Lives West

It's the first day of school at Frederick Douglass Elementary and everyone's just a little bit nervous, especially the school itself. The school has a rough start, but as the day goes on, he soon recovers when he sees that he's not the only one going through first-day jitters.

Billy the Kid - born Henry McCarty in 1859, and also known as William H. Bonney - emerges from this audio in all his complexity, at once a gentleman and gregarious companion and a thief and violent murderer. Tapping new depths of research, Etulain traces Billy’s short life from his mysterious origins in the East through his wanderings in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas.

Sophie works for the local florist, so she's part of every big event in her small hometown, delivering flowers and making sure things run smoothly (which they almost never do). This year, Sophie has tons of events to get through - including a wedding, a funeral, a Valentine's Day party, a Fourth of July cookout, Thanksgiving, and a New Year's Eve bash. And at each event, she runs into Andrew, the distractingly cute - and annoyingly pompous - guy working for the local caterer.

The Colorado River is an essential resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado’s headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes listeners on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks, to the spot near the US-Mexico border where the river runs dry.

On February 3, 1889, just two days shy of her forty-first birthday, Myra Maybelle Shirley—better known at that point by her outlaw sobriquet “Belle Starr”—was blown from her horse saddle and killed by a pair of shotgun blasts, delivered by an unseen assailant, only a few miles away from her home in the Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma. Thus ended the life of one of the most colorful, authentic, and dangerous women in the history of the American West.

Presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who, with a single act, birthed the modern civil rights movement, Theoharis provides a revealing window into Parks’s politics and years of activism. She shows listeners how this civil rights movement radical sought—for more than a half a century—to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice.

When Fiona's family moves to a new town to be closer to her older sister's figure skating club—and far from Fiona's close-knit group of friends—nobody seems to notice Fiona's unhappiness. Alone and out of place, Fiona ventures to the town's library, a rambling mansion donated by an heiress. And there she finds a gripping mystery novel about a small town, family secrets, and a tragic disappearance. Lost Lake is a town of restless spirits, and Fiona will learn that both help and danger come from unexpected places—maybe even from the sister she thinks doesn't care about her anymore.

Isobel Johnson has spent her career in Liston Heights sidestepping the community’s high-powered families. But when she receives a threatening voicemail accusing her of anti-Americanism and a liberal agenda, she’s in the spotlight. Meanwhile, Julia Abbott, obsessed with the casting of the school’s winter musical, makes an error in judgment that has far-reaching consequences for her entire family.

When Delia Byrd packs up her old Datsun and her daughter Cissy and gets on the Santa Monica Freeway heading south and east, she is leaving everything she has known for 10 years: the tinsel glitter of the rock 'n' roll world; her dreams of singing and songwriting; and a life lived on credit cards and whiskey with a man who made promises he couldn't keep. Delia Byrd is going back to Cayro, Georgia, to reclaim her life - and the two daughters she left behind.

In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. For 13 years, no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders", though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward.

The grizzly is one of North America's few remaining large predators. Their range is diminished, but they're spreading across the West again. Descending into valleys where once they were king, bears find the landscape they'd known for eons utterly changed by the new most dominant animal: humans. In searing detail, award-winning writer, Montana rancher, and conservationist Bryce Andrews tells us about one such grizzly. Millie is a typical mother: strong, cunning, fiercely protective of her cubs. But raising those cubs becomes ever harder as the climate warms and people crowd the valleys.

Once Leigh and Susy were close friends and teammates bound for Olympic hockey gold, but when Leigh’s sure-fire plan to make the final roster backfired, she left everything behind to start over, including the one person who knew her secret. Two decades later, Leigh’s a successful investment banker, happily married, and the mom of a hockey prodigy, so when a career opportunity lands the family back in Minnesota, Leigh takes the shot for her kid.

Alice Sullivan feels like she’s finally found her groove in middle age, but it only takes one moment for her perfectly curated life to unravel. On the same day she learns her daughter is struggling in second grade, a call from her son’s school accusing him of bullying throws Alice into a tailspin.

The Skripal Files is a remarkable and definitive account of Sergei Skripal’s story, which lays bare the new spy war between Russia and the West. Mark Urban, the diplomatic and defense editor for the BBC, met with Skripal in the months before his poisoning, learning about his career in Russian military intelligence, how he became a British agent, his imprisonment in Russia, and the events that led to his release. Skripal’s first-hand accounts and experiences reveal the high stakes of a new spy game that harks back to the chilliest days of the Cold War.

Ethan, the first-ever human Goblin King, thought he'd seen it all after a mysterious talisman teleported him to this new world. But when an orcish army stands at the doorstep of his kingdom, life on the throne just got a whole lot more complicated. As he grapples with the imminent threat, he also finds himself captivated by a fiery half-orc, half-goblin blacksmith, whose heart is as elusive as her craft is formidable.

In this provocative and captivating dialogue, bell hooks and Cornel West come together to discuss the dilemmas, contradictions, and joys of Black intellectual life. The two friends and comrades in struggle talk, argue, and disagree about everything from community to capitalism in a series of intimate conversations that range from playful to probing to revelatory. In evoking the act of breaking bread, the book calls upon the various traditions of sharing that take place in domestic, secular, and sacred life.

Welcome to Wildcat Crossing! There's horses to ride, a Wild West show - and a mysterious troublemaker on the loose!

Sam and Jane Archer walk out of a backcountry hiking trip into a living nightmare. Their car is vandalized and dead, along with every other vehicle in the trailhead parking lot. Unable to get a cell phone signal, and spooked by a threatening encounter - they resign themselves to a long hike home, suspecting a possible EMP attack against the United States.

One day, the Hollister children saw their grandparents on television. The show was featuring dog sled races during a yearly Canadian Trappers’ Carnival. Since the elder Mr. and Mrs. Hollister run a winter resort called Snowflake Camp in Canada, the children thought it would be a wonderful idea to ask their grandparents if they could visit them over the Thanksgiving vacation when the next Carnival would be starting. No one had any idea, while waiting for the invitation to arrive, that Snowflake Camp would turn out to be the trail’s end of a mystery that started in Shoreham.

When Stick rescues Stone from a prickly situation with a Pinecone, the pair becomes fast friends. But when Stick gets stuck, can Stone return the favor? With a subtle anti-bullying message even the young will understand, Stick and Stone have energy, emotion, and personality to spare and share a story of kindness and friendship that all will enjoy.