survive all this time? Can he be rescued before his life support runs out? And what is the object long thought to be the elusive "Planet Nine?"

Every parent of a teenage boy knows there are certain conversations they must have with their son, but they often put them off - or worse, don't have them at all - because they simply don't know where to start. Written by Dr. Tim Hawkes, one of Australia's top educators, Ten Conversations You Must Have with Your Son offers a practical, accessible, and invaluable way to get these discussions started. Dr. Hawkes provides parents with the essential information they need to negotiate their way through what can often be very difficult territory.

In The Arctic, Klaus Dodds and Mark Nuttall offer concise answers to the myriad questions that arise when looking at the circumpolar North. They focus on its peoples, politics, environment, resource development, and conservation to provide critical information about how changes there can, and will, affect our entire globe and all of its inhabitants. Dodds and Nuttall explore how the Arctic's importance has grown over time, the region's role during the Cold War, indigenous communities and their history, and the past and future of the Arctic's governance.

Alan I. Abramowitz has emerged as a leading spokesman for the view that our current political divide is not confined to a small group of elites and activists but a key feature of the American social and cultural landscape. The polarization of the political and media elites, he argues, arose and persists because it accurately reflects the state of American society. Here, he goes further: The polarization is unique in modern US history. Today's party divide reflects an unprecedented alignment of many different divides: racial and ethnic, religious, ideological, and geographic.

Despite having retro-temporal communication, the war against the 610 insectoid motherships infesting the spiral arm is proving to be difficult. And lurking in the background across the void in the Sagittarius spiral arm, are more insectoid ships of unknown size and number.

Out in the Pacific Ocean, there is a war taking place. It is a "warm war", a shoving match between the United States, since World War II the uncontested ruler of the seas, and China, which now possesses the world's largest navy. The Chinese regard the Pacific, and especially the South China Sea, as their ocean, and they're ready to defend it. Each day the heat between the two countries increases as the Chinese try to claim the South China Sea for their own, and the United States insists on asserting freedom of navigation.

As Adolf Hitler’s Nazi armies threatened Europe, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt urged a divided America to mobilize to defend democracy and freedom. Many Republicans accused FDR of leading the nation needlessly into war and demanded that America remain neutral. On June 20, 1940, FDR shocked the world by announcing that two prominent Republicans would take posts in his cabinet in the name of national unity.

In Alberta, Canada, at the foot of Dead Horse Mountain, a space capsule is discovered - a capsule that shouldn't exist. Thirty years earlier, Dr. Jan Lee, American entrepreneur and space tourist, purportedly destroyed this craft when he blew up the International Space Station in an act of unexplained sabotage. That event has since inspired conspiracy theories ranging from espionage to alien invasion.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Cynthia Tucker and award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflect on the role of the South in America's long descent into Trumpism. In 1974, Southern author John Egerton published his seminal work, The Americanization of Dixie, reflecting on the double-edged reality of the South becoming more like the rest of the country and vice versa. Tucker and Gaillard dive deeper into that reality from the time that Egerton published his book until the present.

War is a serious business - or is it? Christopher Anvil turns his sardonic sense of humor loose on the subject. Hard-SF legend and Analog regular Christopher Anvil brings together mind-bending ideas and grim-but-true black humor in the face of war's utter destruction in this mega-compilation.

There has never been a more important time - in corporate America and in the American military - for leaders, at all levels, to understand how to invest in people. This book teaches you to do just that. Written by a 27-year army colonel, veteran, and leader of more than 5,000 troops in the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, It's Personal, Not Personnel offers true stories and practical frameworks you can apply to the people in your organization and on your team.

In One Last Song, Ayers invites thirty musicians to consider what song they would each want to accompany them to those pearly white gates. Weaving together their explanations with evocative illustrations and poignant interludes-what your song to die to says about you, what songs famous people have died to, and more. The book offers insight into the minds of famous artists and provides an entry point for considering how integral music is to our own personal narratives.