Showing results by narrator "Paul Brion" in All Categories

Growing up on a farm in Ohio, George always preferred being outdoors and exploring. This made school a challenge, but his hunting, fishing, and trapping skills helped put food on his family's table. As a poor teenager living in a rough area, he got into regular brawls, and he found holding down a job hard because of his wanderlust. After working out West with the CCC, he decided that joining the Marines offered him the opportunity for adventure plus three square meals a day; so he and his brother joined the Corps in 1941.

An unexpected guest on the steps of the clubhouse turns Slayer's world upside down. Scrambling to make sense of everything and adjusting to a life he never expected has Slayer asking for help from the last person he thought could ever help him. Wendy. Can the feisty woman be the one to help him, or will she realize Slayer and the new woman in his life is too much to deal with?

In How I Rob Banks: And Other Such Places, renowned ethical hacker FC delivers a gripping and often hilarious discussion of his work: testing the limits of physical bank security by trying to "steal" money, data, and anything else he can get his hands on. In the book, you'll explore the secretive world of physical assessments and follow FC as he breaks into banks and secure government locations to identify security flaws and loopholes.

Whether you live in a mountain cabin or a city loft, plant spirits present themselves to us everywhere. Since its first edition in 1995, Plant Spirit Medicine has passed among countless audiences drawn to indigenous spirituality and all things alive and green. In this updated edition, Eliot Cowan invites us to discover the healing power of plants - not merely their physical medicinal properties, but the deeper wisdom and gifts that they offer.

Psychedelic Shamanism presents the spiritual and shamanic properties of psychotropic plants and discusses how they can be used to understand the structure of human consciousness. Author Jim DeKorne offers authoritative information about the cultivation, processing, and correct dosages for various psychotropic plant substances, including the belladonna alkaloids, d-lysergic acid amide, botanical analogues of LSD, mescaline, ayahuasca, DMT, and psilocybin.

The last time I saw Nevada Kane, I was 17, and he was loading his things into the back of his truck, about to embark on a 14-hour drive to the only college that offered him a full ride to play basketball. I told him I'd wait for him. He promised to do the same. But life happened. I broke my promise long before he ever broke his - and not because I wanted to. We never saw each other again.... Until 10 years later, when Nevada unexpectedly returned to our hometown after an abrupt retirement from his professional basketball career. Suddenly, he was everywhere.

Emmy Bonaire has built a successful career as a historian by anticipating the worst outcome and avoiding it at all costs. What she couldn't foresee was her history museum having to combine with the science museum across campus. Even worse, Emmy now has to share an office and design an exhibition with an annoyingly attractive fellow curator, Dr. Ryan Andersson, a paleontologist whose optimism is only topped by Emmy's skepticism of him.

The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities. This entertaining book charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth of compact discs to resurgence among independent music makers.

Schlock horror director Landis Woodley lives in a decaying mansion in the Hollywood Hills. When he abandoned the movie business, he also left a laundry list of enemies, including the IRS. But avid fan Clint Stockbern is determined to write a piece on the alcoholic recluse for Monster magazine. Woodley agrees to the interview—for $600 in cash. As the tape recorder starts rolling, Stockbern travels back in time with Woodley. He hears recollections of Attack of the Haunted Saucer and Blood Ghouls of Malibu. But he really wants to know about Woodley's masterpiece, Cadaver.

Continue the journey in this dark fantasy with Shade and Kate Medici. Lorenzo discovers his mother isn't the only one born with unique powers. Alec makes his final bid for political power and is prepared to take down anyone who stands in his way. There is nothing more dangerous than a vampire with nothing more to lose. You won't believe what happens when he returns to exact his own revenge.

It shouldn't be a surprise to Azy that her pregnancy is...different. Everything else about her has been too. A girl from Chicago who is half mermaid and mated to a dragon Wyvern? Yeah. That's not exactly the kind of life she can talk to anyone about. But she's only a few months along and already the size of a house. She'll happily let her little ones take over her entire body if it will keep them safe from the woes of the world, which not only include the dark forces of hell, but also uninvited mermaids, a whole crew of wedding planning friends, and a bizarre prophecy.

When he met her, he knew how it would end. Shade Medici, a warrior king and sole male heir to the dynasty, is expected to mate and produce an heir to secure the continuation of the Medici coven. He's waited over five hundred years for the right mate, and when he meets Kate Reese, his attraction is more than primal—it's merciless. She's also mortal.

In the fifteenth century, even before the city states of the Apennine Peninsula began to coalesce into what would become, several centuries later, a nation, "Italy" exerted enormous influence over all of Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Viewing the Italy (the many Italies?) of that time through the lens of today allows us to gather a fragmented, multi-faceted, and seemingly contradictory history into a single unifying narrative that speaks to our current reality as much as it does to a specific historical period. This is what the French historian Fernand Braudel achieves here.

Cage Gylden is one lucky son of a dragon. He should have died when his soul shard was stolen, but his mate saved his life. Too bad he's never met her and she's in hell. As a warrior, he will do everything in his power to defeat the Black Dragon and rescue her, whether she wants to be saved or not, even if he has to sacrifice his own life. Everyone Azynsa loves gets hurt or dies. She won't allow herself to feel for those around her, not since her father died and her mother's people came for her. These two are in for one hell of a time trying to save each other, and themselves.

The Rise of the West is famous for its ambitious scope and intellectual rigor. In it, McNeill challenges the Spengler-Toynbee view that a number of separate civilizations pursued essentially independent careers, and argues instead that human cultures interacted at every stage of their history. The author suggests that, from the Neolithic beginnings of grain agriculture to the present, major social changes in all parts of the world were triggered by new or newly important foreign stimuli, and he presents a persuasive narrative of world history to support this claim.

Not everyone can become a tyrant. It requires a particular confluence of events to gain absolute control over entire nations. First, you must be born with the potential to develop brutal personality traits. Second, your predisposition to antisocial behavior must be developed and strengthened during childhood. Finally, you must come of age when the political system of your country is unstable.

Convulsed by a civilizational crisis, the great thinkers of the Renaissance set out to reconceive the nature of society. Corrupt and reckless tyrants sowing discord and ruling through fear; elites who prized wealth and status over the common good; military leaders waging endless wars. Their solution was simple and radical. They would rebuild their city, and their civilization, by transforming the moral character of its citizens. Soulcraft, they believed, was a precondition of successful statecraft.

Forever Prisoners offers the first broad history of immigrant detention in the United States. Elliott Young focuses on five stories, including Chinese detained off the coast of Washington in the late 1880s, an "insane" Russian-Brazilian Jew caught on a ship shuttling between New York and South America during World War I, Japanese Peruvians kidnapped and locked up in a Texas jail during World War II, a prison uprising by Mariel Cuban refugees in 1987, and a Salvadoran mother who grew up in the United States and has spent years incarcerated while fighting deportation.

Our human psyches possess astonishing resources that wait within us, but we might not even know they exist until we discover how to access them and cultivate their powers, their untapped potentials and depths. Wild Mind identifies these resources - which Bill Plotkin calls the four facets of the self, or the four dimensions of our innate human wholeness - and also the four sets of fragmented or wounded subpersonalities that form during childhood.

In July of 1781, an American privateer sailing out of New London, Connecticut, captured the British merchantman the Hanna, loaded with a bounty of luxury goods destined for British officers based in New York City. That action induced the British supreme leader of British forces in America to grant permission to the infamous traitor Benedict Arnold to lead an 1,800-man punitive amphibious expedition to destroy the American privateer base in New London.