Showing results by narrator "David Colacci" in All Categories

Daniel Briggs, former Marine sniper and recent vagabond, finds himself in Seattle, Washington. Flinging fish during the day and walking the streets at night, Daniel finally finds a measure of peace he so desperately needs. But peace is the last thing on fate's agenda. Will a new threat plunge Daniel back into the abyss, and once unleashed, will The Beast take over for good?

I lost track of the drinks...Deeper and deeper I go...This next stop may be my last. Another town, another problem. Former Marine Daniel Briggs slips from locale to locale, the haze a comforting pillow, but inevitably the chips fall hard. Daniel finds himself in Maine, courtesy of a small hamlet called Old Orchard Beach. While everything seems quaint on the surface, the veteran sniper soon finds himself pitted between evils. Which one will he choose...or which one will choose him? Is this a story about vigilante justice, or a hero on a righteous path?

A new Marine Commandant...An insidious threat to his beloved service...Can anything be done to save it...The new Commandant of the Marine Corps is worried. Not only is he dealing with a shrinking service, a tightening budget and a war-weary nation, he's also just found out that there's an even bigger threat, a mounting menace that could tear the mighty Marine Corps apart from all sides. The Commandant calls on Cal Stokes and his team at The Jefferson Group to root out the threat. But is it too late?

Following his predecessor's abrupt departure, newly appointed President Brandon Zimmer must deal with aggressors at home and abroad. The sharks sense his weakness and are out for blood. The burden might just be too much to handle for the young president. Will President Zimmer cave to outside forces, or stand strong with his friends from Stokes Security International (SSI), like former Marine Cal Stokes and ex-Navy SEAL Travis Haden?

While gangster films are one of America's most popular genres, gangster movies appear in every film industry across the world. With contributions from an international panel of experts, A Companion to the Gangster Film explores the popularity of gangster films across three major continents: the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

It should have been an easy score - a suburban house on a quiet cul-de-sac, with the owners scheduled to be gone all night. But career burglar George Patniks has chosen the wrong time to go breaking and entering, because tonight Harvey Rozier will murder his wife. Patniks is the only witness to the brutal killing, but, of course, he can't go to the police.

December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln's government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country's law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American.

Billionaire entrepreneur David Traynor has big dreams for fixing a broken government in his first term as president of the United States. In the months before his inauguration, he’s developed daring and, in some cases, secret strategies to solve the climate crisis, force Congress to work again, and rebuild America’s economy - and that’s just the beginning. Everyone in the capital is scrambling to adapt to the new disruptor in chief’s bold agenda, though many, both at home and abroad, also want to see Traynor and his steely vice president, Wendy Upton, fail.

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with E. E. Cummings's Cambridge upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary Decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and other "modern" movements in the arts.

Noted for his remarkable erudition, wit, and playful pessimism, Miller here ranges over topics from personal disasters to literary and national ones. Drawing on a truly immense store of knowledge encompassing literature, philosophy, theology, and history, he excavates the evidence of human anxieties around scarcity in all its forms (from scarcity of food to luck to where we stand in the eyes of others caught in a game of musical chairs we often do not even know we are playing).

During the summer of 1776, a British incursion from Canada loomed. In response, citizen soldiers of the newly independent nation mounted a heroic defense. Patriots constructed a small fleet of gunboats on Lake Champlain in northern New York and confronted the Royal Navy in a desperate three-day battle near Valcour Island. Their effort surprised the arrogant British and forced the enemy to call off their invasion.

Otto Penzler presents a collection of 19 unsolved mystery stories by a number of noted authors, including Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, and Mark Twain, where the ending is left up to the listener to determine.

J. D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn's Salinger is a young American World War II draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war - from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood.

Americans responded to the deadly terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, with an outpouring of patriotism, though all were not united in their expression. A war-based patriotism inspired millions of Americans to wave the flag and support a brutal War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, while many other Americans demanded an empathic patriotism that would bear witness to the death and suffering surrounding the attack. Twenty years later, the war still simmers, and both forms of patriotism continue to shape historical understandings of 9/11's legacy and the political life of the nation.

A mysterious black van is spotted by several people at various times in the area around Cavanaugh Street, Philadelphia's Armenian-American enclave. Presumed by some to be related to the increasing ICE raids around the area, the mystery deepens one night when a body falls out of the back of the van when speeding through the neighborhood. Marta Warkowski, a reclusive older woman, is found bound up in a garbage bag after it falls out of the van. In a coma, Warkowski is unable to tell police how she ended up as she did.

It’s presidential primary season in Washington, DC, and both parties are on edge. At campaign rallies for all the candidates around the country, there are disturbing incidents of violence and protest and shocking acts of civil disobedience. Rena and Brooks are happy to sit it out. Against this backdrop, Wendy Upton, the highly respected centrist senator, must make a choice: She’s been offered the VP slot by both parties’ leading candidates.

The bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers was the pivotal event of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed. Ever since the bankruptcy, there has been heated debate about why the Federal Reserve did not rescue Lehman in the same way it rescued other financial institutions, such as Bear Stearns and AIG. The Fed's leaders from that time, especially former Chairman Ben Bernanke, have strongly asserted that they lacked the legal authority to save Lehman because it did not have adequate collateral for the loan it needed to survive.

On a windy night in 1937, a 17-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him "Cesare" after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr's enemies.

In their third book of the series, follow Matt and Karen as they work their way around the western United States discovering some of our most beautiful public lands, hidden gems, and revisiting a few of their favorite national parks. Share their trials and tribulations as they hit the road in an RV for the first time in Arizona and hike the same trail the Klondike Gold Rush prospectors took in Alaska. Through a series of emails written to their friends, Bob and Sue, the couple brings the listener along on their adventures, sharing their experiences as they explore.

Beethoven imbibed Enlightenment and revolutionary ideas in his hometown of Bonn, where they were fervently discussed in cafes and at the university. Moving to Vienna at the age of 21 to study with Haydn, he gained renown as a brilliant pianist and innovative composer. In that conservative city, capital of the Hapsburg empire, authorities were ever watchful to curtail and punish overt displays of radical political views. Nevertheless, Beethoven avidly followed the meteoric rise of Napoleon.