Showing results by narrator "Steve Carlson" in All Categories

After four decades of training volunteers to sit at the bedsides of the dying, psychologist and Shanti founder Charles Garfield has created an essential guide for friends and families who want to offer comfort and ease their loved ones' final days. Life's Last Gift is an indispensable emotional lifeline to hand to the grief-stricken, offering compassionate, practical advice on reaffirming connection and acquiring skills to be of the greatest service to those at the end of life. By focusing on the reciprocal and healing relationship between the living and the dying, which continues until the last breath, Garfield offers a path toward clarity and wholeness, and even growth.

For most of humankind, the woman calling herself Eve has been nothing more than a shock of red hair glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, in a crowd, or from a great distance. She's been worshipped, feared, and hunted, but perhaps never understood. Now, she's trying to reconnect with the world, and finding that more challenging than anticipated. Can the oldest human on Earth rediscover her own humanity? Or will she decide the world isn't worth it?

Adam has accidentally stumbled upon an important period in history: Vienna in 1814. Mostly, he'd just like to continue to enjoy the local pubs, but that becomes impossible when he meets Anna, an intriguing woman with an unreasonable number of secrets and sharp objects.

On a nice quiet trip to the English countryside to cope with the likelihood that he has gone a little insane, Adam meets a man who definitely has. The madman's name is John Corrigan, and he is convinced he's going to die soon. He may be right. Because there's trouble coming, and unless Adam can get his own head together in time, they may die together.

When he's in a funk, Adam the immortal man mostly just wants a place to drink and the occasional drinking buddy. When that buddy turns out to be Santa Claus, Adam is forced to face one of the biggest challenges of extremely long life: Christmas cheer. Will Santa break him out of his bad mood? Or will he be responsible for depressing the most positive man on the planet?

Adam's adventures on the high seas have taken him from the Mediterranean to the Barbary Coast, and if there's one thing he learned, it's that maybe the sea is trying to tell him to stay on dry land. In Immortal At Sea, the first adventure in The Immortal Chronicles, Adam talks about what it took to make it back to shore safely, and why it's a bad idea to sail on a gilded ship.

To bridge this gap between the "talk" and the "walk", Freeman and Auster provide a process through which organizations can collectively surface deeply held values that truly resonate with everyone, from top to bottom. Their Values Through Conversation (VTC) process focuses on four key types of values conversations: introspective, historical, connectedness, and aspirational.

Agent Orange, the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, the Virginia Tech massacre, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Deep Horizon gulf oil spill: Each was a disaster in its own right. What they had in common was their aftermath - each required compensation for lives lost, bodies maimed, livelihoods wrecked, economies and ecosystems upended. In each instance, an objective third party had to step up and dole out allocated funds: In each instance, Presidents, Attorneys General, and other public officials have asked Kenneth R. Feinberg to get the job done.

From underworld gangsters to homegrown terrorists, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has tracked down and arrested some of the most infamous felons in history. In this second volume of Top Cases of the FBI, RJ Parker includes more recent and illustrious cases broken down into major criminal categories: organized crime and gangsters, counterintelligence/espionage, violent crime/major thefts/bank robberies, civil rights, white-collar crime, and terrorism.

Emerging criminal defense attorney Sam Young has always known he had a gift. Or a curse. He thinks of them as minor psychic abilities. When Sam is hired by an attractive young nun named Camille Paradisi, he agrees to help discover the identity of a serial killer in order to prevent Camille's pastor from being exposed for not reporting the man after a confession - thereby allowing another murder to occur. While Sam's psychic abilities increase as he investigates the case and gets closer to Camille, he realizes that the enigmatic nun is not revealing the complete truth.

When police chief José Fernando recruits his friend Dan Landes to help investigate a case of murder and human trafficking, neither of them expect to find that solving the case rests on the memory of a single mentally-challenged lottery seller.

Talon is just trying to get home as quickly as possible. Still recovering from recent wounds, Talon and his small group are heading for the Ohio River in the hopes of gaining transportation downriver. But inadvertently becoming a target for retribution after saving two young kids from a marauding gang. With no intention of becoming involved in the local power struggle, Talon's small group decides to change their plans of heading straight for the Ohio River. Instead, they attempt to cross the vast rugged mountains of West Virginia on horseback to throw off their pursuers.

Blaine Sullivan's world has turned upside down. Torn away from his hidden sanctuary—the alluring woods behind his house—the sixteen-year-old's frazzled, abused mother takes him away from his unstable father who struggles with his anger and alcoholism. Now in an unpleasant change of scenery that is his mom's older brother's house, hours away from home, Blaine realizes his summer will be anything but fun. Blaine endures his uncle's sour attitude and harsh insults--until Brandon begins to come around.

As the son of a crofter family, young Berend Bouters natural talent finds him in the prestigious Art Academy of Amsterdam. It is early 1900. Everything points to a successful career as an artist; he works along Mondrian, becomes part of the Barbizon movement, until life throws him a curve ball. During the First World War, Holland remains neutral, Berend becomes the owner of a barge, and during heart-stopping escapades, smuggles goods to occupied Belgium for which he is richly rewarded. When the war is over, authorities confiscate all his belongings.

No one would suspect that Dan Landes, an ex-LA cop known for methodically building cases against criminals, was a former ayahuasca user. He thought he had buried his past when he retired to Panama 10 years ago. But a brutal murder forces him to return to the States. Now, to save his soul, he has to prevent another murder. But to do that, he may need to drink the psychedelic potion again.

In an unnamed and timeless Latin American country, the lives of six men and three police officers intertwine after a brutal murder in a gay bathhouse. Dan Landes, an expat LA cop, is recruited to hunt for a serial killer who preys on lonely men in the dark steam rooms. Dan is forced to use his friend Ricardo as bait for the killer.

Robert Rahula delivers a dazzling collection of contemporary “portilla” short stories—that writing style that interweaves graphic sexual detail, existential philosophy, wry political commentary, and intricate dream-like plots. A large talking bear waxes philosophical on the nature of evil while eating pancakes. Scientists work together mapping the Higgs Boson particle while secretly plotting the seduction of each others’ wives. A man joins the Bad Luck Club and learns the ultimate method for changing his luck. Forbidden pleasures in a crematorium. A duck walks into a bar.

What if, after you die, your life just continues in exactly the same manner as when you were alive? In this riveting and often humorous novel by Robert Rahula, an American expat wakes up dead in Toledo, Spain, and discovers that nothing has changed, except that he is dead. He continues to interact with all his old friends, and they with him. Only he alone knows that he’s dead. In his journey through this afterlife, he ponders the choices he made during his life, the nature of consciousness, the nonexistence of free will, the flow of time, and existence of multiple universes.

A troubled woman marches west across the great, barren prairie. Suffering from a mental trauma, she's barely aware of the grim changes that have consumed the world around her. She avoids the dead, hides from people, and wanders westward in a daze. Hungry and tired, she finds her way to Montana, where she is taken prisoner on an Indian reservation run by a man with an iron fist and a cold heart.

We return to the story of Seth and Melinda, siblings who've fallen in with the likes of Noone Tompkins, a bad man with a fast gun and a cruel disposition. The group's journey south, to a promised oasis in the New Mexico desert, is interrupted by a war between the citizens of Billings, Montana and the scattered survivors of the Crow Nation.