Showing results by narrator "robert fass" in All Categories

For the past decade, an audacious program called Football Dreams has held tryouts for millions of young boys across Africa, looking for soccer's next superstars. Led by the Spanish scout who helped launch Lionel Messi's career and funded by the desert kingdom of Qatar, the program chooses just a handful of boys each year to train to become professionals; the process is one thousand times more selective than getting into Harvard University.

What is it like to encounter cancer? How does it feel to face the unknown, to enter a world of hope, loss, and dread? From the diagnosis of his childhood friend’s mother to his poignant memories in the lab, David Scadden’s seen the unknown world of cancer from the lens of a young boy, a classmate, a researcher, a friend, a doctor, and a neighbor. Scadden chronicles his personal memories of cancer - his visits to his sick neighbor and his classmate who left school and never came back.

"Vlad" is Vlad the Impaler, of course, whose mythic cruelty was an inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula. In this sly sequel, Vlad really is undead. More than a postmodern riff on 'the vampire craze,' Vlad is also an anatomy of the Mexican bourgeoisie, as well as our culture's ways of dealing with death. For - as in Dracula - Vlad has need of both a lawyer and a real-estate agent in order to establish his new kingdom, and Yves Navarro and his wife Asuncion fit the bill nicely. Having recently lost a son, might they not welcome the chance to see their remaining child live forever?

Lincoln's Citadel is a fresh, absorbing narrative history of Lincoln’s leadership in Civil War Washington. Here is the vivid story of how the Lincoln administration met the immense challenges the war posed to the city, transforming a vulnerable capital into a bastion for the Union.

On a Thursday in November of 2013, Guadalupe Morales waited anxiously with her sister-in-law and their four small children. Every Latino man who drove away from their shared apartment above a small auto repair shop that day had failed to return - arrested, one by one, by ICE agents and local police. As the two women discussed what to do next, a SWAT team clad in body armor and carrying assault rifles stormed the room. In Separated, William D. Lopez examines the lasting damage done by this daylong act of collaborative immigration enforcement in Washtenaw County, Michigan.

To Charles Fort, with Love is award-winning fantasist Caitlín R. Kiernan’s third collection of short fiction, a haunting parade of the terrible things which may lie beyond the boundaries of science, the minds which may exist beyond psychology, and the forbidden places which will never be located in any orthodox globe. A deceptively even dozen, this collection includes Kiernan’s celebrated stories “Onion” and “Andromeda Among the Stones”, as well as a number of more obscure pieces.

In this well-rounded, deeply investigated biography, the first full look at the vice president, two award-winning journalists unmask the real Mike Pence. In this landmark biography, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael D’Antonio and Emmy-nominated journalist Peter Eisner follow the path Pence followed from Catholic Democrat to conservative evangelical Republican. As The Shadow President reveals, Mike Pence is the most important and powerful Christian right politician America has ever seen.

October 1944: In the long, narrow undressing rooms in Auschwitz-Birkenau, prisoner Jakub Bak toils under the scrutiny of SS guards. Like other members of the Sonderkommando, Jakub was selected on arrival for an unthinkable job: sorting through the clothes of the dead and moving their bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoriums. Jakub clings to the promise he made to his murdered father - to live, at any cost - and to the moments he is able to spend in the company of Anna, imprisoned in the women's camp.

Joseph and Evelyn’s New England beach homes have been side by side for generations. And in the summer of 1941, on the shores where they were raised, these two childhood friends fell in love. Now, more than sixty years later, Joseph and Evelyn gather their three grown children to share the staggering news: in one year’s time, they will end their lives on their own terms. She has received a diagnosis and he cannot – will not – live without her.

In Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality, Hector Macdonald explores how truth is used and abused in politics, business, the media and everyday life. He shows how a clearer understanding of truth's many faces renders us better able to navigate our world and more influential within it. Combining great storytelling with practical takeaways and a litany of fascinating, funny, and insightful case studies, Truth is a sobering and engaging listen about how profoundly our mindsets and actions are influenced by the truths that those around us choose to tell.

The first of Plimpton's remarkable forays into participatory journalism, Out of My League chronicles with wit, charm, and grace what happens when a self-professed amateur has the chance to answer every fan's question: could he strike out a major league star? Plimpton's inspired idea - to get on the mound and pitch a few innings to the All-Stars of the American and National Leagues - begins as a fun-filled stunt and comes to a deeply hellish, nearly humiliating end.

In this breathtakingly imaginative audiobook - now appearing in audio for the first time - we enter the mind of an unnamed artist of prodigious talent and intelligence who is determined to correct the world's wrongs via a direct confrontation with the Almighty, no matter what the consequences. A spellbinding tale told by a memorably unreliable narrator, It Happened in Boston? places you inside a vivid world that brilliantly and surprisingly interweaves art, genius, love, madness, betrayal, God - and murder.

Carol Andreas was a traditional 1950s housewife from a small Mennonite town in central Kansas who became a radical feminist and Marxist revolutionary. From the late sixties to the early eighties, she went through multiple husbands and countless lovers while living in three states and five countries. She took her youngest son, Peter, with her wherever she went, even kidnapping him and running off to South America after his straitlaced father won a long and bitter custody fight.

In the past two decades, GMOs have come to dominate the American diet. Advocates hail them as the future of food, an enhanced method of crop breeding that can help feed an ever-increasing global population and adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Critics, meanwhile, call for their banishment, insisting GMOs were designed by overeager scientists and greedy corporations to bolster an industrial food system that forces us to rely on cheap, unhealthy, processed food so they can turn an easy profit.

1943. The supernatural alchemy for the ultimate weapon, encoded in an ancient biblical text, has fallen into the hands of the most ruthless secret society known to man---the Nazi SS. Present Day. Dishonorably discharged from the armed forces after the events of The Promised War, Sam Deker is trying to build a new life in Los Angeles.

Two never before published novellas from some of our very best crime writers, compiled and edited by Ed McBain.

The tight-knit residents of Blue Moon Mountain, nestled high in the Colorado Mountains, form an interconnected community of those living off the land, stunned by the beauty and isolation all around them. So when, at the onset of winter, the town veterinarian commits a violent act, the repercussions of that tragedy will be felt all across the mountainside, upending their lives and causing their paths to twist and collide in unexpected ways.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter, a powerful and cathartic portrait of a country grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic - from fear and being overwhelmed to extraordinary resilience - told through voices of people from all across America.

A humorous yet practical five-step guide to ridding ourselves - and our companies - of the bureaucratic bottlenecks and red tape that plagues every office. How often in your life do you spend time following a rule or a procedure that makes no sense, offers little or no advantage and slows you down in the process? In a world of work governed by a system of well-intentioned rules, that's something that happens all too often. 

During the harshest year of the Great Depression, Lorena Hickok, a top woman news reporter of the day and intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, was hired by FDR’s right-hand man Harry Hopkins to embark upon a grueling journey to the hardest-hit areas of the country to report back on the degree of devastation. Distinguished historian Michael Golay draws on a trove of original sources - including the moving, remarkably intimate, almost daily letters between Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt - as he re-creates that extraordinary journey.