Search:

Results 371 to 380 of 425 | « previous |

The house at Watch Hill : a novel / by Moning, Karen Marie,author.;
Zo Grey is reeling from the sudden death of her mother when she receives a surprising call from an attorney in Divinity, Louisiana, with the news she has been left an inheritance by a distant relative, the terms of which he will only discuss in person. Destitute and alone, with nothing left to lose, Zo heads to Divinity and discovers she is the sole beneficiary of a huge fortune and a monstrosity of a house that sits ominously at the peak of Watch Hill--but she must live in it, alone, for three years before the house, or the money, is hers. Met with this irresistible opportunity to finally build a future for herself, Zo puts aside her misgivings about the foreboding Gothic mansion and the strange circumstances, and moves in, where she is quickly met by a red-eyed Stygian owl and an impossibly sexy Scottish groundskeeper. Her new home is full of countless secrets and mystifying riddles, with doors that go nowhere, others that are impossible to open, and a turret into which there is no visible means of ingress. And the townspeople are odd ... What Zo doesn't yet know is that her own roots lie in this very house and that in order to discover her true identity and awaken her dormant powers, she will have to face off against sinister forces she doesn't quite comprehend--or risk being consumed by them. --
Subjects: Witch fiction.; Vampire fiction.; Paranormal fiction.; Gothic fiction.; Novels.; Grief; Inheritance and succession; Magic; Mansions; Man-woman relationships; Secrecy; Vampires; Witches;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Where the falcon flies : a 3,400 kilometre odyssey from my doorstep to the Arctic / by Shoalts, Adam,1986-author.;
"From Canada's most accomplished adventurer and storyteller comes another gripping journey into the vastness of Canada's landscape and history, following the route of the migrating peregrine falcon. In March of 2020, Adam Shoalts set out from his front porch--the first steps of an adventure that will change our sense of the way our everyday lives are connected to the vastness of our small planet. Shoalts portaged his canoe down his driveway to Lake Erie. From there he followed the migrating peregrine falcon all the way to the arctic. His quest meant paddling along the shores of the Great Lakes, then travelling up the Saguenay River, through the forests and into the tundra, and then the Torngat mountains. In his signature style, Shoalts roams as much across time as he does across space, winding his way through a stunning landscape and the sites of battles, shipwrecks, and forgotten trading posts that define our country's history. But more importantly, he shows, mile-by-mile, how even our own driveways are connected to the network of ecosystems that support life around the globe. A work of gripping adventure writing and polished storytelling, and a tale with an unavoidably urgent ecological warning, Where the Falcon Flies is a masterwork of one of Canada's most successful and audacious authors"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Shoalts, Adam, 1986-; Canoes and canoeing;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 2
unAPI

Don't think, dear : on loving & leaving ballet / by Robb, Alice,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."An incisive exploration of ballet's role in the modern world, told through the experience of the author and her classmates at the most elite ballet school in the country: the School of American Ballet. Ballet is an art full of hyper-feminine trappings, but beneath the ornate costumes and exaggerated stage makeup, traits like thinness, stoicism, and submission are valued above all else. Journalist Alice Robb spent years immersed in that universe as a child, but as an adult, she couldn't shake the feeling that the same laws that governed the dance world still applied in the regular one. Certain bodies hold more value than others, and men oftentimes hold the most power of all. Pain is best left concealed, along with sexuality, in all of its messiness. Obedience and conformity are rewarded, while standing out comes at a cost. Profound, nuanced, and obsessively researched, Don't Think, Dear, is Robb's excavation of her adolescent years as a dancer, and an exploration of how those days informed her life for years to come. As she grapples with the pressure she faced as a student at the storied School of American Ballet, she explores the fates of her former classmates as well. From sweet and shy Emily--whose body was deemed "thin enough" only when she was too ill to eat--to the precocious and talented Meiying--who despite her success, had to contend with the fact that she was the only Vietnamese-American in the school. Altogether, their stories are ones of heartbreak and resilience, of reinvention and regret. Along the way, Robb weaves in the myths of famous ballerinas past and present, from the groundbreaking Misty Copeland, to the controversial George Balanchine. Ballet does not exist in a vacuum, it is a laboratory of womanhood, a test-tube world in which traditional femininity is exaggerated. By exploring the psyche of a dancer, Don't Think, Dear grapples with the contradictions and challenges of being a woman today. It's also a story about chasing your dreams, however complicated, and learning when to let them go"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Robb, Alice.; School of American Ballet; Ballerinas; Ballerinas; Ballet;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Little monsters : a novel / by Brodeur, Adrienne,author.;
