History's not what it used to be. Ariyl Moro, the gene-powered amazon from 2109 A.D., drags David Preston, archaeologist, back to ancient times to help her fix some broken historical events. But after an epic night together, Ariyl vanishes, leaving David her Time Crystal…and a clue that might lead him back to her…in the camp of a Mongol warrior princess…or a harem in medieval Baghdad…or a monstrously mutated 1950s America. Sci-fi meets romantic comedy with sword-swinging adventure!
This collection concentrates on essays and articles written for the North Forty News, Colorado Gardener magazine, and other regional publications over the past twenty years, but the reader will also discover excerpts from longer works-including a bit of science fiction. I often chuckled as I wrote these pieces and hope you do too. Enjoy the view from a mountaintop. Learn about the microbial conquest of Earth, and how flowering plants remade the world. Visit Pleistocene ghosts at large in the modern world and discover how to make postmodern decisions with prehistoric brains. After finishing the book, you will be prepared to tell your child why plants are green and how to find Great Blue Dinosaurs along the meandering shorelines of majestic desert canyons. And I hope you'll enjoy my closing letter to our successors (of whatever species) 50,000 years hence.
Change your past, and you destroy your future. It's been four years since Ariyl Moro left, and David Preston has moved on with his life - until an unexpected delivery plunges him into the mystery of vanished Time Travel Agent Dylila Duprae, an infamous Old West battle, Stephen Hawking, plagues of microbes and runaway nanobots, a president missing from Mount Rushmore, a Roman Empire that lasted another thousand years, and a paradox which threatens to erase all history. Sci-fi meets romantic comedy with sword-swinging adventure!
History's not what it used to be. Ariyl Moro, the gene-powered Amazon from 2109 A.D., drags David Preston, archaeologist, back to ancient times to help her fix some broken historical events. But after an epic night together, Ariyl vanishes, leaving David her Time Crystal . . . and a clue that might lead him back to her . . . in the camp of a Mongol warrior princess . . . or a harem in medieval Baghdad . . . or a monstrously mutated 1950s America.
In this journey through time, archaeologist David Preston comes into possession of a baseball supposedly signed by the legendary Ty Cobb in 1908, thanks to Ariyl Moro and her mysterious companion, Jon Ludlo. Except the ball tests out to be an impossible paradox. It was signed with a ballpoint pen (not invented until 1938) using ink that's several centuries older. But then, Ariyl and Ludlo aren't who they claim to be either. Ariyl, a voluptuous 6-foot-3 beauty, turns out to be a tourist from a 22nd century paradise where time travel is the latest craze. Unbeknownst to her, however, her traveling companion, Ludlo, is a psychopath whose thefts are starting to alter history. In a world were even small changes in the timeline can cause catastrophic consequences, Ludlo's actions may completely destroy the future. To stop Ludlo, David and Ariyl must solve a mystery involving Bronze Age swordsmen, modern-day Nazis, a steampunk world, Albert Einstein, some highly skeptical Founding Fathers, and a Golden Age Hollywood where the murder of a beloved movie star will spell doom for civilization. Sci-fi meets romantic comedy with sword-swinging adventure!
Write guidebooks, make travel TV, lead bus tours? Cameron Hewitt has been Rick Steves’ right hand for more than 20 years, doing just that. The Temporary European is a collection of vivid, entertaining travel tales from across Europe. Cameron zips you into his backpack for engaging and inspiring experiences: sampling spleen sandwiches at a Palermo street market; hiking alone with the cows high in the Swiss Alps; simmering in Budapest’s thermal baths; trekking across an English moor to a stone circle; hand-rolling pasta at a Tuscan agriturismo; shivering through Highland games in a soggy Scottish village; and much more. Along the way, Cameron introduces us to his favorite Europeans. In Mostar, Alma demonstrates how Bosnian coffee isn’t just a drink, but a social ritual. In France, Mathilde explains that the true mastery of a fromager isn’t making cheese, but aging it. In Spain, Fran proudly eats acorns, but never corn on the cob. While personal, the stories also tap into the universal joy of travel. Cameron’s travel motto (inspired by a globetrotting auntie) is "Jams Are Fun"—the fondest memories arrive when your best-laid plans go sideways. And he encourages travelers to stow their phones and guidebooks, slow down, and savor those magic moments that arrive between stops on a busy itinerary. The stories are packed with inspiration and insights for your next trip, including how to find the best gelato in Italy, how to select the best produce at a Provençal market, how to navigate Spain’s confusing tapas scene, and how to survive the experience of driving in Sicily (hint: just go numb). And you’ll get a reality check for every traveler’s "dream job": researching and writing guidebooks; guiding busloads of Americans on tours around Europe; scouting and producing a travel TV show; and working with Rick Steves and his merry band of travelers. It’s a candid account of how the sausage gets made in the travel business—told with warts-and-all honesty and a sense of humor. For Rick Steves fans, or anyone who loves Europe, The Temporary European is inspiring, insightful, and fun.
