Inside the race to save a great American high school, where making the numbers is only the beginningBeing principal was never her dream. Anabel Garza, the young widow of a young cop, got by teaching English to immigrant children, taking college classes at night and raising her son.And Reagan High was no dream assignment. Once famous for its state football championships, educational achievements and award-winning design, the school was a shadow of its former self. “...

Michael Brick is one of those writers who never leaves your side, and what pleasurable company he provides.In reading this collection of his newspaper and magazine stories from Brooklyn, Houston, and beyond, picture the man. Tall, and lanky, and so proud to be Texan, wearing a brown vest and cowboy boots, his narrow reporter's notebook in his back pocket slapping at his flat ass, as if urging him onward because these blank pages needed filling.Brick's words breathe life int...

Recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts grants and with works exhibited at the prestigious Biennale de Paris, New York’s Whitney Museum, the de Menil Collection in Houston, and other venues, Bob “Daddy-O” Wade started “keeping it weird” in 1961 when he arrived in Austin with his ’51 custom Ford hot rod and his slicked-back hair. Primed to study art at the University of Texas, Wade’s coif and dragster earned him his trademark moniker, and the abstract, welded sculptures he fashio...

A collection of award-winning short stories by Harlan Ellison, an eight-time Hugo Award winner, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, and four-time Nebula Award winnerHarlan Ellison’s work shaped the science-fiction, fantasy, and horror genres in the twentieth century, and this collection of his best-known and most-acclaimed stories is a perfect treasury for old Ellison fans as well as listeners discovering this zany, polyphonic writer for the first time....

Mustafa is a poor young boy working in a small repair shop under the burning summer heat. His biggest dream is simple: a pair of white trousers and white shoes. When he is sent to work at a brutal brick kiln for three days and three nights, he faces exhaustion, pain, and the harsh realities of poverty far beyond his age.Set in rural Anatolia, this emotional story explores child labor, survival, hope, and the quiet strength of a child refusing to give up on his dreams. Through power...

Cary “Sol” Solomon isn’t just in a slump—he’s a mess. His stats have plummeted. Fans hate him. After he caps off two awful seasons with a catastrophic playoff flop, his team is done with him. Worse, thanks to his downward spiral, the addiction that’s nearly cost him his career before is rearing its ugly head.As luck would have it, though, the Seattle Sasquatches are desperate for goalies. When they snatch up Sol off waivers, maybe he has a chance to turn things around… if he can st...

Michael Crichton, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Jurassic Park, returns to the world of paleontology in this recently discovered novel—a thrilling adventure set in the Wild West during the golden age of fossil hunting.The year is 1876. Warring Indian tribes still populate America’s western territories even as lawless gold-rush towns begin to mark the landscape. In much of the country it is still illegal to espouse evolution. Against this backdrop two ...

When a young marine biologist discovers that she’s the victim of a deceptive US Navy research group, her world is suddenly turned upside down. Together Alison Shaw and her colleague Chris Ramirez, are left trying to pick up the pieces of their professional lives.But those pieces are about to put Alison on a path with two creatures that are destined to change everything. Beginning with one of the greatest technological achievements in human history. And an extraordinary computer sys...

"A Friend of Dorothy/Life on the Yellow Brick Road" is about the struggle for self-acceptance and discovering that a happy life is the sole responsibility of the individual traveler. A story that shares some of life's most difficult challenges using humor and honesty to navigate those sometimes treacherous paths. But inevitably "A Friend of Dorothy" is about the realization that the road to a joy filled life starts and ends in our own hearts.

This is the story of a child who unknowingly participated in a very important chapter of Canadian history, a painful chapter that taught Michael and hundreds of thousands of others like him in North America how it was indeed possible to survive and thrive after a potentially deadly disease left them disabled.From the onset of polio until the age of 13 Michael experienced many elective surgeries to correct a deformed limb. The surgeries enabled him to live with moderate disability u...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Timeline, Sphere, and Congo, this is the classic thriller of science run amok that took the world by storm.Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read“[Michael] Crichton’s dinosaurs are genuinely frightening.”—Chicago Sun-TimesAn astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur...

#1 New York Times Bestseller from the author of This is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and Food RulesFood. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?Because in the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion--most of what we’re consuming today is longer the product of nature bu...