Still Alive: A Wild Life of Rediscovery


Forrest Galante - 2021
    As a wildlife biologist and conservationist, Galante devotes his life to studying, rediscovering, and protecting our planet’s amazing lifeforms. Part memoir, part biological adventure, Still Alive celebrates the beauty and determined resiliency of our world, as well as the brave conservationists fighting to save it.  In his debut book, Galante takes readers on an exhilarating journey to the most remote and dangerous corners of the world. He recounts miraculous rediscoveries of species that were thought to be extinct and invites readers into his wild life: from his upbringing amidst civil unrest in Zimbabwe to his many globetrotting adventures, including suspenseful run-ins with drug cartels, witch doctors, and vengeful government officials.  He shares all of the life-threatening bites, fights, falls, and jungle illnesses. He also investigates the connection between wildlife mistreatment and human safety, particularly in relation to COVID-19.  Still Alive is much more than just a can’t-put-down adventure story bursting with man-eating crocodiles, long-forgotten species rediscovered, and near-death experiences. It is an impassioned, informative, and undeniably inspiring examination of the importance of wildlife conservation today and how every individual can make a difference.

Mayhem, Murder and the PTA


Dave Cravens - 2019
    When a key source vanishes on a politically toxic story, this single mother of three finds herself at the center of a media storm and out of a job. Ready to reset, Parker moves her family back to the rural town where she grew up. But a gossip-filled PTA, a tyrannical school principal and a gruesome murder make adjusting to the "simple life" anything but. Parker Monroe is about to chase the story of her lifetime...

Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men: A Rational Christian Look at UFOs and Extraterrestrials


Hugh Ross - 2002
    Primarily, a dichotomy exists between naturalists who deny the supernatural and insist upon scientific explanations for all accounts, and mystics who attribute every unusual sighting to paranormal activity. The common thread is that both sides attempt to fit the unknown into their own paradigm.People everywhere are looking for honest answers. As believers, we have another mandate. We do not simply find an idea or train of thought that is suitable to our sensibilities. We neither shy away from the supernatural because it is unsettling nor condemn scientific explanations for their lack of spirituality. Rather, we search for truth.In Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men, the authors have initiated a search for truth to answers about UFO sightings and extraterrestrial life. Utilizing extensive scientific background and knowledge of the Scriptures, they approach questions like: -- Could life exist on other planets?-- If extraterrestrials exist, is it possible for them to travel to Earth?-- Should reports of alien contact and abductions be dismissed?When we have medical questions, we seek answers from qualified medical professionals. Likewise, when we have questions about UFO and extraterrestrial phenomena, we should seek answers from qualified sources. Authors Hugh Ross, Kenneth Samples, and Mark Clark have training and experience in the appropriate disciplines. They augment scientific and historical analysis with truths from God's Word to provide a balanced look at a controversial subject.

Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change


Maggie Smith - 2020
    When Maggie Smith, the award-winning author of the viral poem “Good Bones,” started writing daily Twitter posts in the wake of her divorce, they unexpectedly caught fire. In this deeply moving book of quotes and essays, Maggie writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, Keep Moving celebrates the beauty and strength on the other side of loss. This is a book for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: What comes next?

Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs


Mark Pilkington - 2010
    This is not your average UFO book. Mirage Men explores the strange and symbiotic relationship between the U.S. military and intelligence agencies and the community who believes strongly that UFOs have visited earth. Just how has the U.S. government manipulated the public’s belief in UFOs to hide military aircraft experimentation? Among the UFO believers are the “mirage men”—a close-knit group of men and women whose careers span science medicine, the military, and the intelligence services. They believe they have received parts of a flying saucer–shaped puzzle, whose final pieces lie tantalizingly out of reach. Dive into this comprehensive and astonishing exposition of exactly what these Mirage Men believe, and why. Interviews, anecdotes, and cold hard facts make this a persuasive book that’s hard to ignore. Many are sure that official disclosure—government announcement of extraterrestrial presence—is just around the corner.

