Life Age

With all his family and friends gone except an estranged grandson, retired Major League ballplayer Murray McBride is looking for a reason to live. He finds it in Jason Cashman, a spirited 10-year-old boy with a terminal heart defect and a list of five things he wants to do before he dies. Murray is determined to help Jason fulfill his dreams. Together, they race against the limited time each has left, ticking off Jason's wishes one by one.

With shimmering prose and mesmerizing precision, David Chariandy takes us inside the lives of Michael and Francis. They are the sons of Trinidadian immigrants, their father has disappeared, and their mother works double, sometimes triple, shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home.

Cyril Avery is not a real Avery - or, at least, that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamorous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.

In 2000, when top financial philosopher and best-selling author Mitch Anthony first presented a new way of thinking about retirement, it was novel, and many critics didn't buy into it. Originally written to get the attention of baby boomers, Mitch ended up starting a revolution by showing us that everything we had learned about retirement was wrong—we needed a "new retirementality."

Churches often realize they need to change. But if they're not careful, the way they change can hurt more than help. Leading practical theologian Andrew Root offers a new paradigm for understanding the congregation in contemporary ministry. He articulates why congregations feel pressured by the speed of change in modern life and encourages an approach that doesn't fall into the negative traps of our secular age.

Who invented beds? When did we start cleaning our teeth? How old are wine and beer? Which came first: the toilet seat or toilet paper? What was the first clock? Every day, from the moment our alarm clock wakes us in the morning until our head hits our pillow at night, we all take part in rituals that are millennia old. Structured around one ordinary day, A Million Years in a Day reveals the astonishing origins and development of the daily practices we take for granted.

Pigeonholed in popular memory as a Jazz Age epicurean, a playboy, and an emblem of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation's shifting mood and manners after World War I. In Paradise Lost, David Brown contends that Fitzgerald's deepest allegiances were to a fading antebellum world he associated with his father's Chesapeake Bay roots. Yet as a midwesterner, an Irish Catholic, and a perpetually in-debt author, he felt like an outsider in the haute bourgeoisie haunts.

Fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone has Asperger's Syndrome, a condition similar to autism. He doesn't like to be touched or meet new people, he cannot make small talk, and he hates the colors brown and yellow. He is a math whiz with a very logical brain who loves solving puzzles that have definite answers.

Live Better: Feel Better: Age Better. In A Better Second Half, Liz Earle shows us how to future-proof our health in midlife and beyond using evidence-based techniques, ideas and wisdom accumulated over her years of experience in the wellbeing arena.

Living on her family’s gorgeous lakeside estate in Cornwall, England, Alice Edevane is a bright, clever, inquisitive, innocent, and precociously talented fourteen-year-old who loves to write stories. But the mysteries she pens are no match for the one her family is about to endure ...One midsummer’s eve, after a beautiful party drawing hundreds of guests to the estate has ended, the Edevanes discover that their youngest son, Theo, has vanished without a trace.

For the first time in history, the average age for an American woman having her first child, 26, is younger than the average age of her first marriage, 27. More children than ever are growing up in fatherless homes, despite the overwhelming evidence that in every measurable way this is bad for the child. The Center for Disease Control also recently reported a dramatic rise in sexually transmitted disease nationwide. In Rhode Island alone, since the onset of online dating, reported cases of Syphilis has risen 79%, and HIV has increased by 33%.

In 1969 Dixie Dupree is 11 years old and already an expert liar. Sometimes the lies are for her mama Evie's sake - to explain away a bruise brought on by her quick-as-lightning temper. And sometimes the lies are to spite Evie, who longs to leave her unhappy marriage in Perry County, Alabama, and return to her beloved New Hampshire. But for Dixie and her brother, Alabama is home, a place of pine-scented breezes and hot, languid afternoons.

Life is over in an instant for sixteen-year-old Finn Miller when a devastating car accident tumbles her and ten others over the side of a mountain. Suspended between worlds, she watches helplessly as those she loves struggle to survive. Impossible choices are made, decisions that leave the survivors tormented with grief and regret. Unable to let go, Finn keeps vigil as they struggle to reclaim their shattered lives.

In 1692, Bridget Bishop was hanged as a witch. Two hundred years later, her legacy lives on in the scions of two very different lines: one dedicated to using their powers to heal and help women in need; the other, determined to grasp power for themselves by whatever means necessary. This clash will play out in the fate of Annis, a young woman in Gilded Age New York who finds herself a pawn in the family struggle for supremacy. She'll need to claim her own power to save herself - and resist succumbing to the darkness that threatens to overcome them all.

What will your 100-year life look like? Does the thought of working for 60 or 70 years fill you with dread? Or can you see the potential for a more stimulating future as a result of having so much extra time? Many of us have been raised on the traditional notion of a three-stage approach to our working lives: education, followed by work and then retirement. But this well-established pathway is already beginning to collapse.

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Some time has passed since the inimitable quartet of Reynie, Sticky, Kate, and Constance have had a mission together. But with the arrival of a new Society member - and a new threat - they must reunite to face dilemmas more dangerous than ever before, including the villainous Mr. Curtain and a telepathic enemy tracking their every move, not to mention a dramatically preteen Constance. In its triumphant return, the Society encounters all new challenges, but the series' trademark sly humor, sweet camaraderie, hairsbreadth escapes, and mind-bending puzzles are all as engaging as ever.

After their mother’s probable suicide, Jazz and Olivia Moon struggle to move on with their lives. Olivia, an 18-year-old who can taste words and see sounds, blinds herself by staring at the sun, then decides to walk to the remote setting of her mother’s unfinished novel to resuscitate her hopes and dreams. Jazz, plagued by unresolved conflict with her mother and a hidden trove of her unsent letters, takes a job in a funeral home before being forced back into the role of her sister’s keeper.

This is not an anti-aging audiobook. It's a groundbreaking guide to functional aging - extending our healthy and active lives longer than ever thought possible. Practical immortality may be within our grasp, due to cutting-edge scientific research and amazing medical breakthroughs that are coming at an astonishing speed. In Chasing Life, prominent neurosurgeon and medical journalist Sanjay Gupta, MD, blends accounts of discoveries from around the world with advice for optimal health and longevity.

Matthew is a 16-year-old living in Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1976. After he loses his two most important male role models, his father and grandfather, his mother uses her inheritance to uproot Matthew and herself to a posh apartment building in Manhattan. Although only three miles away from his boyhood home, "the city" is a completely new and strange world to Matthew. He soon befriends (and becomes a quasi-assistant to) Lou Reed, who lives with his transgender girlfriend, Rachel, in the same building.