Showing results by narrator "Peter Berkrot" in All Categories

Dave R. Stuart Jr.’s work is centered on a simple belief: all students and teachers can flourish. Yet that seemingly simple goal can feel unattainable when teachers are expected to teach core content within the disciplines and improve literacy in their classrooms. How can teachers and students flourish under so much pressure? Stuart’s advice: Take a deep breath and refocus on six known best practices—establish and strengthen key beliefs, then build knowledge and increase reading, writing, speaking and listening, and argumentation in every content area, every day.

Tomorrow, the funk descends on Manhattan, a noxious cloud that separates the island from the rest of the world and mutates the population. Some generations on, the surviving population exists amid the rubble of modernity, wearing our cast-off clothing, worshipping celebrities as dim gods, and using emojis in place of written language. The Island exists in a state of uneasy peace, with each neighborhood an independent fiefdom, protecting itself with scrap metal spears and Molotov cocktails.

Recalling the great muckrakers of the past, an outraged team of America's best-selling writers unite to confront the disasters of wrongful convictions. Wrongful convictions, long regarded as statistical anomalies in an otherwise sound justice system, now appear with frightening regularity. But few people understand just how or why they happen and, more important, the immeasurable consequences that often haunt the lucky few who are acquitted years after they are proven innocent.

Caddyshack is one of the most beloved comedies of all time, a classic snobs vs. slobs story of working-class kids and the white-collar buffoons that make them haul their golf bags in the hot summer sun. It has sex, drugs, and one very memorable candy bar, but the movie we all know and love didn't start out that way, and everyone who made it certainly didn't have the word classic in mind as the cameras were rolling.

The Kosher Capones tells the fascinating story of Chicago’s Jewish gangsters from Prohibition into the 1980s. Author Joe Kraus traces these gangsters through the lives, criminal careers, and conflicts of Benjamin “Zukie the Bookie” Zuckerman, last of the independent West Side Jewish bosses, and Lenny Patrick, eventual head of the Syndicate’s “Jewish wing.”

Brilliantly imagined and deeply informed by P. T. Deutermann's long history as a navy captain, as well as his family's service in the Pacific theater, The Second Sun is a compelling novel timed for the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.

The Great War ravaged the face of the Earth many years ago. In the years that passed, society rebuilt, mixing machinery and magic to form something new. Angel, a daring adventurer in the pursuit of powerful magic, scours the desert endlessly, in search of ancient magic. When he’s given an offer he can’t refuse, he finds out that he’s not the only one seeking lost knowledge. Others seek the same power, but their methods leave cities razed in acrid smoke and the innocent in their wake. Angel will have to determine just how far he’s willing to go to accomplish his goals.

Norfolk, England, November 1944: After a series of dangerous missions in the South of France, US Army Captain Billy Boyle is finally on leave, and is settling into a peaceful rest at the country estate of Sir Richard Seaton, the father of Billy’s British lover, Diana. Seaton Manor is a comfortable haven, and Billy is eager to spend a few precious days in Diana’s company pretending the war is far away.

This fictional recreation of the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 is a stunning work of imaginative history, from Shelby Foote, beloved historian of the Civil War. Shiloh conveys not only the bloody choreography of Union and Confederate troops through the woods near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, but the inner movements of the combatants' hearts and minds.

In The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics, James Kakalios uses examples from comics and magazines to explain how breakthroughs in quantum mechanics led to such technologies as the World Wide Web, pocket-sized computers, mobile phones, and MRI machines.....

May 1944: Captain Billy Boyle is convicted on spurious charges of black market dealings—stripped of his officer’s rank, reduced to private, and sentenced to three months’ hard labor. But Billy is given an opportunity: if he takes on the incredibly dangerous mission of investigating a set...

O. Henry, the pseudonym of the American writer William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), is best known for writing stories full of wit, wordplay, and warm characterizations, and particularly for their clever twist endings. This volume contains 20 of O. Henry's best and best-loved stories. They are marked by coincidence and surprise endings as well as the compassion and high humor that have made O. Henry's stories popular for the last century.

Few American battles have been so extended, savage, and personal. A handful of Americans volunteered to live among six thousand Vietnamese, training farmers to defend their village. Such "Combined Action Platoons" (CAPs) are not a lost footnote about how the war could have been fought; only the villagers remain to bear witness. This is the story of 15 resolute young Americans matched against two hundred Viet Cong; how a CAP lived, fought, and died; and why the villagers remember them to this day.

Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon mischievously materialized in the scientific imagination itself. Scientists began to employ hypothetical beings to perform certain roles in thought experiments―experiments that can only be done in the imagination―and these impish assistants helped scientists achieve major breakthroughs that pushed forward the frontiers of science and technology.

World War III explodes in seconds when a resurgent Russian federation launches a deadly armored thrust into the heart of Germany. With a powerful blizzard providing cover, Russian tanks thunder down the autobahns while specially trained Spetsnaz teams strike at vulnerable command points. Standing against them are the woefully undermanned American forces. What they lack in numbers, they make up for in superior weapons and training.

Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender has a rule about never taking a job that pays too well: In the criminal underworld, if you’re offered more money than a job is worth, someone is going to end up dead. But he’s bending his rule this one time because he and his girlfriend, Ronnie, are in desperate need of cash to hire a kidnapper to snatch Ronnie’s two-year-old son back from her ex. The whole thing is pretty complicated and has Junior on edge.

Joining the fight for the Galaxy isn't required. It's a choice. The United Galactic Government is mired in a decade-long war for control of a key planet. Weakened by overextension and political intrigue, they could lose everything. When a child of privilege gives up everything to enlist and fight for what is right, he learns what it means to become part of a team. He encounters refugees, aliens he never expected to empathize with, and the loss of comrades. In the end he must develop the courage to stand up, not only to aliens and governments, but his own family.

This follow-up to the national best-seller A Study in Sherlock is a stunning new volume of original stories compiled by award-winning Sherlockians Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger.

Victor Asteriscus is just like any other acolyte treading on the Magus Path until his comrades betray him for a broken artifact. In a moment of desperation, he accidentally stumbles upon an abandoned academy and receives a System that allows him to summon Players. Yep, that's right. These “Players” from his old world will help him embark on a quest to develop the academy, complete various missions, and harness the power of magic. Let them kill magical beasts so that he can be promoted further? That’s too simple!

The Books of Blood combine the ordinary with the extraordinary while radiating the eroticism that has become Barker's signature. Weaving tales of the everyday world transformed into an unrecognizable place, where reason no longer exists and logic ceases to explain the workings of the universe, Clive Barker provides the stuff of nightmares in packages too tantalizing to resist.