Showing results by narrator "Chris Patton" in All Categories

In The Dorito Effect, Mark Schatzker shows us how our approach to the nation's number-one public health crisis has gotten it wrong. The epidemics of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are not tied to the overabundance of fat or carbs. Instead we have been led astray by the growing divide between flavor - the tastes we crave - and the underlying nutrition.

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. This first volume contains the short stories : "The Book of Blood," "The Midnight Meat Train," "The Yattering and Jack," "Sex, Death, and Starshine," and "In the Hills, the Cities,"

For Denny Graubert, the chaotic summer of 1967 - when the screams of napalm bombs on the nightly news drowned the cheers of the All-Star game - brings the painful realization that childhood has passed. While engaging in his favorite domestic spying game, Denny unwittingly discovers the desperate measures his mother will take to save his autistic older brother, Fad, who is lost in the diagnostic Dark Ages of autism.

Liam Rush has never ventured too far outside the fences of his family farm, so college is a pretty big deal for him. Now he can finally claim his own identity - one that doesn't involve football, hunting, farm work, or four overbearing brothers. But when he finds himself falling for the androgynous dancer at Trybe, where he works as a bouncer, things get confusing. He's never been attracted to guys before. Not really. And what would the folks back home say if they knew?

The searing accounts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginsberg, and Varlam Shalamov opened the world's eyes to the terrors of the Soviet Gulag. But not until now has there been a memoir of life inside the camps written from the perspective of an actual employee of the Secret police. In this riveting memoir, superbly translated by Deborah Kaple, Fyodor Mochulsky describes being sent to work as a boss at the forced labor camp of Pechorlag in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle.

In the title story, a white aspiring professor is convinced she is being followed. No need to panic - she has a handgun stowed away in her purse, just in case. But when she turns to confront her black male shadow, the situation isn't what she expects. In "The Rescuer" a promising graduate student detours to inner-city Trenton, New Jersey, to save her brother from a downward spiral. But she soon finds out there may be more to his world than to hers.

Xander Miyamoto would rather do almost anything than listen to his sixth grade teacher, Mr. Stedman, drone on about weather disasters happening around the globe. When spring break begins at last, Xander plans to spend it playing computer games with his best friend, Peyton. Xander's father briefly distracts him with a comic book about some samurai warrior who pops out of a peach pit. Little does either boy know that the comic is a warning that they are about to be thrust into the biggest adventure of their lives.

"A beast. Not quite wolf or bear, gorilla or dog but a horrible new creature who walks upright – a creature with fangs and claws and hair springing from every pore. I am a monster. You think I’m talking fairy tales? No way. The place is New York City. The time is now. It’s no deformity, no disease. And I’ll stay this way forever – ruined – unless I can break the spell...."

Matt Turner grew up witnessing firsthand the worst crimes imaginable. At age nine, he discovered his special ability to "read" the emotional imprints people leave on objects. Against better judgment, his police detective father used his son’s talent to help him solve crimes. Now, at 26, Matt tries to keep to himself, but an enemy he thought long gone interrupts his tropical vacation, flying him all over the globe to help track a 3,500-year-old Egyptian opal found sealed in a Cuban tree trunk.

Listeners know that few authors are able to create an atmosphere of unease and terror as well as Oates, a fact confirmed by the four novellas presented here. All the novellas in this collection revolve around the theme of love gone wrong - horribly, shockingly wrong.

Timothy Van Bender, Yale graduate and hedge fund manager in Palo Alto, lives a magical life: His business mints money; his wife, Katherine, is beautiful and charming; his young sexy secretary,Tricia, greets him each morning with a flirtatious smile. Then, one Tuesday, everything changes. Timothy wakes to learn that his hedge fund has lost $24 million on a bad bet against the yen. Timothy decides to double down and bet again.

Seventeen-year-old Cardinal has escaped the virus that ravaged his town, leaving its victims alive but without their memories. Choosing to remain in the quarantined zone, he cares for a group of orphaned kids in a mountain camp with the help of the former brutal school bully, now transformed by the virus into his best friend. But then a strong-willed and mysterious young woman appears, and the closed-off world Cardinal has created begins to crumble.

Sagara Sousuke isn't your typical high school student. He reads military enthusiast magazines; he responds to questions with "affirmative;" he brings grenades to school in his bag. Though everyone at school takes him for a hopeless military geek, Chidori Kaname thinks there might be something more to him. When their plane is hijacked in the middle of a field trip, Kaname's instincts will prove correct: Sousuke is an elite, mech-piloting mercenary... and he's here to protect her!

Two months after Sunan, Sousuke and Kaname are in a holding pattern. He'll fire his rifle off the school roof. She'll yell at him to stop. Lather, rinse, repeat. That all changes one day when Sousuke's commanding officer Teletha "Tessa" Testarossa shows up at his apartment, trying to hide a key to a terrorist superweapon of unprecedented power. Tessa is brilliant, pretty, and the same age as Sousuke, and her presence might put a serious crimp on his relationship with Kaname... assuming the city survives the night!

Kaname is in the doldrums: There's just one week until the end of summer vacation, and she hasn't done anything interesting! Fortunately, Sousuke is here to provide a little adventure by offering her a trip to Merida Island. But what starts for Kaname as a simple trip to learn more about the mystery surrounding her quickly snowballs into a firefight in a chemical weapons facility, a reunion with a mortal enemy, and a battle for control of a runaway submarine! However things turn out, at least she can't claim that her summer was uneventful.