Showing results by narrator "Dennis Kleinman" in All Categories

Edward “Blackbeard” Teach has a good reason for everything he does. Despite what his crewmen might say, he isn’t turning soft. When King George I issues a pardon for all pirates who give up their thieving ways within a year, Blackbeard sees his chance to have it all. He just needs to falsely repent within a year and then his comfortable future will be guaranteed. But Blackbeard has made many enemies over the years—men who are not prepared to forgive him just because of a royal decree.

In the early morning of 20th April 1949, HMS Amethyst was fulfilling orders to travel to Nanking to stand guard for the British Embassy during the height of the Chinese Civil War when she was fired upon by guns from the riverbank. Shells pounded into the ship, killing the commanding officer and destroyed the bridge before the ship grounded on the bank. How did the Amethyst escape the battering of Chinese Communist guns?

On the morning of April 9, 1940, German forces occupied Denmark and invaded Norway, leaving Sweden as the only neutral country in Scandinavia. It was to this country, surrounded by Axis forces, that Captain H. M. Denham was posted as Naval Attaché, arriving after evading capture by the Nazi Wehrmacht in the summer. Over the course of the next five years Captain Denham used his position to covertly provide valuable intelligence to the British military. In Inside the Nazi Ring, Denham gives vivid accounts of his meetings with numerous important political and military figures.

A gripping history of the Security Service and its covert surveillance on British writers and intellectuals in the twentieth century.

What do you do when someone tells you, “It can’t be done”? Here is the extraordinary story of three people - an explorer, an engineer, and a statesman - who repeatedly proved critics and naysayers wrong. Roald Amundsen - the Norwegian explorer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel - the greatest engineer the world has ever seen, and Teddy Roosevelt - the cowboy turned statesman. Audacious Goals, Remarkable Results reveals the outsized risks and setbacks each faced in their quest to change the world.

A rebel without a cause, Lieutenant Simon Ducan is bored with desk duty and longs for excitement and danger. When he is drafted into the brutal French Foreign Legion, the undistinguished lieutenant has a chance to prove himself.

David Conway, author of Magic: An Occult Primer is by now famous for his writings on the paranormal, his prose leavened with humor and imbued with good sense, qualities that have endeared him to believers and sceptics alike. In this fascinating autobiography, he recounts the story of his life with candor and an infectious sense of fun.

When a car-jacking in Johannesburg leads to the death of her colleague and lover, Zoe du Plessis, a palaeontologist of Afrikaner origin, is confronted with her family’s secret. As she heads for the Kalahari Desert in search of early human fossils, Zoe embarks on an inner journey into the sense of guilt haunting her people. Meaningful encounters with a San Bushman shaman, a legendary but troubled writer, a Zulu Border War veteran, and her ancestors’ diaries will reshape Zoe's sense of identity.

A small town shaken by magical occurrences, sets forth a young man on a mystical affair. This prose rendition of the orchestrated masterpiece guides listeners through an epic parable for The Father of Time.

Terrorism kills far fewer Americans annually than automobile accidents, firearms, or even lightning strikes. Given this minimal risk, why does the US continue expending lives and treasure to fight the global war on terror? In Monsters to Destroy, Navin A. Bapat argues that the war on terror provides the US a cover for its efforts to expand and preserve American control over global energy markets.

Henry Morris is watching his wife slip away from him. In an ageist society, where euthanasia is encouraged as a patriotic act, dementia is no longer tolerated. Kaitlyn, a young waitress, is desperate for the funds to keep her brother's life support machine switched on. When a chance encounter brings the two together, they embark on an unconventional business arrangement that will force them to confront their prejudices, as well as their deepest, darkest secrets.

The British don’t belong in Africa. Their skins are too pale, their clothing too heavy and elaborate, their morality all wrong. And yet, here they are in 1912 in the British Protectorate of East Africa, tangled in an uneasy peace with the Sultan of Zanzibar. Much of the tangle in this new mystery in Alfieri’s East Africa series concerns the slave trade. The British have outlawed it, but, well, it’s all a matter of who you know and who you owe, isn’t it? That slippery morality infuriates Vera Tolliver, a Scottish missionary’s daughter and the bride of a English police officer.

Justin Tolliver is on the brink of an enormous change. The younger son of an English peer - that is, the son with no money and no prospects - he had joined the police force in British East Africa, full of dreams of bringing his majesty's justice to a dark and savage world. But it's 1913, and with his faith in the British government in tatters, Justin is opting instead for life as an African farmer and a newly minted family-man. It is his wife, Vera, who has helped him put aside images of darkness and come to see Africa, instead, as all but lit from within.

Karl Erlich loves his country. But these are dangerous times for Germany, whose poor and downtrodden have been seduced by an Austrian sign painter named Adolf Hitler. Karl’s twin brother, Kurt, a distinguished scientist, has already pledged his allegiance to the Third Reich, a regime that Karl finds cruel and oppressive. But he soon has even more reason to fear: There is talk of the Nazis singling out the Jews for extermination. Karl and Kurt’s younger sister, Gerda, is engaged to Eric Rheinhardt, a German Jew.

As the 1980s draw to a close, South Africa is a maelstrom of political violence with the apartheid regime in its death throes. Young Martin Helger is the struggling odd duck at an elite private boys school in Johannesburg, with his father, a rough-handed scrap dealer, and his brother, a mysterious legend. When a beautiful and manipulative American arrives at the family home, Martin soon finds himself wrenched out of his isolated bubble and thrust into the raw heart of the struggle.

It's the spring of '76. For Elsa, her affair with Stanwell may well prove lethal, as she's white and he's black, and they dared to fall in love in apartheid South Africa. The terrified lovers are the prey in a deadly manhunt from the golden city of Johannesburg to the exotic but dangerous wilds of the African Bushveld.

She was running to adventure, he was running from destiny.Lady Sarah Halden stows away on the wrong boat when she thinks to enter a sailing race with her brother. She lands in the company of Lucky's business partner, Ian Ross-Mackeever, heir to the Earl Mackeever. Sarah finds the gruff captain handsome and desires him in ways she'd never wanted a man before. With the help of a salacious little book filled with erotic images, Sarah decides to seduce her captain.

It's the summer of 1936, and writer Stefan Zweig is in crisis. His German publisher no longer wants him, his marriage is collapsing, and his home in Austria has been seized. He's been dreaming of Ostend, the Belgian beach town. So he journeys there with his new lover, Lotte Altmann, and reunites with his semiestranged fellow writer and close friend, Joseph Roth. For a moment they create a fragile paradise. But as Europe begins to crumble around them, the writers find themselves trapped on vacation, in exile, watching the world burn.

Mehmet battles for daily survival in the murky Istanbul of 1951 while being forced to learn the craft of theft and violence alongside the other street children. Come evening, he curls up under a stinking jetty in a waterway off the Bosporus Strait. Desperation fills him as he yearns to break free from the life inflicted on him by his drunken, womanizing father, little knowing that his rotting body lies at the bottom of those same waters.

Amidst a murky underworld of flesh-trafficking, prostitution, and institutionalized corruption, elite soldier Jez Kornfeld is thrown into a world where nothing is what it seems, nobody can be trusted, and everything can be violently torn from him.