Hidden History of Transportation in Los Angeles


Book Description

Los Angeles transportation's epic scale--its iconic freeways, Union Station, Los Angeles International Airport and the giant ports of its shores--has obscured many offbeat transit stories of moxie and eccentricity. Triumphs such as the Vincent Thomas Bridge and Mac Barnes's Ground Link buspool have existed alongside such flops as the Santa Monica Freeway Diamond Lane and the Oxnard-Los Angeles Caltrain commuter rail. The City of Angels lacks a propeller-driven monorail and a freeway in the paved bed of the Los Angeles River, but not for a lack of public promoters. Horace Dobbins built the elevated California Cycleway in Pasadena, and Mike Kadletz deployed the Pink Buses for Orange County kids hitchhiking to the beach. Join Charles P. Hobbs as he recalls these and other lost episodes of LA-area transportation lore.




I'm Smart!


Book Description

From the popular creators of I Stink! and I’m Dirty!—now a streaming animated series—comes the perfect school-time addition to their noisy series: a school bus! Smarter than a rocket scientist, more powerful than a monster truck, able to halt traffic with the flick of a switch! Drive you to school and keeps you safe! Who am I? Your school bus, that’s who! I’m Smart! is the latest A+ addition to Kate and Jim McMullan’s hilarious read-aloud series.




Devil Hills


Book Description

After a series of bizarre and horrific killings, that resemble ones committed years’ prior, thrusts the town of Devil Hills into anarchy, residents of the isolated community soon realize the only way to survive the night is to band together and face the sins of the past...or die trying.




God Fixed It


Book Description

Molly was black-balled fifteen minutes after she arrived at church camp. Unable to shake off the unpopularity and low self-image that followed, she turned to God to fix it. God listened, maybe chuckled a bit and probably shook His head in sympathy at Molly's mishaps. Since girls were not allowed to wear pants to school, Molly tells this story: I would do as Mother suggested: whip my pants off in the cloakroom in the morning and straighten my skirt, then put my pants back on for the ride home after school. The storm, true to Mother's prediction, lasted all night. I jumped off my bike at the street crossing and pushed the front tire off the curb. In that split-second, my pants tumbled down circling my shoes. My skirt remained wadded up around my fanny. Kids behind me gasped, and someone started to laugh. The sound pierced the still morning air like laughter on Jack Benny's radio show. Within moments all the kids giggled and pointed at my struggle to get my pants up. The crossing guard's startled look made my face get hot with embarrassment before I could get my pants buttoned. I wanted to tell him he could see I had a skirt on ... Molly's inability to say no followed her into marriage. She used the saying, "You made your bed; now lie in it," to adjust to wrong decisions until what she wanted the most was denied. What would she do now?




The Jennifer McMahon


Book Description

From New York Times bestselling author Jennifer McMahon comes five dark and chilling novels in one e-book, including: Promise Not to Tell, Island of Lost Girls, Dismantled, Don't Breathe a Word, and The One I Left Behind. Promise Not to Tell—A chilling novel about a woman whose past and present collide when she returns to her small hometown to care for her aging mother on the same night a young girl is killed. Island of Lost Girls—When 23 year-old Rhonda sees someone in a large rabbit suit kidnap a young girl, the investigation that follows uncovers the secrets behind the disappearance of her childhood friend, Lizzy, years ago. Dismantled—A novel about a group of old friends who once believed things (and perhaps, people) must be taken apart, literally, to be truly understood. Don't Breathe a Word—One couple finds themselves in a seemingly supernatural web of fairies that links them to a young girl's disappearance 15 years ago. The One I Left Behind—A gut-wrenching mystery about an architect whose troubled mother has been found 25 years after being kidnapped by a serial killer who is still on the loose.




Hell of a Book


Book Description

***2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER*** ***THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER*** Winner of the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize Finalist, 2022 Chautauqua Prize Finalist, Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing Shortlist, and the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize shortlist A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! An Ebony Magazine Publishing Book Club Pick! One of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction | One of Philadelphia Inquirer's Best Books of 2021 | One of Shelf Awareness's Top Ten Fiction Titles of the Year | One of TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books | One of NPR.org's "Books We Love" | EW’s "Guide to the Biggest and Buzziest Books of 2021" | One of the New York Public Library's Best Books for Adults | San Diego Union Tribune—My Favorite Things from 2021 | Writer's Bone's Best Books of 2021 | Atlanta Journal Constitution—Top 10 Southern Books of the Year | One of the Guardian's (UK) Best Ten 21st Century Comic Novels | One of Entertainment Weekly's 15 Books You Need to Read This June | On Entertainment Weekly's "Must List" | One of the New York Post's Best Summer Reading books | One of GMA's 27 Books for June | One of USA Today's 5 Books Not to Miss | One of Fortune's 21 Most Anticipated Books Coming Out in the Second Half of 2021 | One of The Root's PageTurners: It’s Getting Hot in Here | One of Real Simple's Best New Books to Read in 2021 An astounding work of fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans and America as a whole In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour. As these characters’ stories build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America. Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists, it truly becomes its title.




Image Ethics in the Digital Age


Book Description

'Image Ethics in the Digital Age' brings together leading experts in the fields of journalism, media studies, & law to address the challenges presented by new technology & assess the implications for personal & societal values & behavior.




The Legend Of The Secret Saga


Book Description

Over twenty years in the writing, the three books in The Legend of The Secret Saga series evolved to be an fascinating magical story unlike any other, as they poetically weave together a strange epic tale. THE AUTHOR, Estee Shoesmyth, is a tangible figment of her own unbridled paradoxical imagination and the fantasy fiction pseudonym of eclectic American artist, Suzanne T. Dietz. The Legend Of The Secret Saga is the complete epic trilogy in one colorful volume. There is no other story like it in The Real World! The fantastical epic tale opens in Book One, which is When Begin Began. Celestial Scribe, Angel Daria pens the following words: "To Whom It May Concern: When this immense historical accounting commenced, I surely did not anticipate that the nature of this story would ever veer off the straight and narrow path. Instead, it proceeded to travel along the strangest winding ways. And so, I followed it most dutifully — with my pen in hand. Once upon a time, an anonymous philosopher on The Ultimate Earth aptly intellectualized, 'There are always three sides to every story: your side, the other side, and the truth.' The story presented to you here may seem like nothing more than a collection of my own fantastical delusions. Surely, it could not be that which I, myself, have ever witnessed! In that case, it would certainly not make it to be truth. However, it is ... by my best accounting ... the strange but true enough telling of a deliberately long-lost story from somewhere far out on the other side of Who-Knows-Where." That's just the beginning! In Book Two, The Murky Middle, the story dims to very, very dark with the introduction of a terribly wicked magician's sorcery. Through magic, he enters into a spirit world and adamantly decided to stay there. From that secret domain he meets another and the two, in cahoots, do some deliberately evil damage that stretches out from that invisible place right into the unsuspecting folks who live day to day in The Real World. Those folks do not stand a chance to escape being affected by the magician's insidious determination to capture them all. Eventually, Adam and Eve are reincarnated into The Real World on a specific mission, years beyond the peak of that magician's vicious reign. By then, the worse had evidently devolved into the worst that ultimately leads through to Book Three, The End Of The End. This story is utterly fascinating. Its twisting and turning through that which may be somewhat recognizable is more tangled up into the fantastical that is addictive to read onward to find out what happens next. All throughout there is mystery, magic, love, hate, obsessiveness, rejection, maliciousness, brilliance, stupidity, sickness, healing, forgiveness, revenge, romance, weirdness, wonderment, heavy heartedness, humor, life, death, and reincarnation. All along, there is that concept of eternity being a time lasting for Forever. Which, according to all reports in The Real World, Forever is a long, long time. The Legend Of The Secret Saga is the complete epic trilogy in one colorful volume. There is no other story like it in The Real World. Not from When Begin Began, throughout The Murky Middle, and all the way to The End Of The End. It is a story that is a Fairytale and a Fantasy. Magical and Mythical. Poetic and Artistic. The Legend Of The Secret Saga is fantastical and not as expected it might be!




The Birds On The Trees


Book Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE LOST MAN BOOKER PRIZE 'Nina Bawden gets inside the skins of all her people and shows them as paradoxical, crotchety, adulterous, ambitious and completely human . . . A beautifully sustained impression of the impossibility of family life' INDEPENDENT 'A story about a middle-class family in crisis, which is so good, and so true' GUARDIAN The expulsion from school of their eldest son shatters the middle-class security of Maggie, a writer, and Charlie, a journalist. Since childhood, Toby has been diffident and self-absorbed, but the threat of drug-taking and his refusal - or inability - to discuss his evident unhappiness, disturbs them sufficiently to seek professional help. Veering between private agony and public cheerfulness, Maggie and Charlie struggle to support their son and cope with the reactions- and advice- of friends and relatives. Noted for the acuity with which she reaches into the heart of relationships, Nina Bawden here excels in revealing the painful, intimate truths of a family in crisis. Toby's situation is explored with great tenderness, while Maggie's grief and self-recrimination are rigorously, if compassionately, observed.




A Sense of Duty


Book Description

A memoir by a former Vietnamese refugee who became a U.S. Marine, Quang Pham’s A Sense of Duty is an affecting story of fate, hope, and the aftermath of the most divisive war the United States has ever fought. This heartfelt salute to the spirit of America is also the account of the author’s reunion with his long-absent father, Hoa Pham, himself a devoted officer who saw combat firsthand as a South Vietnamese fighter pilot. Hoa’s revelations about his wartime experience leave Quang even more conflicted about his service in the Marines in the first Gulf War, and after years of struggling to reconnect with each other and the homeland they left behind, the two set out on a final, profound quest—to make sense of the war in Vietnam. Tracing Quang Pham’s uniquely spirited yet agonizing journey from his experiences as an uprooted refugee to his becoming a combat aviator, A Sense of Duty reveals the turmoil of a family torn apart and reunited by the fortunes of war. It is an American journey like no other.