"From the author of the bestselling memoir Wild Game comes a riveting novel about Cape Cod, complicated families, and long-buried secrets-for fans of the New York Times bestsellers The Paper Palace and Ask Again, Yes. Ken and Abby Gardner lost their mother when they were small and they have been haunted by her absence ever since. Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them mostly on his own in his remote home on Cape Cod, where the attachment between Ken and Abby deepened into something complicated-and as adults their relationship is strained. Now, years later, the siblings' lives are still deeply entwined. Ken is a successful businessman with political ambitions and a picture-perfect family and Abby is a talented visual artist who depends on her brother's goodwill, in part because he owns the studio where she lives and works. As the novel opens, Adam is approaching his seventieth birthday, staring down his mortality and fading relevance. He has always managed his bipolar disorder with medication, but he's determined to make one last scientific breakthrough and so he has secretly stopped taking his pills, which he knows will infuriate his children. Meanwhile, Abby and Ken are both harboring secrets of their own, and there is a new person on the periphery of the family-Steph, who doesn't make her connection known. As Adam grows more attuned to the frequencies of the deep sea and less so to the people around him, Ken and Abby each plan the elaborate gifts they will present to their father on his birthday, jostling for primacy in this small family unit. Set in the fraught summer of 2016, and drawing on the biblical tale of Cain and Abel, Little Monsters is an absorbing, sharply observed family story by a writer who knows Cape Cod inside and out-its Edenic lushness and its snakes"--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Novels.; Families; Father and child; Secrecy; Siblings;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Stolen focus : why you can't pay attention - and how to think deeply again / by Hari, Johann,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening-and how to get our attention back. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding it much harder to focus than he used to. He found that a life of constantly switching from device to device, from tab to tab, is diminishing and depressing. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions-even abandoning his phone for three months-but in the long-term, nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention and to study their scientific findings-and learned that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong. In the U.S., teenagers now focus on a task for only sixty-five seconds on average, and office workers manage only three minutes. We think this inability to focus is a personal flaw, an individual failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: Our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces, and the science shows that these forces have been ramping up for decades-leaving us uniquely vulnerable, when social media arrived, to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. These forces have been so successful that our collapse in attention is behind many of the wider problems society faces. In Stolen Focus, Hari embarks on a thrilling journey, taking readers from veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD, to Silicon Valley dissidents who exposed social media companies' furtive attempts to hack our focus; from a favela in Rio where everyone lost their attention in a particularly catastrophic way, to an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore their workers' attention. In this urgent, deeply researched book, Hari shows that if we understand the twelve true causes of this crisis-from the collapse of sustained reading to the disruption of boredom to rising pollution-we, as individuals and as a society, can finally begin to solve it by staging an "attention rebellion." Finally, we have a way to get our focus back"--
Subjects: Attention.; Distraction (Psychology);
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Stay true : a memoir / by Hsu, Hua,1977-author.;
"From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art. In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, a first-generation Taiwanese American who has a 'zine and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become best friends, a friendship built of late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of his best friend--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Hsu, Hua, 1977-; Hsu, Hua, 1977-; Ishida, Kenneth N., 1977-1998.; University of California, Berkeley; Children of immigrants; Coming of age.; Murder victims; Popular culture; Taiwanese Americans; Taiwanese Americans;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The story of a heart : two families, one heart, and the medical miracle that saved a child's life / by Clarke, Rachel(Physician),author.;
Includes bibliographical references."One summer day, nine-year-old Keira Ball was in a terrible car accident and suffered catastrophic brain injuries. As the rest of her body began to shut down, her heart continued to beat. In an act of extraordinary generosity, Keira's parents and siblings immediately agreed that she would have wanted to be an organ donor. Meanwhile nine-year-old Max Johnson had been in a hospital for nearly a year, valiantly fighting the virus that was causing his young heart to fail. When Max's parents received the call they had been hoping for, they knew it came at a terrible cost to another family--in what Clarke calls "the brutal arithmetic of transplant surgery." The act of Keira's heart resuming its rhythm inside Max's body was a medical miracle. But this was only part of the story. While waiting on the transplant list, Max had become the hopeful face of a campaign to change the UK's laws around organ donation. Following his successful surgery, Keira's mother saw the little boy beaming on the front page of the newspaper and knew it was the same boy whose parents had recently sent her an anonymous letter overflowing with gratitude for her daughter's heart. The two mothers began to exchange messages and eventually decided to meet"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Johnson, Max, 2008-; Ball, Keira, 2008-2017; Donation of organs, tissues, etc.; Donation of organs, tissues, etc.; Heart; Organ donors; Organ donors; Transplantation of organs, tissues, etc. in children;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

All the worst humans : how I made news for dictators, tycoons, and politicians / by Elwood, Phil(Philip),author.;
