Showing results by narrator "Gary Dikeos" in All Categories

From roots to canopy, a lush, verdant history of the making of California. California now has more trees than at any time since the late Pleistocene. This green landscape, however, is not the work of nature. It’s the work of history. In the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California landscape, harnessing nature to their vision of the good life. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers began to "improve" the bare, brown countryside, planting millions of trees to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped cities.

The powerful story of an unlikely friendship and a doctor’s re-education on the battlefields of the Vietnam War. Fresh out of medical school and planning to enter academia, David pragmatically applies to serve in the US Army, thinking he would rather work in a stateside military hospital than get drafted. But when he gets reassigned to Southeast Asia, he suddenly finds himself on a base in Vietnam. He joins a civilian aid mission on a supposedly secure plateau, and spends his days dispensing pills to villagers.

Considered a master of the short story, Saki was best known for his witty and mischievous stories that satirized the culture and society of Edwardian England. In "The Open Window" his best-known vignette, a teenage girl regales the tale of an eerie family tragedy to a high-strung visitor, who receives something of a shock.

Superheroes soar in this promising debut—and they’re kids! Twelve-year-old Daniel, the new kid in town, soon learns the truth about his nice—but odd—new friends: one can fly, another can turn invisible, yet another controls electricity. Incredible. The superkids use their powers to...

Judy: A Legendary Film Career tells the story of Garland’s movie work in unprecedented detail. Hundreds of never-before-published photos, newly-assembled contemporary reviews, insight from her costars and coworkers, and production histories are provided for each film in which she appeared. Highlighting and complimenting the feature films is a definitive biography; an examination of Judy’s short subjects; details of the movies she did not complete; and an enthralling compendium of film projects for which she was considered or rumored.

A year after the AIDS-related death of filmmaker Clarence Laird, known to friends as Angel Clare, his young boyfriend, Michael, is still in deep mourning. Clarence’s older, sophisticated friends—male and female, gay and straight—find themselves the custodians of Michael, a callow kid they never liked much to begin with. What follows is a dark, intimate comedy about real grief and false grief, misunderstanding, friendship, love, and forgiveness.

Blood isn't always thicker than water. Mason Fitzgerald recently discovered a world hidden within our own that was filled with fae, sheers, vampires, and werewolves. While his friends and family help him search for the person responsible for his parents' deaths, he discovers that someone he thought he could trust has been working against him the entire time. He's lost some of his allies, but has gained some unlikely new ones. Will Mason be able to avenge his parents' deaths, or will he lose everything and everyone he loves?

The Rossi family received only a handful of letters after their son shipped out on the supertanker Aurora Victorious. The first dispatches were from Harold himself, describing the blend of tedium and excitement that defined life onboard the ship. The last communication came from the ship's owners: four brief sentences informing them that their son had died and been buried at sea.

Pittsburgh has recently (and more than once) been called the most livable city in America; yet the old image of smoky skies and steel mills spewing forth grit has never quite disappeared. Its history as a dirty industrial center is a part of its residents, a part of their toughness. The people of the steel city fight.

A genderless alien from Ellipsia, a planet whose inhabitants have no concept of individuality, comes to Earth on an intergalactic exchange program to learn how to become human. To live here, the traveler must study and understand our inclinations for seeing people as distinct beings - the nature of gender, and at the heart of identity, the word I. At once funny and serious, Journal from Ellipsia offers a starkly objective view on our own humanity.

A haunting debut novel about a psychically shattered patrician New England family and one of its sons, implicated in the mysterious death of his alcoholic father. The time is the 1990s. Simon Curtis, in his mid-thirties, is a painter, a yearning, troubled loner still burdened with the unfinished business of childhood. He seeks refuge for the summer in his family’s house in Maine, and then, for the fall, in their place in Massachusetts - despite his father’s insistence that he is not welcome.

Wrecker is an abandoned child for whom life turns around in most unexpected ways. It's June of 1965 when Wrecker enters the world. The war is raging in Vietnam, San Francisco is tripping toward flower power, and Lisa Fay, Wrecker's birth mother, is knocked nearly sideways by life as a single parent in a city she can barely manage to navigate on her own. Three years later, she's in prison, and Wrecker is left to bounce around in the system before he's shipped off to live with distant relatives in the wilds of Humboldt County, California.

AD 2053. Earth has barely recovered from a supernova that destroyed much of its infrastructure, and now a deadly particle storm is racing toward it. An international effort has been launched out of the Sky City space colony to save the planet, but the plan to build a giant protective shield is falling dangerously behind schedule. A series of murders has disrupted the workforce, so a brilliant but monstrous criminal has been enlisted to track down the killer. Then more startling news arises.

San Francisco jazz pianist Evan Horne takes a gig in Los Angeles, where he’s offered his most unusual job yet. Movie megastar Ryan Stiles hires Evan to teach him to look like he’s playing piano for an upcoming role. Evan stays at Stiles’ lush Malibu home for the tutoring, but things suddenly go wrong for the arrogant, spoiled star. Stiles’ adversarial relationship with the paparazzi explodes when a photographer is killed. Was it an accident, or is Stiles himself a suspect? Evan wants out.

El Arte de la Guerra es el mejor libro de estrategia de todos los tiempos. Inspiró a Napoleón, Maquiavelo, Mao Tse Tung, y muchas más figuras históricas. Este libro de dos mil quinientos años de antigüedad es uno de los más importantes textos clásicos Chinos, en el que, a pesar del tiempo transcurrido, ninguna de sus máximas ha quedado anticuada, ni hay un solo consejo que hoy no sea útil. Pero la obra del general Sun-tzu no es únicamente un libro de práctica militar....

Ancient legend tells of an army of knights that will remain sleeping until the last days. The knights are waking up. A homeless man is stalked by a pale, wraithlike creature with a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. Maimed animals and a host of suicides cluster around a mountain in Scotland. And deep beneath the cobbled streets of Oxford, a malicious hoard besieges a hidden city. Freya Reynolds is a university student with a touch of OCD and an obsession with myth and folklore.