Showing results by narrator "Malcolm Hillgartner" in All Categories

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'.

For more than 25 years John Thavis held one of the most fascinating journalistic jobs in the world: reporting on the inner workings of the Vatican. His daily exposure to the power, politics, and personalities in the seat of Roman Catholicism gave him a unique, behind-the-scenes perspective on an institution that is far less monolithic and unified than it first appears. Thavis reveals Vatican City as a place where Curia cardinals fight private wars, scandals threaten to undermine papal authority, and reverence for the past is continually upended by the practical considerations of modern life.

Early on March 15, 1697, a band of Abenaki warriors in service to the French raided the English frontier village of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Striking swiftly, the Abenaki killed 27 men, women, and children, and took 13 captives, including 39-year-old Hannah Duston and her week-old daughter, Martha. A short distance from the village, one of the warriors murdered the squalling infant. After witnessing her infant's murder, Duston resolved to get even.

David Foster Wallace was the leading literary light of his generation, a man who not only captivated readers with his prose but also mesmerized them with his brilliant mind. In this, the first biography of the writer, D. T. Max sets out to chart Wallace’s tormented, anguished, and often triumphant battle to succeed as a novelist as he fights off depression and addiction to emerge with his masterpiece, Infinite Jest.

Here is the private and most intimate correspondence of one of America's most influential and incisive journalists - Hunter S.Thompson. In letters to a who's who of luminaries, from Norman Mailer toCharles Kuralt, Tom Wolfe to Lyndon Johnson, William Styron to Joan Baez - not to mention his mother, the NRA, and a chain of newspaper editors - Thompson vividly catches the tenor of the times in 1960s America and channels it all through hisown razor-sharp perspective.

Fifteen years ago, Bronx-born plumber Tommy Rosa died in a hit-and-run incident. Lying by the road, he felt a tug whisking him off into a tunnel of light to meet his divine teacher in heaven. After several weeks in a coma, Tommy returned to Earth to walk again with a heightened sense of connection to one and all. Around the same time, Dr. Stephen Sinatra, an integrative cardiologist, was dismantling the prevailing ideas of preventive pharmacology with his holistic approach to treatment.

Considered by Ty Cobb as the "finest natural hitter in the history of the game," "Shoeless Joe" Jackson is ranked with the greatest players to ever step onto a baseball diamond. With a career .356 batting average - which is still ranked third all-time - the man from Pickens County, South Carolina, was on his way to becoming one of the greatest players in the sport's history. That is until the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, which shook baseball to its core.

He glides through life cocooned by his devoted family, lucrative business, sporting prowess and good looks. He is the embodiment of thriving post-war America, land of liberty and hope. Until one sunny day in 1968, when Swede's daughter, Merry, commits an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism and the Levov family is plunged into mayhem. Extraordinarily nuanced and poignant, American Pastoral is the first in an eloquent trilogy of post-war American novels that still resonates today.

Verne Lundquist's remarkable broadcasting career has placed him at the center of major sporting events in America for more than 50 years, from Jack Nicklaus' final victory at the 1986 Masters to Tonya Harding's attack on Nancy Kerrigan at the 1994 Olympics to the Auburn-Alabama shocker of 2013. In his first memoir, he replays highlights from his career, taking sports fans behind the scenes of some of the most dramatic moments in modern sports history.

Angel in the Whirlwind is the epic tale of the American Revolution, from its roots among tax-weary colonists to the triumphant Declaration of Independence and eventual victory and liberty, recounted by Benson Bobrick, lauded by the New York Times as "perhaps the most interesting historian writing in America today".

Politician, evangelist, and reformer William Jennings Bryan was the most popular public speaker of his time. In this acclaimed biography - the first major reconsideration of Bryan's life in 40 years - award-winning historian Michael Kazin illuminates his astonishing career and the richly diverse and volatile landscape of religion and politics in which he rose to fame.

No American statesman has been as revered and as reviled as Henry Kissinger. Once hailed as "Super-K" - the "indispensable man" whose advice has been sought by every president from Kennedy to Obama - he has also been hounded by conspiracy theorists, scouring his every "telcon" for evidence of Machiavellian malfeasance. Yet as Niall Ferguson shows in this magisterial biography, the idea of Kissinger as the ruthless arch-realist is based on a profound misunderstanding.

David Player has spent 30 years trying to forget the traumas of his childhood. The threats, the kidnappings, the murders. The imagined curses of a people born centuries earlier, passed from father to son, mother to daughter, generation to generation. Its climax came in human form, a monster of a man, one of the most notorious serial killers the nation has ever seen: Pee Wee Gaskins. And Gaskins had a particular hatred for the Player family, then for David, himself, who barely escaped those years with his own life intact.

This is New York Times bestselling author and Emmy-nominated broadcaster Ron Darling's 108 baseball anecdotes that connect America’s game to the men who played it. Darling has played with or reported on just about everybody who has put on a uniform since 1983, and they in turn have played with or reported on just about everybody who put on a uniform in a previous generation. Like the 108 stitches on a baseball, Darling's experiences are interwoven with every athlete who has ever played, every coach or manager, and every fan.

Manchester recalls in intimate detail everything from family gatherings at Hyannis Port, to grueling campaign trips, and quiet evenings alone with the president in the White House family quarters. The resulting portrait provides listeners with myriad anecdotes and insights into a life of a man that bristled with vigor, competitiveness, and an unflagging drive for excellence, and shone with elegance, intelligence, and compassion.

Set against a backdrop of glittering privilege, The Assassination ofthe Archduke combines royal history, touching romance, and political murder in a moving portrait of the end of an era. One hundred years after the event, it offers the startling truth behind the Sarajevo assassinations, including Serbian complicity, and examines rumors of conspiracy and official negligence.

Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, E. B. White's stroll around Manhattan remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America's foremost literary figures. The New York Times named Here Is New York one of the 10 best books ever written about the metropolis, and The New Yorker called it "the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city".

Now, he knows it is too late to change things. He can barely walk and manages to hurt himself badly while sleeping. With those limitations, how can he fix the lamentable situation he's made of his life? But this is Middle Falls, where everyone gets a second chance. The Regretful Life of Richard Bell is the sixteenth book in the Middle Falls Time Travel Series. Like all Middle Falls stories, it can be read as a standalone novel, or as part of the series.

The defeat of South Vietnam was arguably America's worst foreign policy disaster of the twentieth century. Yet a complete understanding of the endgame—from the January 27, 1973 signing of the Paris Peace Accords to South Vietnam's surrender on April 30, 1975—has eluded us. Black April addresses that deficit.

The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the great books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress.