Rob Shapiro
2) Alpha
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For the visitors to Wilsonville, the largest theme park in the world, the day began with a smile. By the end, they wonder-will they be able to escape with their lives?
Retired Delta Force operator, Master Sergeant Jonathan "Jad" Bell, is Wilsonville's lead undercover security officer. The threat begins with the announcement of a hidden dirty bomb, but quickly becomes something far, far worse.
Trained since the age of seventeen to save innocent...
Retired Delta Force operator, Master Sergeant Jonathan "Jad" Bell, is Wilsonville's lead undercover security officer. The threat begins with the announcement of a hidden dirty bomb, but quickly becomes something far, far worse.
Trained since the age of seventeen to save innocent...
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"From the creator of Bulletproof Coffee and author of the bestselling The Bulletproof Diet comes a revolutionary plan to upgrade your brainpower--in two weeks or less. For the last decade, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dave Asprey has worked with world-renowned doctors and scientists to uncover the latest, most innovative methods for making humans perform better--a process known as "biohacking." In his first book, The Bulletproof Diet, he shared his...
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"It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next few months new bonds of friendship and love will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge among this unlikely cast of characters, each richly drawn and achingly human: a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American...
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The Ars Technica senior space editor chronicles the first four historic flights that launched SpaceX, describing how, after three failed attempts, the fourth flight helped transform SpaceX from a shaky startup into the world's leading edge rocket company. Less than 20 years after its founding, SpaceX boasts the largest constellation of commercial satellites in orbit, has pioneered reusable rockets, and in 2020 became the first private company to launch...
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"A hilarious and heartfelt novel about a seemingly-perfect family in an era of waning American optimism, from the acclaimed author of The Altruists. The year is 2013 and the Greenspans are the envy of Brookline, Massachusetts, an idyllic (and idealistic) suburb west of Boston. Scott Greenspan is a successful physician with his own cardiology practice. His wife, Deb, is a pillar of the community who spends her free time helping resettle refugees. Their...
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After a CIA covert mission goes badly awry, U.S. Air Force intelligence officer Nicholas Flynn is exiled to guard a remote radar post along Alaska's Arctic frontier. This dead-end assignment is designed to put his career permanently on ice, but Flynn's not the type to fade quietly into obscurity...As winter storms pound Alaska and northern Canada, Russian aircraft begin penetrating deep into friendly airspace. Are these rehearsals for a possible first...
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"When Nick Flynn left the US Air Force to join the Quartet Directorate, he did so with the full knowledge that no one could ever know. This covert private force--called Four by its members--promised him the chance to lead his own missions and make his own decisions. When a former senior CIA executive goes dark, Flynn and his team are ready to step in. What begins as a quiet check on his home turns into a firefight against a familiar enemy who is more...
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"Good People Are Bad At Relationships One night during his divorce, after one too many vodkas and a call with a phone-in-therapist who told him to "journal his feelings," Matthew Fray started a blog attempting to piece together the story of how his ex-wife went from the 18-year-old college freshman who adored him to the angry woman who thought he was an asshole before she left him to have sex with someone else. It turned out that even though he was...
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In this sequel to Dale Brown's New York Times bestselling Arctic Storm Rising, former U.S. Air Force officer Nick Flynn is caught up in a shadow war against allied Russia and Iran--a duo wielding a terrifying new weapon. Nick Flynn is back in action, and he has a new employer--a shadowy intelligence outfit whose roots go back to the very beginning of the Cold War. But his first mission for them almost becomes his last. While meeting with a high-ranking...
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The 1950s vintage ocean liner Queen Isabella is making her final voyage before heading to the scrapyard. For the guests on board, among them Christine Thorne, a former journalist turned Maine farmer, it's a chance to experience the bygone mid-20th century era of decadent luxury cruising, complete with fine dining, classic highballs, string quartets, and sophisticated jazz. Smoking is allowed but not cell phones--or children, for that matter. The Isabella...
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From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood "talking drums" of Africa, James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He also provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information, including Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, and Claude Shannon.
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"An entertaining, enlightening, and utterly original investigation into one of the most quietly influential forces in modern American life--the humble parking spot. In a beguiling and often absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation's parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between. He reveals how the pathological...
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Charlie and Margaret Marder, political stars in 1960s Washington DC, know all too well how the tangled web of power in the nation's capital can operate. Attorney General Robert Kennedy needs them to look into a potential threat to the security of the United States. Charlie and Margaret quickly find themselves on a flight to sunny Los Angeles. At the center of their investigation is Frank Sinatra, a close friend of President John F. Kennedy and a rumored...
15) Kaddish.com
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"The Pulitzer finalist delivers his best work yet--a brilliant, streamlined comic novel, reminiscent of early Philip Roth and of his own most masterful stories, about a son's failure to say Kaddish for his father. Larry is an atheist in a family of orthodox Memphis Jews"--Publisher.
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"Brent Cummings, an Iraq war veteran, has come home feeling he survived one war only to find himself in the midst of another one. The country he loves and defended for twenty-eight years seems to be unraveling in front of his eyes. Raised to believe in a vision of America that values fairness, honesty, and respect for others, Cummings is increasingly engulfed by the fear and anger sweeping through his beloved country as he tries to hold onto hope...
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Gleick's story begins at the turn of the twentieth century with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation, The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological--the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks. Gleick tracks the...
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"The Storm is Here is the definitive eyewitness account of how--over the course of a year of pandemic, economic collapse, and feral hatred-stoking and conspiracy-mongering by the President and his campaign--a large segment of Americans became convinced that they needed to rise up against dark forces on the Left that were plotting to take their country away, and then did just that. Through vivid and intimate accounts of people and events on the ground,...
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"From his heyday to the present moment, Al Capone's life has gripped the public imagination, and his gangster persona has been immortalized in the countless movies and books inspired by his exploits. But who was the man behind the legend? Capone loved to tell tall tales that perpetuated his mystique; newspapers loved him and frequently embellished or fabricated stories about him to sell copies. While some remember him as fundamentally kind and good,...
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"The epic true crime story of bootlegger George Remus and the murder that shocked the nation, from the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City and Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy In the early days of Prohibition, long before Al Capone became a household name, a German immigrant named George Remus quits practicing law and starts trafficking whiskey. Within two years he's a multi-millionaire. The press calls him "King of the Bootleggers,"...