Includes bibliographical references."A bridge-burning, riotous memoir by a top PR operative in Washington who exposes the secrets of the 129-billion-dollar industry that controls so much of what we see and hear in the media -- from a man who used to pull the strings, and who is now pulling back the curtain. After nearly two decades in the Washington PR business, Elwood wants to come clean, by exposing the dark underbelly of the very industry that's made him so successful. The first step is revealing exactly what he's been up to for the past twenty years -- and it isn't pretty. Elwood has worked for a murderer's row of clients, including Gaddafi, Assad, and the government of Qatar -- namely, the bad guys. In All the Worst Humans, Elwood unveils how the PR business works, and how the truth gets made, spun, and sold to the public -- not shying away from the gritty details of his unlikely career. This is a piercing look into the corridors of money, power, politics, and control, all told in Elwood's disarmingly funny and entertaining voice. He recounts a four-day Las Vegas bacchanal with a dictator's son, plotting communications strategies against a terrorist organization in Western Africa, and helping to land a Middle Eastern dictator's wife a glowing profile in Vogue on the same time the Arab Spring broke out. And he reveals all his slippery tricks for seducing journalists in order to create chaos and ultimately cover for politicians, dictators, and spies -- the industry-secret tactics that led to his rise as a political PR pro. Along the way, Phil walks the halls of the Capitol, rides in armored cars through Abuja, and watches his client lose his annual income at the roulette table. But as he moved up the ranks, he felt worse and worse about the sleaziness of it all -- until Elwood receives a shocking wake-up call from the FBI. This risky game nearly cost Elwood his life and his freedom. Seeing the light, Elwood decides to change his ways, and his clients, and to tell the full truth about who is the worst human"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Elwood, Phil (Philip); Communication in politics.; Political consultants; Public relations and politics.; Public relations consultants;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Your life depends on it : what you can do to make better choices about your health / by Miron-Shatz, Talya,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."Medicine used to be a paternalistic affair: a doctor's job was to make all the decisions, and a patient's job was to obey them. But technological, economic, and cultural changes over the last century have given us unprecedented control over our own healthcare. We have been turned into healthcare consumers, expected to work with doctors on complicated medical decisions. But just how capable are we of making those decisions? Talya Miron-Shatz is an expert in the psychology of risk and decision-making. She points out that medical decisions, whether about undergoing chemotherapy or treating a sprained ankle, are among the most difficult choices we ever make. They are personal and often require us to act quickly. The doctors we rely on are under pressure to make money for hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. And even if they have your best interests at heart, they often simply don't know enough about us, nor do they have the time to learn. The decisions we make about our health are riddled with psychological traps. As a result, we are likely to misuse medication, fall for pseudoscientific cure-alls, undergo needless procedures, and avoid the doctor when we should be getting help. If you need further proof, look no further than the coronavirus pandemic, in which responses from Americans have ranged from ignorance, to confusion, to outright defiance over the simple choice of wearing a mask. Your Life Depends on It offers an unsparing yet sympathetic diagnosis of the ways of thinking that lead to bad medical choices, shines a light on how the medical system fails and sometimes even capitalizes on patients' ignorance, and maps a new model for creating effective doctor-patient relationships. And ultimately, these insights give us a better way of thinking about a question that extends beyond medicine: What's the best way to make important decisions when it isn't possible to know all the facts? Your Life Depends on It offers a new take on the science of making good decisions, where it will build on the success of books like Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge. But while most books in this space are happy to talk about relatively mundane topics like clothing sales or traffic patterns, this book is a vital guide to the choices that matter most, the choices your life depends on"--
Subjects: Health behavior.; Health;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Almost surely dead / by Akhtar, Amina,author.;
"Dunia Ahmed lives an ordinary life-or she definitely used to. Now she's the subject of a true crime podcast. She's been missing for over a year, and no one knows if she's dead or alive. But her story has listeners obsessed, and people everywhere are sporting merch that demands "Find Dunia!" In the days before her disappearance, Dunia is a successful pharmacist living in New York. The daughter of Pakistani immigrants, she's coping with a broken engagement and the death of her mother. But then something happens that really shakes up her world: someone tries to murder her. When her would-be killer winds up dead, Dunia figures the worst is over. But then there's another attempt on her life ... and another. And police suspect someone close to her may be the culprit. Dunia struggles to make sense of what's happening. And as childhood superstitions seep into her reality, she becomes convinced that someone-or something-is truly after her"--
Subjects: Thrillers (Fiction); Psychological fiction.; Novels.; Assassins; Attempted murder; Missing persons; Murder; Pakistani American women; Pakistani Americans; Parents; Serial murderers; Suicide; Women pharmacists;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Results 371 to 380 of 425 | « previous |