Entertainment Science

Three years ago, award-winning actress Angelina Jolie took on a radically different role as a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Here are her memoirs from her journeys to Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Ecuador, where she lived and worked and gave her heart to those who suffer the world's most shattering violence and victimization. Here are her revelations of joy and warmth amid utter destitution...compelling snapshots of courageous and inspiring people for whom survival is their daily work.

For an actor who’s been in so many mega-hits and equally mega misses, it can be tough to track Keanu Reeves's accomplishments. But true fans know that Keanu is so much more than his Bill and Ted persona, both onscreen and off. During his long career - over 30 years, although you wouldn’t know it from his immortal looks - he has constantly subverted Hollywood stereotypes and expectations. He's the type to start his own publishing company, reread Hamlet, eat lunch alone in the park while looking very sad, and give away his salary to the film crew.

In Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means - or doesn’t - to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected president of the United States purely on showmanship.

From “The Star-Spangled Banner” to “Born in the USA”, Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw take listeners on a moving and insightful journey through eras in American history and the songs and performers that inspired us. Meacham chronicles our history, exploring the stories behind the songs, and Tim McGraw reflects on them as an artist and performer. Their perspectives combine to create a unique view of the role music has played in uniting and shaping a nation.

Fate wants nothing more than to save Roxy from certain death in Galia, a death to which her fellow holy knights condemned her. As he follows Roxy's trail, he encounters a Galian girl he once met: Myne, who wields a black axe that eerily resembles Fate's own black sword. Myne agrees to help Fate fight the monsters between him and Galia--but once they get there, he must repay her favor in kind.

In this intimate biography of the Prince of Soul, David Ritz provides a candid look at a star and a friend. Ritz had been collaborating with Marvin Gaye on his story for several years before the singer's tragic death and had conducted a series of extraordinary interviews in which Gaye discussed his deepest secrets. What emerges is a full-scale portrait of a charming but tortured artist, a brilliant singer with a divided soul.

After a harrowing escape from the SYLO occupied Pemberwick Island, Tucker Pierce and his surviving friends have finally reached the mainland, only to find that no one is left. The once bustling seaport city is deserted.From the bowels of a Portland hospital where they encounter their first fellow survivor to the abandoned stores they must raid for supplies, Tucker, Tori, and company set off on a quest for answers and, for Tucker, vengeance. Tucker soon realizes that “trust no one” doesn’t just mean the U.S. military.

Marshall Seaver is being haunted. In the first installment of this chillingly compelling trilogy, sixteen-year-old Marshall discovers that something beyond our world is after him. The eerie clues pile up quickly, and when people start dying, it's clear whatever this is - it's huge. Marshall has no idea what's happening to him, but he's soon convinced that it has something to do with his best friend, Cooper, who's been missing for over a week.

Earth is in danger! The only thing that can save our planet are six essential elements scattered throughout the galaxy. It is up to the Voyagers - a team of four kids (plus one stowaway) - to gather them all and return to Earth. Failure is not an option. The Alpha team knows that the second element is hidden on Meta Prime, a planet filled with metal mazes, catapults of fire, and warring alien robots. But what they don’t know is that another spaceship is following hot on their trail....

Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch’s life-long fascination with classical music has taken her through Juilliard and into the shiny world of symphony halls and international concert tours. She’s loved classical music her whole life. But she’s also hated classical music her whole life. After all, if you can like Beyoncé without liking Bieber, you can certainly like Brahms without liking Bach—especially since they were born 148 years apart and the thing we call “classical music” is really just centuries of compositions shoved into one hodge-podge of a genre.

As Zoey Donovan-Quinn first sets foot in the faery homeland of her beloved Devinshea, life is perfect. Her enemy is defeated, her heart is full, and Neil and Sarah are at her side. Daniel and Dev are happy, so their visit to the sithein should be a pleasant honeymoon full of wonder and joy. Well, except for the part where Zoey needs to steal an ancient gem from the Queen of Faery in order to prevent Louis Marini from killing Daniel.

The Sandman ha sido definida por la revista Los Angeles Times como “la mejor epopeya de la historia del cómic” y ha conseguido revolucionar el formato al adaptar su lúgubre universo literario de fantasía y horror para convertirse en un fenómeno cultural de talla mundial. Por fin ha llegado el momento: Audible y DC presentan The Sandman, la primera producción sonora del cómic superventas del New York Times, escrita por el afamado autor Neil Gaiman que además es coproductor ejecutivo de esta adaptación.

Music opinions bring out passionate debate in people, and Steven Hyden knows that firsthand. Each chapter in Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me focuses on a pop music rivalry, from the classic to the very recent, and draws connections to the larger forces surrounding the pairing.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the landscape of television began an unprecedented transformation. While the networks continued to chase the lowest common denominator, a wave of new shows, first on premium cable channels like HBO and then basic cable networks like FX and AMC, dramatically stretched television’s narrative inventiveness, emotional resonance, and artistic ambition. Just as the Big Novel had in the 1960s and the subversive films of New Hollywood had in 1970s, television shows became the place to go to see stories of the triumph and betrayals of the American Dream.

Jumping the Shark is the precise moment when things go terrible bad for a beloved something or someone. From music legends to sports heroes, from talk show hosts to politicians, Jump the Shark catalogs these priceless moments when the magic vanishes.

Jon Fine spent nearly 30 years performing and recording with bands that played various forms of aggressive and challenging underground rock music. And, as he writes in this memoir, at no point were any of those bands "ever threatened, even distantly, by actual fame". Yet when members of his first band, Bitch Magnet, reunited after 21 years to tour Europe, Asia, and America, diehard longtime fans traveled from far and wide to attend those shows.

The game is over for Yoshio. His villagers are gone, all dead as far as he can tell. But just as he is overcome with despair, one final gift arrives from the Village of Fate--a package containing the NPC Carol, and she's clearly a real, live girl. With Carol in tow, Yoshio leaves the safety of his home to travel to Hokkaido, where the developers are located. He will uncover the truth of this mysterious game once and for all!

When a madman starts robbing banks the really old-fashioned way - by blowing holes in them with magical explosives - the police want Alex to catch him before he kills and robs again. Alex splits his time between chasing the homicidal bomber and helping Danny figure out what happened to a dead writer who was basing her book on Broadway’s most famous murder. While the bomber continues to elude Alex, he becomes convinced that the writer was killed by someone who wanted the old murder to remain unsolved.

Greg Gutfeld hates artificial tolerance. At the root of every single major political conflict is the annoying coddling Americans must endure of these harebrained liberal hypocrisies. In fact, most of the time liberals use the mantle of tolerance as a guise for their pathetic intolerance. And what we really need is smart intolerance, or as Gutfeld reminds us, what we used to call common sense. The Joy of Hate tackles this conundrum head on- - replacing the idiocy of open-mindness with a shrewd judgmentalism that rejects stupid ideas, notions, and people.

For seven decades Katharine Hepburn played a leading role in the popular culture of the 20th century, reigning as an admired actress, a beloved movie star, and a treasured icon of the modern American woman. She also remained one of the most private of all the public figures of her time.