Showing results by narrator "Sean Crisden" in All Categories

Following a stellar 12-year career as a linebacker, including a Super Bowl win with Baltimore in 2000, O. J. "Juice" Brigance joined the Ravens' front office. But in 2007, Brigance was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - also known as Lou Gehrig's disease - and told he had only three to five years to live. As a player, he'd battled hundreds of injuries and setbacks. None of them prepared him to face ALS.

In this memoir of identity and discovery, Vanessa A. Bee explores the way we define "home" and "belonging"—from her birth in Yaounde, Cameroon, to her adoption, to experiencing housing insecurity in Europe and her eventual immigration to the US. After her parents' divorce, Vanessa traveled with her mother to Lyon and later to London, eventually settling in Reno, Nevada, as a teenager, right around the financial crisis and the collapse of the housing market. At 20, still a practicing evangelical Christian and newly married, Vanessa applied to and was accepted by Harvard Law School.

In 1849, Henry David Thoreau argued in his essay “Civil Disobedience” that people should not allow governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have the right to avoid such submission to permit the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was partly motivated by his abhorrence with slavery and the Mexican-American War. His work has inspired great leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Martin Buber.

Rook has turned his attention onto the newly formed Kingdom of the Iron Dice. In his mind, Joe has become a nuisance that must be squashed. How will Joe's castle prevail when not one, but two armies march upon it? Joe and Zoya no longer have a shield of ignorance to hide behind. If they face Rook, it will be with the full knowledge of their own true mortal peril. They may be Champions, with near-immortality, but they are still just two micro-sentients facing a godlike being.

Matthew Elliott is a recovering man. As an ex-cop and ex-fighter, his new job teaching kids at the local community gym about drug awareness and self-defense, is a little bit of both. His new focus on helping street kids is helping him heal, and with Kira by his side, he's making strides. Brother and sister, Rueben and Claudia, are homeless kids and they're very much alone. As they strike a chord with Matt, he does everything in his power to help them. But when Ruby and Claude need more help than he bargained for, it stops being about work, and starts being about home.

Dad promised me he’d stop sneaking into the Veil. He lied. Which is why I found a teaching job in the Court of His Highness, Gabriel the Virtuous. His school for misguided youth is nearest to the Veil. If he catches me sneaking around, I’m toast. My problems mount when I meet Gabriel face to face - and my soul lights up and begins to dance. He’s six-feet-three of muscle with midnight-blue eyes and a body made for lust - which is decidedly not on his list of virtues.

Amworth College, Connecticut - a place where the gates between our world and the Land of Faerie are thin and crumbling, a place where horrors really do lurk in the shadows, and evils in the gardens. A place where the fates of worlds really does hide within the brushstrokes of a forgotten painting. The House Across the Way is a dark fantasy novel by the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Throne of Bones.

Twelve Years a Slave is the autobiographical account of Solomon Northup, an African American who was born free in New York in the early 1800s. In 1841, Solomon Northup was captured and forced into slavery for a period of twelve years. Northup's account is detailed in its account of life on a cotton and sugar plantation and the daily routine of slave life during the first part of the 19th century.

Evan Lennox is going nowhere fast. She's living with her grandparents after her parents bailed on her, she got kicked out of her posh private school, her ex-boyfriend proved to be the biggest sleaze imaginable, her former best friend is a back-stabber, and her current best friend is stuck in backwoods New Jersey. To top it all off, one teeny, tiny fire she lit to burn some memories of her ex goes a little out of control and winds up igniting a good piece of a very powerful family's pecan orchard.

Southern civility turns savage when Hank Whitaker’s dying words reveal the unimaginable. No one - not his socialite wife, Maggie, or young son, Lance - suspected the successful businessman, husband, and father they loved and thought they knew was a black man passing for white. In 1931, in the segregated South, marriage between whites and blacks is illegal. Maggie, now a criminal, faces jail. When Lance receives death threats to atone for his father’s betrayal, the family flees the US for a new life in Paris.

Imagine if the most severe physical pain and sorrow in your life were inflicted by the people you trusted most. In the spring of 2007, Belo Cipriani was beaten and robbed of his sight at the hands of his childhood friends. Blind: A Memoir chronicles the two years immediately following the assault.

Sexy bad boy shapeshifter Michael O'Dare grew up on the streets. When government soldiers finally captured and imprisoned him, he became a lab rat and a collared slave, never again allowed to be human. His escape allowed him to return to human form and head for freedom in the Western Territories.

Detective Mike Distefano enters his favorite interrogation room one late night to begin questioning a suspect in a crime. After sizing each other up, both men try to coax the other into talking about the circumstances that led each of them to the interrogation room. The suspect prods at Distefano’s sense of accountability seemingly in a gambit to undermine the investigation until the detective is no longer sure of which party is about to be judged; the suspect or himself.

These explicit, playful tales range from the sweetly sensual to the candidly carnal. Bill Noble's poetic "Stardrift" finds a beach runner drawn into an unexpected moonlight ménage. Saskia Walker's "It's Just Not Cricket" stars fearless bondage queen Ella, whose hobby of tying up "languid aristocratic types" is challenged by a randy noble who turns her into a human croquet game. Marilyn Jaye Lewis's piquant "That Summer by Our Pool" is a provocative tour of a woman's sexual history.

Maddy and Reid have seen their fair share of trials and tribulations, of love and loss. Facing down the biggest challenges of their young lives, they managed to survive and endure. With the future stretching out before them, they must learn to navigate new and unfamiliar paths.

She wants her three gorgeous bosses in the dirtiest way. She’s forbidden to them, not only because she’s their employee, but because she’s too pure to be sullied by their darkest desires. Can one anonymous night sate their needs and fulfill her fantasies? My bosses are hot, smart, and totally unattainable. But when I glimpse them at The Access Club—New York’s hottest underground sex club—and hear a rumor they share their women, I come up with a plan to live out my fantasy, at least for one night.

When the curtains rise on Angelina Weld Grimké’s devastating drama, the Lovings—a Black family from the South—have settled into a small but immaculate apartment in an unnamed northern city. The widowed matriarch, Mary; her daughter, Rachel; and her son, Tom anticipate a more promising future here, but Rachel, a sensitive young woman, has a sudden reckoning with the past that throws her future into serious doubt.

New York City social worker Camilo Santiago Briggs grew up surrounded by survivors who taught him to never rely on anything you didn’t earn yourself. He’s always dreamed of his own happily ever after, but he lives in the real world. Men who seem too good to be true...usually are. And Milo never ever mixes business with pleasure...until the mysterious man with whom he had an unforgettable hookup turns out to be the wealthy donor behind his agency’s new, next-level funding.

Detective Shane Ford, Sugarland's favorite cop, has been blindsided by the sudden death of his best friend, NFL star Brad Cooper, and by becoming the legal guardian of Brad's son, Drew - a bitter, angry 16-year-old with a dangerous secret. Shane is determined to pry the truth from Drew, but he manages only to alienate him - and winds up going head-to-head with Juvenile Officer Daisy Callahan, whose job is to protect the teen's best interests.

The Social Media Management Handbook provides a complete toolbox for defining and practicing a coherent social media strategy. It is a comprehensive resource for bringing together such disparate areas as IT, customer service, sales, communications, and more to meet social media goals. Wollan and Smith and their Accenture team explain policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities, metrics, strategies, incentives, and legal issues that may arise.