Showing results by narrator "Richard Ferrone" in All Categories

Author William Gay is the winner of the 1999 William Peden Award and the 1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize. In his debut collection, Gay brings to life 13 stories about a diverse group of colorful characters living in the fertile Tennessee country land.

Pietro Pinti, born as he says "in the Middle Ages", worked the land with hoe and plow from his earliest youth. Growing up under Mussolini's Fascist regime on a farm near Florence, he and his family lived under conditions of extreme poverty, as sharecroppers to generally unscrupulous landowners. But during World War II, when millions in towns and cities suffered untold hardships, the hardy Tuscan peasants were well equipped to face the rigors of the era. War or no war, work on the land went on, and Pietro describes month by month a typical year in their lives.

Noir - as a style, movement, or sensibility - has its roots in hardboiled detective fiction by writers like Chandler and Hammett, and films adapted from their novels were among the first called "film noir" by French cineastes. But film isn't the only medium with a taste for a dark story. Hundreds of noir dramas have been produced for television, featuring detectives and femmes fatales, gangsters, and dark deeds, continuing week after week, with a new disruption of the social order. In TV Noir, television historian Allen Glover presents the first complete study of the subject.

What do you get when you take one stagecoach out of Denver, add a thousand-or-so bullets whizzing past your head, while sitting next to two headless corpses caught in the crossfire? If your name is Lou Prophet, you get revenge. Raucous, rowdy, ruthless revenge. Next question?

Algren’s classic 1947 short story collection is the pure vein Algren would mine for all his subsequent novels and stories. The stories in this collection are literary triumphs that “don’t fade away.” Among the stories included here are “A Bottle of Milk for Mother”, about a Chicago youth being cornered for a murder, and “The Face on the Barrome Floor”, in which a legless man pummels another man nearly to death - the seeds that would grow into the novel Never Come Morning.

December, 1966: Platoon leader Lt. Joseph Callaway had just turned 23 when he arrived in Vietnam to lead 42 untested men into battle against some of the toughest, most experienced, and best-trained guerrilla soldiers in the world. Callaway soon learned that most events in this savage jungle war were beyond his control. But there was one thing he could do well: take the best damn care of his troops he knew how.

The former president of St. Johns College reveals why 2,500 years of learning in the West is of inestimable value to all of us—and why its trashing is a crime of monumental proportions.

Hiram Taine is a handyman who can fix anything. When he isn't fiddling with his tools, he is roaming through the woods with his dog, Towser, as he has done for as long as he can remember. He likes things that he can understand. But when a new ceiling appears in his basement - a ceiling that appears to have the ability to repair television sets so they're better than before - he knows he has come up against a mystery that no man can solve.

Leading the U.S.S. Nimitz survivors has forced Father Xavier Church to make some hard decisions, but he's protected his flock. Only, his fortress is about to fall, and, this time, he might not be able to save them all. Most people lost everyone they loved to the walking dead, but Evan Tucker didn't have anything to lose. The folks on the Nimitz are the closest family he's ever had. He'll fight to his last breath to make sure nothing comes between them - no matter whether it's the undead or the living.

While swimming in a secluded creek on a hot Sunday in 1969, 16-year-old Eugene and his older brother, Bill, meet the entrancing Ligeia. A sexy, free-spirited redhead from Daytona Beach banished to their small North Carolina town until the fall, Ligeia will not only bewitch the two brothers but lure them into a struggle that reveals the hidden differences in their natures.

One Navy admiral called it "one of the greatest unsolved sea mysteries of our era". To this day, the U.S. Navy officially describes it an inexplicable accident. For decades, the real story of the disaster has eluded journalists, historians, and the family members of the lost crew. But a small handful of Navy and government officials knew the truth from the very beginning: the sinking of the nuclear submarine U.S.S. Scorpion and its crew of 99 men, on May 22, 1968, was an act of war.

Detective Matt Cordell was happily married once, and gainfully employed, and sober. But that was before he caught his wife cheating on him with one of his operatives. Now Matt makes his home on the streets of New York and his only companions are the city's bartenders. But trouble still knows how to find him, and when Johnny Bridges shows up from the old neighborhood, begging for Matt's help, Cordell finds himself drawn into a case full of beautiful women and bloody murder.

The only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Vietcong attack, Paco Sullivan is sent back to the U.S. with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next. One evening, he limps off a bus and into the small town of Boone, determined to find a real life; but no matter how hard he works, nothing muffles the anguish in his mind and body.

Desired by many, cardsharp Evelyn Starr Johnson will go to any lengths to recover the treasure map stolen from her murdered foster parents. It's her deal, and she antes up the only thing she has left--her innocence. Staring coolly at the killers across the poker table, Evelyn deals the winning hand to the handsome, unsuspecting sharpshooter Matt "Reno" Moran. But when she takes off with his winnings, Reno vows to hunt her down. He wants the beauty he desires with all his soul.

Acclaimed WWII historian and military intelligence expert John Prados offers a provocative reassessment of the Allies’ battle for the Solomon Islands - a turbulent, dramatic campaign that, he argues, was the true turning point of the Pacific conflict.

In The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza, Bernie applies philosophy to match wits with a wily murderer and a few too many burglars. Bernie and his dog-grooming partner in crime, Carolyn, are planning the perfect crime. Tonight, they will rob a brownstone while the well-heeled owners are out of town with their vicious watch dog. But when Bernie painstakingly picks the lock, they discover somebody has already emptied the house - except for a valuable coin almost too hot to handle.

When his truck slammed into a telephone pole and burst into flames, the seventeen-year-old became pinned in the driver seat. Moments before the vehicle was consumed by fire, Mike was pulled from the burning wreckage of twisted metal as his body burned. After his guitar was incinerated in the blaze, Pete Townsend from The Who, a musical inspiration, sent him a new guitar, offering, “This is the Phoenix.” In the wake of his Phoenix moment of rising from the ashes, Mike wanted to believe that his life had been saved for a unique purpose.

Arnold J. Toynbee, the most famous professional historian of the twentieth century, is widely quoted as having declared that “History is just one damn thing after another.” This book argues that history is not about “things” at all but is all about turning points—the decisions, acts, innovations, errors, ideas, successes, and failures on which the shape of a nation’s life—our lives—depends. It presents the 100 points at which America’s path decisively turned on its way to where we find ourselves today.

What I wanted more than anything was to be standing beside Schmidt, in concert with Schmidt, at the foot of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss along with Schmidt, hands cupped to the sides of our faces, debating art, transcendence, and the glory of the apocalypse.” Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other’s deathbed for unknown reasons by a “relatively short” nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer.

In a place called No Man's Land, Texas rancher Ben Langham hired Luke Starbuck for his loyalty and toughness gained by riding with Rip Ford's Texas volunteers. But when Langham sent Starbuck after a band of horse thieves, a loyal man left behind the only home he had ever known - and met the stranger in himself.