Showing results by narrator "Jim Meskimen" in All Categories

Under names like Otis J. Raisincluster, Quigley E. Sneersight, and Cormorant Beecham III, W. C. Fields squirreled away nearly a million dollars in banks across the country during his vaudeville days - before he became one of the silver screen's most recognizable funnymen. But it's no laughing matter when a burglar has the audacity to rob him blind, stealing his bankbooks and cleaning out his accounts. Steaming, the comedian hires Hollywood private investigator Toby Peters to track down the missing dough and protect what remains of his nest egg.

Zacharia, a Civil War general, discovers a secret about the Gods. With Jacob, his aide-de-camp, he sets out to alter the lives of Gods and men in this offbeat tale of satire and humor.

Cardboard Gods is the memoir of Josh Wilker, a brilliant writer who has marked the stages of his life through the baseball cards he collected as a child. It also captures the experience of growing up obsessed with baseball cards and explores what it means to be a fan of the game. Along the way, as we get to know Josh, his family, and his friends, we also get Josh’s classic observations about the central artifacts from his life - the baseball cards themselves.

A memoir of a composer’s life in the Alaskan wilderness and a meditation on making art in a landscape acutely threatened by climate change. In the summer of 1975, the composer John Luther Adams, then a 22-year-old graduate of CalArts, boarded a flight to Alaska. So began a journey into the mountains and forests of the Far North - and across distinctive mental and aural terrain - that would last for the next 40 years.

In his first book, American Underdog, David Brat examines how we brought down the status quo by tapping in to moral and economic lessons as old as our civilization and discusses how Washington can learn from history instead of ignoring it. A fighter for children, he illuminates how our current fiscal policies are selling their future and outlines new ways to move forward with a conservative agenda that provides fairer treatment for all.

When his friend Peralta, newly sworn in as sheriff, is shot by a sniper, David Mapstone, former historian and new deputy sheriff, can’t keep a cool, academic distance - and he’d better not. While Peralta lies comatose in the hospital, the powers that be install Mapstone as acting sheriff in his friend’s place. Mapstone feels unqualified, but he’s the only person whose temporary appointment won’t infuriate all the other candidates, who want the sheriff’s position permanently. Meanwhile, a cryptic note scrawled by Peralta before the shooting forces Mapstone to confront his own personal history, inadvertently drawing him into danger.

As a lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, Michael Stuart was once considered an officer and a gentleman. But that’s all changed. Now he’s seen as a renegade, a traitor, and a thief. Stuart is a man without a country...and perhaps without a prayer. Why? Because in a daring plot to foil the Japanese puppet regime in China, he set out to reinstate the country’s true emperor. Known now as The Red Dragon, Stuart is a soldier of fortune in war-torn Manchuria - and a man of honor in a world of treachery.

If you don't know Melville's letters to Hawthorne, you don't know Melville. These letters are full of passion, humor, doubt, and spiritual yearning, and offer an intimate view of Melville's personality. Lyrical and effusive, they are literary works in themselves. This correspondence has been out of print for decades, and even when it was in print it appeared in scholarly volumes of Melville's complete correspondence, aimed at the academy.

Johnny D. Boggs turns the battlefield itself into a character in this historical retelling of Custer's Last Stand, when George Custer led most of his command to annihilation at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in southern Montana in 1876. More than 40 first-person narratives are used - Indian and white, military and civilian, men and women - to paint a panorama of the battle itself. Boggs brings the events and personalities of the Battle of the Little Bighorn to life in a series of first-hand accounts.

In late 2014, Arundhati Roy, John Cusack, and Daniel Ellsberg traveled to Moscow to meet with Edward Snowden. The result is a series of essays and dialogues in which Roy and Cusack reflect on their conversations with Snowden. In these provocative and penetrating discussions, Roy and Cusack discuss the nature of the state, empire, and surveillance in an era of perpetual war, the meaning of flags and patriotism, the role of foundations and NGOs in limiting dissent, and the ways in which capital but not people can freely cross borders.

One day Arthur Friedland piles his three sons into the car and drives them to see the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis. Protesting that he doesn't believe in magic even as he is led onto the stage, Arthur nevertheless experiences something. Later that night, while his family sleeps, he takes his passport, empties all the money from his bank account, and vanishes. In time, still absent from his family, he begins to publish novels and becomes an internationally renowned author.

Professor Vlad Smith is on a terrifying quest, one that will take him from the halls of our most hallowed institutions to the most run-down of old houses in blighted neighborhoods. A mysterious committee, shredded yellowed newspapers, a daguerreotype of a Confederate soldier, a headless corpse, and a corpseless head.... These are the clues that Smith must piece together to save his sanity and his daughter and uncover the terrible secret of the Boss in the Wall.

Boldly go to times where no one has gone before. While transporting a contraband Russian time machine and developmental weaponry, Private Everett Dumphee finds himself cast into new settings when the device suddenly activates. What follows are fantastic high-tech experiences that might be called the ultimate off-road adventure. For the determined Dumphee - narrowly escaping with his life and three beautiful women - it is not necessarily a matter of will he make his destination, but when.

The story is based on true events in the life of Stanley William Miller. It inspires the heart on how a young man’s devotion to his family pushes him beyond impossible odds and testifies to the perseverance of the human spirit. A murder mystery. An infamous scandal. A beautiful love story.

In recent years, the dream of eternal youth has started to look like more than just a dream. In the 20th century alone, life expectancy increased by more than 30 years—almost as much time as humans have gained in the whole span of human existence. Today a motley array of scientists, researchers, and entrepreneurs believe that another, bigger leap is at hand—that human immortality is not only possible, but attainable in our own time.

When Glenn Dixon is spurned by love, he packs his bags for Verona, Italy. Once there, he volunteers to answer the thousands of letters that arrive addressed to Juliet - letters sent from lovelorn people all over the world to Juliet's hometown, people who long to understand the mysteries of the human heart. Glenn's journey takes him deep into the charming community of Verona, where he becomes involved in unraveling the truth behind Romeo and Juliet.

Richard Brautigan was an original - brilliant and wickedly funny. His books resonated with the 1960s, making him an overnight counterculture hero. Dark, funny, and exquisitely haunting, his final book-length fiction explores the fragile, mysterious shadowland surrounding death. Told with classic Brautigan wit, poetic style, and mordant irony, An Unfortunate Woman assumes the form of a peripatetic journal chronicling the protagonist's travels and oblique ruminations on the suicide of one woman and the death of a close friend from cancer.

Portia Kane is having a meltdown. After escaping her ritzy Florida life and her cheating pornographer husband, she finds herself back in South Jersey, a place that remains largely unchanged from the years of her unhappy youth. Lost and alone, looking to find the goodness she believes still exists in the world, Portia sets off to save herself by saving someone else - a beloved high school English teacher who has retired after a traumatic incident.

A handsome young New York professor comes to Phoenix to research his new book. But when he’s brutally murdered, police connect him to one of the world’s most deadly drug cartels. This shouldn’t be a case for historian turned deputy David Mapstone—except the victim had been dating David’s sister in law, Robin, and now she’s a target too. David’s wife, Lindsey, is in Washington with an elite anti-cyber-terror unit, and she makes one demand of him: protect Robin.

In this modern-day fairy tale, the twelve-year-old, telepathic twins uncover a world hidden behind an enchanted mist conjured by five sorcerers to protect all magical beings from the human world. A world that is now terrorized by a dark and destructive force sweeping across the land, threatening their very existence.