Showing results by narrator "Joel Richards" in All Categories

Hidden for centuries in the vast Peruvian jungle lies the ancient city of Machu Picchu. It is one of the finest examples of Incan architecture on the continent, preserved and unplundered by the Spanish when they invaded in the sixteenth century. It eluded the Spanish and although it has long been rediscovered, its essence is still shrouded in mystery.

Nova is a lonely planet. It has been on its way to the Andromeda galaxy for ages. And yet, it is inhabited by people who have never known anything other than the caves beneath the surface that protect them from the vacuum and cosmic radiation. A surprising encounter changes everything. The planet gets visitors who seem to have their own agenda, and are so alien that communication seems futile. But they, too, have unexpected existential problems.

From before the dawn of the 20th century until the arrival of the New Deal, one of the most protracted and deadly labor struggles in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were 50,000 mine workers, the nation's largest labor union, and the legendary "miners' angel", Mother Jones.

Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how two rival families participated in an economic boom that opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil at their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.

Eric has learned much about the ways of power since arriving in this strange world. Winning a place among the mighty Nords wasn't easy, but his heroics have earned him a seat at their table. As spring comes to the land, Nord thoughts turn from staying warm to raiding. They've invited Eric to come along. But not all is right in the ripe lands the Nords raid every season. Troops are based where there should be none, and their adversaries are building a navy.

Bobby Hale is a Union veteran several times over. After the war, he sets his sights on California, but only makes it to Montana. As he stumbles around the West, from the Wyoming Territory to the Black Hills of the Dakotas, he finds meaning in the people he meets - settlers and native people - and the violent history he both participates in and witnesses.

With the civilized universe conquered, it’s up to the uncivilized to fight back. Rico prefers working alone, but this time, he’s leading an army against his two greatest enemies, who both have one thing in common: Rico’s own DNA. Fighting a personal battle on a galactic scale, Rico enlists thieves, murderers, and malcontents (plus one space princess) to help him save the universe from tyranny. And considering Rico’s new associates, it’s not a question of whether he’ll be betrayed, but when, and by whom.

This is not a simple story. This is not even just one story. There’s a boy, and there’s a girl. But there’s so much more than that. I was going home. Not forever; only long enough to watch my eternally irresponsible father marry a girl who happened to be my childhood enemy. There were no plans to embark on some crazy sex odyssey with a wild 19-year old baseball player. Easton Malone is insufferable, crude, and far too close. The hot, reckless days we shared should never have happened. I would forget him.

Starting where resiliency studies leave off, two psychologists explore the science of remarkable accomplishment in the wake of trauma, revealing the surprising principles that allow people to transform their lives and achieve extraordinary things. Over four billion people worldwide will survive a trauma during their lives. Some will experience severe post-traumatic stress. Most will eventually recover and return to life as normal. But sometimes, survivors do more than bounce back. Sometimes they bounce forward.

A planet in the endless emptiness of space, far from the warmth of any sun. And yet there are people who populate its vast caverns, living, working and loving. Since time immemorial, they have been on course for Andromeda, the neighboring galaxy of the Milky Way. This is the prophecy of the ancients, the one goal that unites them all, their cult. But then the unthinkable happens: the journey stops because the planet enters the orbit of a mysterious object that can't be seen in any telescope.

An interplanetary adventure in the grand tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

To him, Earth was a prison of the mind and body. Only on the world of the Green Star would he walk - in the borrowed body of a primitive youth.

As the Green Star Rises is the fourth novel in the Green Star saga.

In the riveting second installment of the National Park Mystery Series, archaeologist Chuck Bender finds himself and his young wife and stepdaughters in the crosshairs of an unknown killer when he defends his brother-in-law from false accusations of murder in the brutal slaying of a resort worker in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Hounded by false accusations of murder, archaeologist Chuck Bender and his family risk their lives to track down an unknown killer on the loose in a rugged canyon on the remote western edge of Mesa Verde National Park, where ancient stone villages and secret burial sites, abandoned centuries ago by the Ancestral Puebloan people, harbor artifacts so rare and precious they're worth killing over.

A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy is a deliberately compact introductory work aimed at junior seafarers, those who make decisions affecting the sea services, and those who educate seafarers and decision-makers. It introduces listeners to the main theoretical ideas that shape how statesmen and commanders make and execute maritime strategy in times of peace and war.

A practical guide to outguessing everything from multiple-choice tests to the office football pool to the stock market. People are predictable even when they try not to be. William Poundstone demonstrates how to turn this fact to personal advantage in scores of everyday situations, from playing the lottery to buying a home. Rock Breaks Scissors is mind-reading for real life.

Born to privilege, with preselected genetic advantages and the best nanotech augmentation his father's fabulous money can buy, Daryn spurned the lucrative family Media Network to seek his own path, a crafty raven among soaring eagles. After serving with distinction as a space pilot in the military, he enjoys success as a media consultant. But when he finds himself the target of sophisticated murder attempts, his world is turned upside down.

COVID-19 was not an accident. Its successor, the highly lethal and contagious COVID-23, is not a mutation of COVID-19. China would like us to believe the passage of 19 from animal to human was random and 23 is a natural mutation of 19. The United States wants us to believe both 19 and 23 are weaponized versions of a harmless coronavirus released during a botched Chinese bioweapons experiment. It will be up to Dr. David Aaronson, the new surgeon in the desert town of Fallon, Nevada, to tell the world what really happened.

A famed sandstone arch in Utah's Arches National Park collapses and takes a woman atop it to her death, ensnaring archaeologist Chuck Bender and his family in lethal questions of environmental monkey wrenching and political intrigue. As more deaths follow, Chuck and his wife Janelle race to uncover the killer even as they become murder targets themselves.

From the tremendous hope for a new century embodied in the 1900 Worlds Fair in Paris to the shattering assassination of a Habsburg archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, historian Philipp Blom chronicles this extraordinary epoch year by year. Prime Ministers and peasants, anarchists and actresses, scientists and psychopaths intermingle on the stage of a new century in this portrait of an opulent, unstable age on the brink of disaster.