Showing results by narrator "Paul Woodson" in All Categories

It’s 1936. The seaside-resort village of Split on the Adriatic coast bustles. The tourist spots are booming, passenger steamers dot the harbor, and Jewish émigrés have found tenuous refuge from persecution. But as war in Europe looms, Split is also a nest of spies, fascists, and smugglers—and now, a locale suspiciously scouted by a German Reich film crew. Then one summer morning it becomes the scene of a murder investigation when a corpse is found entangled in fishing nets in the port.

The first and only successful slave revolution in the Americas began in 1791 when thousands of brutally exploited slaves rose up against their masters on Saint-Domingue, the most profitable colony in the 18th-century Atlantic world. Within a few years, the slave insurgents forced the French administrators of the colony to emancipate them, a decision ratified by revolutionary Paris in 1794. This victory was a stunning challenge to the order of master/slave relations throughout the Americas, including the Southern United States.

In The Allure of the Multiverse, physicist Paul Halpern tells the epic story of how science became besotted with the multiverse, and the controversies that ensued. The questions that brought scientists to this point are big and deep: Is reality such that anything can happen, must happen? How does quantum mechanics "choose" the outcomes of its apparently random processes? And why is the universe habitable? Each question quickly leads to the multiverse.

John Lennon 1980 traces the powerful, life-affirming story of the former Beatle’s remarkable comeback after five years of self-imposed retirement. Lennon’s final pivotal year would climax in several moments of creative triumph as he rediscovered his artistic self in dramatic fashion. With the bravura release of the Double Fantasy album with wife, Yoko Ono, he was poised and ready for an even brighter future only to be wrenched from the world by an assassin’s bullets.

In Collisions, Michael Kimmage, a historian and former State Department official who focused on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, offers a wide-angle, historically informed account of the origins of the current Russia-Ukraine war.

Ridge de Reyne (from The Red Fury) served both Henry III and Alexander, King of Scotland, but royal appointments were ultimately not the life he wanted. Determined to make his fortune and become a powerful warlord in his own right, Ridge has followed the tournament circuit for the past few years, accumulating wealth and making a name for himself as the unbeatable warrior known as The Black Storm. Enter Lady Catherine de Tuberville.

Between dusk and dawn on the night of March 24-25, 1944, a small army of Allied soldiers crawled through tunnels in Germany in a covert operation the likes of which the Third Reich had never seen. The prison break from Stalag Luft III in Eastern Germany was the largest of its kind in the Second World War. Seventy-nine Allied soldiers and airmen made it outside the wire - but only three made it outside Nazi Germany. Fifty were executed by the Gestapo.

Strian Eindrideson has served alongside his friends since he was old enough to swing a sword, but beneath the handsome but brutal exterior lies a wounded heart. Separated from the only woman he ever loved, Strian searches for his missing wife until a pair of blue eyes captures his attention during a raid. Will love be enough to repair the damage caused by so many years apart?

Lord Henry Radcliffe, the scarred but sinfully sexy Earl of Langlevit, is a beast. The only way Henry can exorcise the demons of his war-ravaged past is through intense physicality. In and out of bed. An endeavor that has no shortage of willing participants. Intent on scandalizing London, Princess Irina Volkonsky is a hellion and every gentleman's deepest desire....except for one. Irina knows better than to provoke the wickedly forbidding earl, but she will stop at nothing short of ruination to win the heart of the only man she's ever loved.

John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to fascinate. Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe's obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. He remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues.

Philippe Girard shows how Toussaint Louverture transformed himself from lowly freedman into revolutionary hero as the mastermind of the bloody slave revolt of 1791. By 1801, Louverture was governor of the colony where he had once been a slave. But his lifelong quest to be accepted as a member of the colonial elite ended in despair: he spent the last year of his life in a French prison cell. His example nevertheless inspired anticolonial and Black nationalist movements well into the 20th century.

Ally, daughter of the Duke of Gunthry, has spent her life terrified of her father and dreams of the day when she can escape his tyrannical rule. When her mum helps her escape to the beautiful island of Kauai, Ally thinks she’s found paradise - and maybe more with the handsome River who keeps crossing her path. But there are unexpected enemies lurking in the shadows. And no matter how tough River seems, no one can withstand the army her father will send when he discovers her location.

Nothing is more dear to Griffin than his magic school, but for a man with no magic, life there has its challenges. They laugh at him. They exclude him. And that's just his fellow teachers. So when a dragon no one else has seen delivers a chilling warning to Griffin, it's no surprise that his colleagues don't take him seriously. Unfortunately, convincing them that the magistery stands at the brink of destruction is only the beginning of his troubles. As an ancient struggle between dragons and men reignites, Griffin's only hope lies in deciphering the secrets of a long-dead madman.

Loyal Americans marched off to war in 1861 not to conquer the South but to liberate it. So argues Elizabeth R. Varon in Armies of Deliverance, a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims. Northerners imagined the war as a crusade to deliver the Southern masses from slaveholder domination and to bring democracy, prosperity, and education to the region. As the war escalated, Lincoln and his allies built the case that emancipation would secure military victory and benefit the North and South alike.

Milan, 1492: When a 16-year-old beauty becomes the mistress of the Duke of Milan, she must fight for her place in the palace—and against those who want her out. Soon, she finds herself sitting before Leonardo da Vinci, who wants to ensure his own place in the palace by painting his most ambitious portrait to date. Munich, World War II: After a modest conservator unwittingly places a priceless Italian Renaissance portrait into the hands of a high-ranking Nazi, she risks her life to recover it, working with an American soldier, part of the famed Monuments Men team, to get it back.

One hundred years ago in Port Arbello a pretty little girl began to scream. And struggle. And die. No one heard. No one saw. Just one man whose guilty heart burst in pain as he dashed himself to death in the sea. Now something peculiar is happening in Port Arbello. The children are disappearing, one by one. An evil history is repeating itself. And one strange, terrified child has ended her silence with a scream that began 100 years ago.

Traumatized from an attack, Cairstine is determined never to marry and never to be subjected to a man's control. But one obstacle stands in her way: Her younger sister can't marry the man she loves until Cairstine marries first. When Cairstine's father refuses to consider her choice to become a nun, can Cairstine convince an unsuspecting friend to pose as her betrothed?

Thea loves the adventure of riding patrols through the Scottish Highlands and Borderlands, protecting her people from the English. But she knows that someday she'll have to find her true place within the Ramsay clan. If only she knew what that might be.

Popular Lost Cities author David Hatcher Childress takes us into the amazing world of ancient technology, from computers in antiquity to the flying machines of the gods. Childress looks at the technology that was allegedly used in Atlantis and the theory that the Great Pyramid of Egypt was originally a gigantic power station. He examines tales of ancient flight and the technology that it involved; how the ancients used electricity; megalithic building techniques; the use of crystal lenses and the fire from the gods; and more.

January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent.