Entertainment Science

All that's left of Hallie Walker after the Eudora Jayde mission are nightmares and an ancestry tangled with dark secrets. When her parents send an urgent telegram to return home, she knows it's time to face the past she's determined to forget. In doing so, she unwittingly stumbles into a scheme as old as the planet itself. If only she can convince a certain cocky pilot to fly her home. Reeling from the death of his brother, Kase Shackley focuses on anything but reality itself. But when his past sins spill into the light of day, Kase does what he does bestrun.

When the FBI wants to sweep the murder of a US Senator under the rug, Alex Lockerby must navigate the halls of political power and corruption in order to catch a professional killer and uncover dark conspiracy that threatens the very foundations of government. Hired by the widow of a murdered US Senator, Alex Lockerby is shocked to find out that she’s the only one who seems to want the crime solved.

Between bouts of babysitting a nine-year-old alien with a sometimes - dangerous crush on her, Jet spends her days training for the Rings, the televised Nirreth obsession that involves watching humans navigate perilous courses filled with both real and virtual enemies. As Jet is the first female human ever to run in the Rings, everyone fully expects her to die in the first round... or at the very least, to do so poorly that the judges, the infamous Rings Board, will kick her out even if she survives.

At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the US State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth, from Iraq to India, from the Congo to the Soviet Union, in order to win the hearts and minds of the Third World and to counter perceptions of American racism.

Being a black woman in America means contending with old prejudices and fresh absurdities every day. Comedian Phoebe Robinson has experienced her fair share over the years: She's been unceremoniously relegated to the role of "the black friend", as if she is somehow the authority on all things racial; she's been questioned about her love of U2 and Billy Joel ("isn't that...white people music?"); she's been called "uppity" for having an opinion in the workplace; and yes, people do ask her whether they can touch her hair all. The. Time.

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.

Jack and his fellow students are now well into their School of Thought training and are "sidekicking" for official, card-carrying super heroes. But, even though Jack feels more at home in the Imagine Nation, he's still hiding secrets from his friends Skerren and Allegra, both about his shocking connection to their enemy Revile and about his "Top Secret" school assignment, which involves investigating the RÜstov computer virus that affects the Mechas.

Jet is a 19-year-old skag, one of the humans still living free on Earth following an invasion of creatures called the Nirreth. Squatting in the ruins of Vancouver, Jet and her family eke out an existence underground, hiding from the culler ships. No one knows where the ships take the people they abduct, but they never return. When a culler finds Jet, she may discover the truth the hard way...and end up living among the very creatures that have enslaved her.

Dancer, award-winning choreographer, show producer, stand-up comedienne, TV/film actress, and author, Norma Miller shares her touching historical memoir of Harlem's legendary Savoy Ballroom and the phenomenal music and dance craze that "spread the power of Swing across the world like Wildfire". It was a time when the music was Swing, and Harlem was king.

"The meaning of life is the most urgent of questions", said the existentialist thinker Albert Camus. And no less a philosopher than Woody Allen has wondered: "How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?" The essays in Movies and the Meaning of Life look at popular and cult movies, examining their assumptions and insights on meaning-of-life questions....

It's a sad and eerie harbinger of our times that the Oprah-watching, crystal-rubbing, Whole Foods-shopping moms and their whipped attorney husbands have taken the ability to reason away from the poor schlub who makes the Bloody Marys. What we used to settle with common sense or a fist, we now settle with hand sanitizer and lawyers. Adam Carolla has had enough of this insanity and he's here to help us get our collective balls back.

With war brewing in Europe, German troops have marched, unopposed, into Austria and many Austrians are fleeing their homeland. One of them is a brilliant alchemist with a top secret recipe that the Nazi’s want, so someone is going to have to go to Austria and get him. Naturally, American spymaster William Donovan has someone in mind, Alex Lockerby.

What do Hedy Lamarr, avant-garde composer George Antheil, and your cell phone have in common? The answer is spread-spectrum radio: a revolutionary inven­tion based on the rapid switching of communications sig­nals among a spread of different frequencies. Without this technology, we would not have the digital comforts that we take for granted today. Only a writer of Richard Rhodes’s caliber could do justice to this remarkable story. Unhappily married to a Nazi arms dealer, Lamarr fled to America at the start of World War II; she brought with her not only her theatrical talent....

Four horror stories, over 30 hours of audio entertainment. Horror stories are intended to frighten, startle, and even disgust the listener. The tales of blood-sucking vampires, headless horsemen, hideous creatures, and transformed humans will leave you terrified yet compelled to listen to the next.

Jacob Reckless has only a few months left to live. He's tried everything to shake the Fairy curse that traded his life for his brother's - legends such as the All-Healing Apple, the Well of Eternal Youth, the blood of a northern Djinn. And yet hope after hope is extinguished. After months of fruitless searching, Jacob journeys through his father's mirror one final time to deliver the bad news to Fox. But there they hear of one last possibility - an item so legendary that not even Mirrorworlders believe it exists: a crossbow that can kill thousands, or heal one, when shot through the heart.

Beneath the stylized violence and thrilling car crashes, the Mad Max films consider universal questions about the nature of human life, order and anarchy, justice and moral responsibility, society and technology, and ultimately, human redemption. In Mad Max and Philosophy, a diverse team of political scientists, historians, and philosophers investigates the underlying themes of the blockbuster movie franchise, following Max as he attempts to rebuild himself and the world.

As she closes the door on her stunningly successful television show, Rosie O' Donnell opens her heart to share the amazing experience that changed her life forever. "An enormously powerful story," says Publishers Weekly, "about how forces strong enough to shatter one person can make another shine like a diamond."

Can't Slow Down is the definitive portrait of the exploding world of mid-80s pop and the time it defined, from Cold War anxiety to the home-computer revolution. The story of that thrilling, turbulent time, an era when Top 40 radio was both the leading edge of popular culture and a moral battleground, has never been told with the full detail it deserves - until now.

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.

Hollywood stars have always furthered fashion's cause of seducing the masses into buying designers' clothes by acting as living billboards. Now, red carpet celebrities are no longer content to just advertise and are putting their names on labels that reflect the image they - or their stylists - created.