Showing results by narrator "James C. Moore" in All Categories

Tales of the Jazz Age is a delightful, sobering, thought-provoking, and downright curious collection of 11 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories, published after his first two novels - This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922) - but before The Great Gatsby (1925).

How could things have gone so badly wrong? Writing with customary calmness and clarity, and drawing on unrivaled experience as a reporter in the region, Cockburn analyzes the unfolding of one of the West's greatest foreign policy debacles and the rise of the new jihadis.

Valgolia, a planet in the Epsilon Eridani star system, conquered Earth generations ago, but their conquest was incomplete. While Valgolians made possible greater prosperity, universal health, and interstellar trade for all Earthlings, the factional frictions of Earth - race against race, religion against religion, culture against culture - continue to bedevil the Valgolian's vision of a peaceable world for all mankind.

By the end of the 21st century, a deep-state human-systems organization, the Psychotechnic Institute, has begun melding neuroscience and psychoanalytics to create the foundation for generations of more peaceful, more powerful, more "sensitive" human beings. In Poul Anderson's 1954 science-fiction thriller, The Sensitive Man, one such human, Simon Dalgetty, is on the trail of brutal men who kidnapped Michael Tighe, keeper of the keys to the Institute's secrets, and, thus, to the fate of world order.

The Russians were playing Donald Trump and his allies long before the 2016 election - and continue to do so to this day. That much, and more, is made clear in this masterfully narrated audiobook.

Martial arts master Lin Su Yoshimura is a force to be reckoned with. Now in the US after being shunned as a mixed-race Chinese-Japanese girl, then kidnapped as a teen and sold into the sex-trafficking trade, Lin Su is rescued from an abusive New York pimp by one of the city’s top-level cocaine dealers. Navigating both back alleys and opulent venues with lethal grace, Lin Su finds her way forward through the underbelly of the city, as she wrestles with the horrors of her past.

"Pillar of Fire", a great Ray Bradbury short story, is one of those horror tales that is guaranteed to raise goosebumps at every step of the bizarre way...from the graveyard to, well, a golden box launched into forever.

As tense, short story Westerns go, W.C. Tuttle's "Spawn of the Desert", set in the 1850s rugged Southwest mountains, is a splendid, fast-paced example of the classic genre of tales of gold and silver mining towns run by ruthless men, and inhabited by an eclectic population of miners, gamblers, gunmen, drunks, hardscrabble women, and the obligatory "colorful" characters. Tuttle (1883-1969) was one of the most prolific Western writers of his day, with more than 40 novels and short stories to his credit.

"On the Duty of Civil Disobedience", published by Henry David Thoreau in 1849, speaks eloquently and personally about one man's desire to live a peaceful, government-free life. In this short essay, Thoreau lays out his philosophy best summed up by the author as, "That government governs best that does not govern at all." Thoreau takes on the key issues of his day: slavery and the Mexican war.

Old Judge Anderson feared the inevitable - he was to be replaced by a Cyber, a lightning-fast, softly-speaking machine that deals out decisions from its cyber-bench free of human errors and motions. The District Attorney has a surprise up his sleeve for the Judge, a case against a man who claims he can outwit any Cyber, and is willing to prove it in Judge Anderson's court room. As the trial gets underway, Judge Anderson must come to grips with a future he wishes would just go away. What would his judicial and ethical hero, Justice Holmes, think?

Here, political scientist Jakub J. Grygiel brings to light the importance of incorporating geography into grand strategy. He argues that states can increase and maintain their position of power by pursuing a geostrategy that focuses on control of resources and lines of communication.

A sweet, exciting, and somewhat supernatural story of Champneys "Champ" Carter and his devoted and headstrong wife, Dolly, who, in the early teens of the 20th century, discover Carter's uncanny knack for picking winning racehorses. Carter, a struggling novelist, and Dolly, absent a family fortune due to her marriage to Champ, are making what they can with their very last dollars in a New York City apartment. He wishes nothing more than to make her happy, but finds himself unsuited for nearly every sort of real job except for his passion for writing.

Romance, intrigue, jewels, gold-laden tombs, ancient curses, Egyptian princesses, a dysfunctional British family, a heroic archaeologist, a conniving thief, a wicked and vengeful heir to a 4,000-year-old line of Egyptian kings all come together on the Nile in 1900s Cairo in a tale only L. Frank Baum - creator of the Oz stories - could tell with his adventure-tipped and action-filled pen. And no finer adventure and action-packed tale came from Baum's quill than The Last Egyptian: A Romance of the Nile.

This is a remarkable book. It tells the story of an apparently ordinary American who happens to be born in extraordinary times and who is, therefore, forced to live an exceptional life. Edgar Brown is a member of that generation which fought both the Great Depression and World War II, and prevailed! Thus, this story of one man's life becomes the story of the history of our country through some of its most dramatic and significant times in microcosm.

In the late Cretaceous period, about 80 million years ago, vast stretches of the North American continent were under water, between what is now the central Rocky Mountains and the eastern Appalachians, and extending south from the Canadian provinces to the Gulf of Mexico (as we know it today). We've all read about, and maybe even had in our hands, seashells and other fossils originally deposited on the shores and floor of that ancient inland sea.

Riordan, a ruthless and wealthy hunter, needs one more kill to fill out his bucket list. He's faced down and brought home the wildest beasts on Earth, Venus, and even Neptune. But what he really craves is the hide of a Martian, and he'll pay any price, endure any obstacle, to hang that trophy on his wall.

When Red, a young boy living on a vast country estate owned by his father, a world-renowned industrialist, finds and captures two small and strange-looking animals, he hides them away in an old bird cage in the loft of his father's barn. He has dreams of making big bucks in a circus sideshow featuring the two unusual creatures.

It is 1934. Red-headed Henry Cook, fresh out of Amherst and excited about working on his first book at an infamous writers' colony, arrives at the Vermont island retreat at the invitation of its owner, Thaddeus Hulbert, a boisterous, bellowing, bloviated curmudgeon, whose reputation as a novelist, columnist, and radio commentator has vaulted him to national prominence.

In this 1909 young adult thriller penned by Stanley R. Matthews, originally featured in the serial magazine Brave and Bold Weekly, the Motor Boys unite once again to fight off the bad guys while showcasing the fabulous world of the early 20th century. From motorcars that speed along at a breathtaking 25 miles per hour to discussions about heavier-than-air flight to the stock tickers of Wall Street linked to a gold mine in Tucson, A Taxicab Tangle: The Mission of the Motor Boys is in many ways as fresh and innocent as it was more than a century ago.

It is summer, in the probably distant future, and Artie Lindstrom - the wizard behind a remotely-triggered jar lid opener that became the weapon that defeated the Martian invasion, a water desalinization machine that inadvertently produced gin, and a death ray gun that obliterated Venus during the Three-Day War - has sketched out plans for an anti-gravity machine not much bigger than a mini-fridge.