For the last 70 years we've been lied to. What began as a covert black ops program to keep reverse-engineered ET technologies from the Soviets during the Cold War has become a compartmentalized criminal transnational enterprise illegally kept from presidents, world leaders, and congress. Dr. Steven M. Greer, the world's foremost authority on UFOs and ETS has provided briefing materials for sitting U.S. Presidents, members of congress, directors of the CIA and DIA, world leaders, and members of the Joint Chiefs. As founder and director of CSETI (Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence) he has pioneered CE-5 protocols that have enabled thousands of civilians to engage in peaceful contact with our interstellar visitors. Now, he and hundreds of military personnel, scientists, and civilians who had top-secret access to Unacknowledged Special Access Projects (USAPs) have come forward with startling revelations about the greatest cover-up in human history in an attempt to prevent a false flag event in the works that - if unleashed - would make 9/11 look like a fender bender.Holding nothing back, Dr. Greer and his witnesses provide startling details about this unacknowledged chapter in history, energy and anti-gravitic systems, lunar bases, and black shelved technologies (purposely denied patents) that can transform our world...if we force their introduction into the free market.
From the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less comes Andrew Sean Greer's extraordinarily haunting love story The Confessions of Max Tivoli, told in the voice of a man who appears to age backwards. A Today Show Book Club Pick We are each the love of someone's life. So begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other. At his birth, Max's father declares him a "nisse," a creature of Danish myth, as his baby son has the external physical appearance of an old, dying creature. Max grows older like any child, but his physical age appears to go backward--on the outside a very old man, but inside still a fearful child. The story is told in three acts. First, young Max falls in love with a neighborhood girl, Alice, who ages as normally as any of us. Max, of course, does not; as a young man, he has an older man's body. But his curse is also his blessing: as he gets older, his body grows younger, so each successive time he finds his Alice, she does not recognize him. She takes him for a stranger, and Max is given another chance at love. Set against the historical backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, Max's life and confessions question the very nature of time, of appearance and reality, and of love itself. A beautiful and daring feat of the imagination, Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli reveals the world through the eyes of a "monster," a being who confounds the very certainties by which we live and in doing so embodies in extremis what it means to be human.
The blogger behind Confessions of a Funeral Director—what Time magazine called a "must read"—reflects on mortality and the powerful lessons death holds for every one of us in this compassionate and thoughtful spiritual memoir that combines the humor and insight of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes with the poignancy and brevity of When Breath Becomes Air. We are a people who deeply fear death. While humans are biologically wired to evade death for as long as possible, we have become too adept at hiding from it, vilifying it, and—when it can be avoided no longer—letting the professionals take over. Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde understands this reticence and fear. He had planned to get as far away from the family business as possible. He wanted to make a difference in the world, and how could he do that if all the people he worked with were . . . dead? Slowly, he discovered that caring for the deceased and their loved ones was making a difference—in other people’s lives to be sure, but it also seemed to be saving his own. A spirituality of death began to emerge as he observed: The family who lovingly dressed their deceased father for his burial The act of embalming a little girl that offered a gift back to her grieving family The nursing home that honored a woman’s life by standing in procession as her body was taken away The funeral that united a conflicted community Through stories like these, told with equal parts humor and poignancy, Wilde offers an intimate look into the business and a new perspective on living and dying