She Has a Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be


J.D. Barker - 2020
     After the loss of his parents, young Jack Thatch first met Stella as a child—this cryptic little girl of eight with dark hair and darker eyes, sitting alone on a bench in the cemetery clutching her favorite book. Gone moments later, the brief encounter would spark an obsession. She'd creep into his thoughts, his every waking moment, until he finally finds her again exactly one year later, sitting upon the same bench, only to disappear again soon after. The body of a man found in an alley, every inch of his flesh horribly burned, yet his clothing completely untouched. For Detective Faustino Brier, this wasn't the first, and he knew it wouldn't be the last. It was no different from the others. He'd find another just like it one year from today. August 9, to be exact. Isolated and locked away from the world in a shadowy lab, a little boy known only as Subject "D" waits, grows, learns. He's permitted to speak to no one. He has never known the touch of another. Harboring a power so horrific, those in control will never allow him beyond their walls. All of them linked in ways unimaginable.

The Holdouts (Detective Buddy Lock #2)


James Tucker - 2018
    Homicide cop Buddy Lock knows there isn’t a chance in hell that this is some tragic accident. But as soon as his investigation begins, so do the warnings to back off. They’re not only coming from within the NYPD; they’re hitting close to Buddy’s heart: his new family has become the killer’s target.When people start disappearing from Chinatown, Buddy finds himself on the trail of a killer whose motives are more twisting and far-reaching than the detective imagined. A killer who knows just how to get to him—by pursuing everyone he loves. Now Buddy can trust only himself—even as his relentless pursuit of justice plunges him into the most brutal waters of his career.

Tell Tale: Short Stories


Jeffrey Archer - 2017
    Tell Tale gives listeners a fascinating, exciting and sometimes poignant insight into the people he has met, the stories he has come across, and the countries he has visited during the past ten years.Find out what happens to the hapless young detective from Naples who travels to an Italian hillside town to find out Who Killed the Mayor? and the pretentious schoolboy in A Road to Damascus, whose discovery of the origins of his father's wealth changes his life in the most profound way.Revel in the stories of the 1930's woman who dares to challenge the men at her Ivy League University in A Gentleman and A Scholar while another young woman who thumbs a lift gets more than she bargained for in A Wasted Hour.These wonderfully engaging and always refreshingly original tales explain why Archer has been described by The Times as probably the greatest storyteller of our age. A must-listen for anyone who seeks an audio adventure!

Forget Me Not


Alexandra Oliva - 2021
    But her search for the truth reveals answers she wishes she could forget in this suspenseful and deeply moving novel from the author of The Last One.What if your past wasn’t what you thought?As a child, Linda Russell was left to raise herself in a 20-acre walled-off property in rural Washington. The woods were her home, and for twelve years she lived oblivious to a stark and terrible truth: Her mother had birthed her only to replace another daughter who died in a tragic accident years before.And then one day Linda witnesses something she wasn’t meant to see. Terrified and alone, she climbs the wall and abandons her home, but her escape becomes a different kind of trap when she is thrust into the modern world—a world for which she is not only entirely unprepared, but which is unprepared to accept her.And you couldn’t see a future for yourself?Years later, Linda is living in Seattle and immersed in technology intended to connect, but she has never felt more alone. Social media continually brings her past back to haunt her, and she is hounded by the society she is now forced to inhabit. But when Linda meets a fascinating new neighbor who introduces her to the potential and escapism of virtual reality, she begins to allow herself to hope for more.What would it take to reclaim your life?Then an unexplained fire at her infamous childhood home prompts Linda to return to the property for the first time since she was a girl, unleashing a chain of events that will not only endanger her life but challenge her understanding of family, memory, and the world itself.

Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope


Megan Phelps-Roper - 2019
    A loving home, shared with squabbling siblings, overseen by devoted parents. Yet in other ways it was the precise opposite: a revolving door of TV camera crews and documentary makers, a world of extreme discipline, of siblings vanishing in the night.Megan Phelps-Roper was raised in the Westboro Baptist Church - the fire-and-brimstone religious sect at once aggressively homophobic and anti-Semitic, rejoiceful for AIDS and natural disasters, and notorious for its picketing the funerals of American soldiers. From her first public protest, aged five, to her instrumental role in spreading the church's invective via social media, her formative years brought their difficulties. But being reviled was not one of them. She was preaching God's truth. She was, in her words, 'all in'.In November 2012, at the age of twenty-six, she left the church, her family, and her life behind. Unfollow is a story about the rarest thing of all: a person changing their mind. It is a fascinating insight into a closed world of extreme belief, a biography of a complex family, and a hope-inspiring memoir of a young woman finding the courage to find compassion for others, as well as herself.

Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy


Anne Sebba - 2021
    Both had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the US government was aware that the evidence against Ethel was shaky at best and based on the perjury of her own brother.This book is the first to focus on one half of that couple for more than thirty years, and much new evidence has surfaced since then. Ethel was a bright girl who might have fulfilled her personal dream of becoming an opera singer, but instead found herself struggling with the social mores of the 1950's. She longed to be a good wife and perfect mother, while battling the political paranoia of the McCarthy era, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and a mother who never valued her. Because of her profound love for and loyalty to her husband, she refused to incriminate him, despite government pressure on her to do so. Instead, she courageously faced the death penalty for a crime she hadn't committed, orphaning her children.Seventy years after her trial, this is the first time Ethel's story has been told with the full use of the dramatic and tragic prison letters she exchanged with her husband, her lawyer and her psychotherapist over a three-year period, two of them in solitary confinement. Hers is the resonant story of what happens when a government motivated by fear tramples on the rights of its citizens.

There's a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis


Tracy K. Smith - 2021
    Across the country, people are losing their loved ones, their livelihoods, their homes, and even their own lives to COVID-19. Despite the pandemic, countless protests erupted this summer over the recurring loss of Black lives. Shock and outrage reverberated. There's a Revolution Outside, My Love captures and gives voice to all of these roiling sentiments that were unleashed in a profoundly affecting time. Beginning with a heart-rending poem by masterful poet Patricia Smith that grieves the murder of George Floyd, among others--the pieces in this anthology fan out from there, offering a kaleidoscopic and intimate view of the change we all underwent. Composed of searing letters, essays, poems, reflections, and screeds, There's a Revolution Outside, My Love highlights the work of some of our most powerful and treasured writers. They hail from across a range of backgrounds and from almost all fifty states. Between them, have brought home four Pulitzers, two National Book Awards, a fistful of Whitings, and numerous citations in best American poetry, short story, and essay compilations. They are noisy with beauty, and their pieces ring out. Galvanizing and lyrical, this is a deeply profound anthology of writing filled with pain and beauty, warmth and intimacy. A remarkable feat of empathy, There's a Revolution Outside, My Love offers solace in a time of swirling protest, change, and violence--reminding us of the human scale of the upheaval, and providing hope for a kinder future.

Ghosts of Gotham


Craig Schaefer - 2019
    His latest case is an obsession—at least for an ancient and wealthy heiress: verify the authenticity of a lost Edgar Allan Poe manuscript circulating through New York City’s literary underworld. But the shrewd Regina Dunkle offers more than money. It’s a pact. Fulfill her request, and Lionel’s own notorious buried past, one he’s been running from since he was a child, will remain hidden.As Lionel’s quest begins, so do the warnings. And where rare books go, murder follows. It’s only when Lionel meets enigmatic stranger Madison Hannah, his personal usher into the city’s secret history, that he realizes he’s being guided by a force more powerful than logic…and that he isn’t just following a story. He is the story.Now that the true purpose of his mission is revealing itself in the most terrifying ways, it may finally be time for Lionel to believe in the unbelievable.

The Future Was Now


J.R. Harber - 2020
    Gabriel is the best Contract Enforcer the State has ever created, trained from childhood to efficiently identify and eliminate threats to society’s vital balance and ensure every citizen adheres to their Social Contract.Asa has spent his life in one of the State’s carefully planned farming communities, but he yearns for something more. The day after his twenty-first birthday, he sets out for the metropolis of Horizon—but compliance with his Social Contract turns out to be more complicated than he could have imagined. He soon meets the girl of his dreams, Eve, an outsider in Horizon who has learned to survive for years using her guile and beauty.When an unexpected tragedy forces Asa and Eve to go on the run, Gabriel is determined to track them down and deliver the State’s justice. Their joined paths will take them into the Waste, farther away from the State’s seemingly omnipresent gaze than any of them have ever been. The truths they uncover will force them to reexamine everything they know.

Shaman Stone Soup


Elizabeth M. Herrera - 2010
    The author shares her personal stories that demonstrate how spirit guides, angels and enlightened beings can answer calls for help through miracles. You will read about the matronly ghost who overstayed her welcome, the spirits of ancient wise men who offered advice and a miraculous cure from cancer for a friend, the man who got out of his wheelchair to go hunting and fishing, a vivid dream and later chance meeting of a pastor who needed guidance, the metamorphosis of a schizophrenic, the loving afterlife contact from her mother who died unexpectedly, and many other stories.