Showing results by narrator "Malcolm Hillgartner" in All Categories

Thanks to the machinations of the right, there is no dirtier word in American politics today than "liberal". Yet public-opinion polls consistently show that the majority of Americans hold liberal views on everything from health care to foreign policy.

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 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.

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.

Paul Hansen is in prison. He's been in this prison on the outskirts of Montreal for a couple of years, sharing a cell with a murderous Hells Angel who often reminds Paul that he could kill him at any moment. What did Paul do to end up here? Jean-Paul Dubois's extraordinary novel and winner of the Prix Goncourt Not Everybody Lives the Same Way, follows this man as he reviews his life. A life of equilibrium, it has given Paul both tragedy and gifts.

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 year, over two brutal Northeast winters, the whole of Vermont was captivated by the hunt for a runaway golden retriever named Murphy. He was more than a missing dog - he was a target for capture, and journalistic obsession. This is that story. Murphy’s disappearance would unite the dog’s increasingly anxious owners with an impassioned reporter - Wilson Ring, the state’s correspondent for the Associated Press - and an online community of animal lovers. As Murphy kept running, the quest to bring him home, safe and sound, seemed more and more impossible.

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.

Private investigator Heredia spends his days reading detective novels; commiserating with his cat, Simenon; and peering out over the Mapocho River from his Santiago apartment. The city he loves may be changing, but Heredia can't stop chasing the ghosts of the past. This time, they've come to him...

Christmas 1941 came little more than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The shock - in some cases overseas, elation - was worldwide. While Americans attempted to go about celebrating as usual, the reality of the just-declared war was on everybody’s mind. United States troops on Wake Island were battling a Japanese landing force and, in the Philippines, losing the fight to save Luzon. In Japan, the Pearl Harbor strike force returned to Hiroshima Bay and toasted its sweeping success.

At a time when the hottest issue in US immigration law is the proposed action by President Obama to protect from deportation as many as five million illegals in the United States, the John Lennon case takes on special relevance, notwithstanding the passage of 40 years since he was placed in deportation proceedings. This is John and Yoko's incredible story, as told by the lawyer who fought in the front lines.

Rob Spillman has devoted his life to the rebellious pursuit of artistic authenticity. Born in Germany to two driven musicians, his childhood was spent among the West Berlin cognoscenti in a city 200 miles behind the Iron Curtain. There, the Berlin Wall stood as a stark reminder of the split between East and West, between suppressed dreams and freedom of expression.

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.

The best carnival barker in the business couldn’t have drawn a crowd like the one now gathered around the Ferris wheel on the pier. In one of the cabs, still rocking with the ocean breeze, is a dead man - a bloody knife protruding from his back. Why the notorious gambling boss Jerry McGurn was killed is no mystery. Who did it is. And there’s only one probable witness to the crime.

All his life, Viggo Larssen has been haunted by the same troubling dream, which he calls the Omen - a vision of a woman beckoning to him from the surface of a churning sea. Now, as he broods over his shipwrecked existence in a remote lighthouse off the outermost coast of Denmark, he is about to be borne backward by the current to a past he thought he had escaped forever.

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.

Harbor Hill in Roslyn, Long Island, was designed to be a "palace" for a "queen." Commissioned by the beautiful and imperious Katherine Duer Mackay, wife of one of the country's wealthiest men, it was an estate almost without equal in the entire country. This is the saga of that magnificent mansion, an extravagant product of the owners' hubris and desire for social acceptance, and of the ultimate failure of that driving ambition.

Almir Narayamoga Surui, the Amazonian tribal chieftain of the indigenous Surui people, is a leader in the fight to save the rainforest not only for the preservation of his land and people, but for the Earth's and humanity's survival as well. Joining forces with such high-tech corporations as Apple and Google Earth, Surui has become a guardian of his people and a global activist, despite death threats and million-dollar bounties on his head.

When talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman makes his pilgrimage to sit at the feet of his hero, the reclusive master of American Literature, E. I. Lonoff, he soon finds himself enmeshed in the great Jewish writer's domestic life, with all its complexity, artifice and drive for artistic truth. As Nathan sits in breathlessly awkward conversation with his idol, a glimpse of a dark-haired beauty through a closing doorway leaves him reeling. He soon learns that the entrancing vision is Amy Bellette, but her position in the Lonoff household - student? mistress? - remains tantalisingly unclear.

Ice Ghosts weaves together the epic story of the Franklin Expedition—whose two ships and crew of 129 were lost to the Arctic ice—with the modern tale of the scientists, divers, and local Inuit behind the incredible discovery of the flagship's wreck in 2014. Paul Watson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was on the icebreaker that led the discovery expedition, tells a fast-paced historical adventure story.