Showing results by narrator "Michael Prichard" in All Categories

Spenser smells corruption in a college town. Taft University's hottest basketball star is shaving points for quick cash. All manner of sleaze -- from corrupt academics to hoods with graduate degrees -- have their fingers in the pot. Spenser's search takes him from lecture halls to blue collar bars and finally into a bloody confrontation with almost certain death. But Spenser saves an arrogant young athlete -- even though it nearly kills him to do it.

From the early 1800s to the end of his life in 1917, Buffalo Bill Cody was as famous as anyone could be. Annie Oakley was his most celebrated protegee, the "slip of a girl" from Ohio who could (and did) outshoot anybody to become the most celebrated star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

The Jack Nicholson film The Departed didn't tell half of their story. A poor kid from the slums, Robert Fitzpatrick grew up to become a stellar FBI agent and challenge the country's deadliest gangsters. Relentless in his desire to catch, prosecute, and convict Whitey Bulger, Fitzpatrick fought the nation's most determined cop-gangster battle since Melvin Purvis hunted, confronted, and killed John Dillinger. In his crusade to bring Bulger to justice, Fitzpatrick faced not only Whitey but also corrupt FBI agents, along with political cronies and enablers from Boston to Washington....

Mortally wounded in battle when he was only 31, the dashing J. E. B. Stuart, the South's "plumed warrior knight", stands with Stonewall Jackson as one of the Confederacy's most revered martyrs. Union General John Sedgwick called him "the greatest cavalryman ever foaled in America". Jeffry D. Wert, however, offers a more balanced assessment in this comprehensive biography.

On February 13 and 14, 1945, three successive waves of British and U.S. aircraft rained down thousands of tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the largely undefended German city of Dresden. Night and day, Dresden was engulfed in a vast sea of flame, a firestorm that generated 1,500-degree temperatures and hurricane-force winds. Thousands suffocated in underground shelters where they had fled to escape the inferno above.

So said Brigadier S. James Hill, commanding officer of the British 3rd Parachute Brigade, in an address to his troops shortly before the launching of Operation Overlord - the D-Day invasion of Normandy. No more prophetic words were ever spoken, for chaos indeed reigned on that day, and many more that followed.

Captain Nemo captures the men on his incredible submarine, the Nautilus. The captain and his unwilling passengers thus embark on a deep-sea odyssey that stretches from the palm-strewn Indian Ocean to the frozen peril of the South Pole. But the enigmatic Nemo has a darker purpose for his voyage...revenge on humanity.

The purpose of Why Architecture Matters is to "come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually" - with its impact on our lives. "Architecture begins to matter," writes Paul Goldberger, "when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads."

Only two Americans held positions of great influence throughout the Cold War; ironically, they were the chief advocates for the opposing strategies for winning---and surviving---that harrowing conflict. Both men came to power during World War II, reached their professional peaks during the Cold War's most frightening moments, and fought epic political battles that spanned decades.

Award-winning author William Rosen tells the story of the men responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the machine that drove it: the steam engine.

A giant in American journalism in the vanguard of "The Greatest Generation" reveals his World War II experiences in this National Geographic book. More than 100 of Cronkite's letters from 1943-45 (plus a few earlier letters) survive. They reveal surprising and little-known facts about this storied public figure in the vanguard of "The Greatest Generation". They chronicle both a great love story and a great war story.

John Mosier presents a revisionist retelling of the war on the Eastern Front. The conventional wisdom is that Hitler was mad to think he could defeat the USSR, because of its vast size and population, and that the Battle of Stalingrad marked the turning point of the war. Neither statement is accurate, says Mosier; Hitler came very close to winning outright.

Jack London was born a working class, fatherless Californian in 1876. In his youth, he was a boundlessly energetic adventurer on the bustling West Coast - an oyster pirate, a hobo, a sailor, and a prospector by turns. He spent his brief life rapidly accumulating the experiences that would inform his acclaimed best-selling books The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf.

As the Revolutionary war draws to an end, the violence on the frontier only accelerates. The infamous Girty brothers incite Indians to a number to massacres, but when the Village of Peace, a Christian utopian settlement is destroyed, the settlers know they will have to hunt them down.

A work of remarkable scholarship that moves with the swift pace of a John le Carre thriller, A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich is a chilling addition to the literature of espionage. In 1943, a young official named Fritz Kolbe from the German foreign ministry arranged to meet with Allen Dulles, then an OSS officer in Switzerland and later the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

On June 27, 1844, a mob stormed the jail in the dusty frontier town of Carthage, Illinois. Clamorous and angry, they were hunting down a man they saw as a grave threat to their otherwise quiet lives: The founding prophet of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. They wanted blood. At thirty-nine years old, Smith had already lived an outsized life. In addition to starting the Church of Latter-Day Saints and creating his own "Golden Bible" - the Book of Mormon - he had worked as a water-dowser and treasure hunter.

Al-Hasan al-Wazzan - born in Granada to a Muslim family that in 1492 went to Morocco - became famous as the great Renaissance writer Leo Africanus, author of the first geography of Africa to be published in Europe (in 1550). He had been captured by Christian pirates in the Mediterranean and imprisoned by the Pope; when he was released and baptized, he lived a European life of scholarship as the Christian writer Giovanni Leone....

In this revealing business advice book, the magic of the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market proves a dynamic example of what a group of people can create when they are aligned and living a powerful vision. Here for the first time, owner John Yokoyama explains in his own words just how he transformed his business into a workplace that is renowned worldwide.

Still unsolved, still baffling, still claiming new victims. Here are the untold stories. A pilot reports a strange haze enveloping his plane, then disappears; 11 hours after fuel starvation, as if calling from a void, he is heard 600 miles away. He requests permission to land, then vanishes forever. A freighter steaming over placid seas disappears without a trace. A pleasure yacht ghosts past without a soul on board. A pilot calls for help because a "weird object" is harassing his plane. A jet collides with an "unknown" and is never found.

The Middle East is the beginning and the end of U.S. foreign policy: events there influence our alliances, make or break presidencies, govern the price of oil, and draw us into war. But it was not always so - and as Patrick Tyler shows in this thrilling chronicle of American misadventures in the region, the story of American presidents' dealings there is one of mixed motives, skulduggery, deceit, and outright foolishness, as well as of policymaking and diplomacy.