Showing results by narrator "Malcolm Hillgartner" in All Categories

Late 1930's Germany: Best friends Alex von Hemmerle and Nicolas von Bingen, titled childhood friends with neighboring estates, are witnessing the rise of Nazism when Nick's father reveals the long-buried secret of his son's partial Jewish ancestry. Warned by highly placed friends to flee, the only treasures Nick and his sons can take are two dazzling Lipizzaner horses, gifts from Alex. These powerful and majestic creatures become their ticket to a new life waiting across the ocean.

Tomorrow, the sun will rise for the first time in 40 days. Thirty minutes of daylight will herald the end of the polar night in Kautokeino, a small village in northern Norway, home to the indigenous Sami people. But in the last hours of darkness, a precious artifact is stolen: an ancient Sami drum. The most important piece in the museum's collection, it was due to go on tour with a UN exhibition in a few short weeks.

When University of Washington Professor Benjamin Bradshaw discovers the dead body of a despised colleague inside the Faraday cage of the electric machine, his carefully controlled world shatters.

Frederick Kaufman tackles the complex history of money, beginning with the earliest myths and wrapping up with Wall Street’s byzantine present-day doings. Along the way, he exposes a set of allegorical plots, stock characters, and stereotypical metaphors that have long been linked with money and commercial culture, from Melanesian trading rituals to the dogma of Medieval churchmen faced with global commerce, the rationales of Mercantilism and colonial expansion, and the U.S. dollar’s 1971 unpinning from gold.

By turns a family drama and an action-adventure story, The Age of Daredevils chronicles the lives of the men and women who devoted themselves to the extraordinary sport of jumping over Niagara Falls in a barrel - a death-defying gamble that proved a powerful temptation to a hardy few. Internationally known in the 1920s and '30s for their barrel-jumping exploits, the Hills were a father-son team of daredevils who also rescued dozens of misguided thrill seekers and accident victims who followed them into the river.

This is the true story of an unknown American politician who played a critical role in ending centuries of conflict in Northern Ireland. Without the president's permission, and breaking every conventional rule about how to deal with terrorists, former congressman Bruce Morrison helped end a conflict that most observers thought would continue indefinitely.

A tense, dangerous thriller of CIA operations in Latin America, guerrilla wars, drug flights, environmental catastrophes and genocides. Shot down over the Guatemalan jungle with a planeload of marijuana, Vietnam veteran Joe Murphy gets caught up in the country's brutal Civil War, and in an attack on a Mayan village by the Guatemalan Army and its CIA "advisors". Badly injured, he escapes on a nightmare trek through the jungle, hunted by the Army, the CIA, and death squads.

Can America's public schools, long resistant to change, meet the challenges of globalization and new educational alternatives? Not by doing what they're doing today. So argues Building Engaged Schools, a book that challenges the faulty assumptions that guide American public education.

Just before Thanksgiving in 1950, five months into the Korean War, General MacArthur flew to American positions in the north and grandly announced an "end-the-war-by-Christmas" offensive despite recent intervention by Mao's Chinese, who would soon trap tens of thousands of US troops poised toward the Yalu River border.

For more than a decade, French journalist Nicolas Hénin has reported from the front lines of conflict in the Middle East, much of his time spent in Iraq and Syria. He witnessed the events leading to the rise of Islamic State, and, in June 2013, he was captured by IS and spent 10 months in captivity with James Foley and others who were beheaded soon after Hénin was released.

A society matron's life is threatened after she engineers the theft of her own priceless jewelry to pay off a gambling debt. Only a debonair connoisseur of crime can save her and recover her gems. For a price.

Jonathan Starr is not your traditional do-gooder, and in 2009, when he decided to found Abaarso, a secondary school in Somaliland, the choice seemed crazy to even his closest friends. Why, they wondered, would he turn down a life of relative luxury to relocate to an armed compound in a breakaway region of the world's number one failed state? To achieve his mission, Starr would have to overcome profound cultural differences, broken promises, and threats to his safety and that of his staff.

A starlet's plot to blackmail a film-studio executive results in her murder. Only the "trouble chaser" can clear her volatile lover and solve the crime.

On an urban battleground dangerously divided along racial lines, probation officer Steve Baum is desperately struggling to hold on to the last remaining shreds of his idealism, until Darryl King invades his world. A deranged young sociopath, one of the most bloodthirsty creations of a diseased society, Darryl has come to drag Baum along with him into an inescapable morass of terror and corruption.

A big-city tough guy comes to a small Minnesota town to settle a deadly fight between the local crime boss and his chief rival - his son.

Private investigator Heredia has many phantoms - and one of his most haunting has come calling. Argentine investigative journalist Fernanda Arredondo, an old flame he loved and lost, needs to see him after saying good-bye years ago. All it takes is a single day for Heredia to lose her again when she’s found dead - an apparent suicide in a lonely hotel room in Santiago. Heredia has more than his instincts to tell him that it was murder.

San Francisco, 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets. A disgraced professor takes a downtown office to plot his return. But the walls are thin, and he’s distracted by voices from next door—his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of her patients dislikes the hum of the white-noise machine. And so he begins to hear about the patient’s troubles with her female lover, her conflicts with her adoptive WASP family, and her quest to track down her birth mother.

The race to win an electrical competition incites Professor Benjamin Bradshaw’s obsession for invention in this sequel to A Spark of Death. The contest winner’s telephonic system will deliver music of the Seattle Grand Theater to homes throughout the city, and Bradshaw is confident he can win. But he is diverted by a peddler and a child gone missing, while the assassination of President McKinley drops Bradshaw and the entire nation into shock. When Bradshaw discovers that the peddler’s child may have witnessed a murder, he follows her trail....

Ira Ringold is an American roughneck who transforms himself from a ditch-digger in 1930s New Jersey, to a radio hotshot in the 1940s. In his heyday as a star - and as a bullying supporter of 'progressive' political causes - Ira marries Hollywood's leading lady, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling exposé that identifies Ira as 'an American taking his orders from Moscow'.

A Manhattan gumshoe pursues a convict to St. Louis, where he gets mixed up in a cop killing and nearly loses his own life at the hands of a B girl.