Showing results by narrator "Bob Neufeld" in All Categories

As the brigade he commanded attacked a Confederate battery on a hill outside Petersburg in July 1864, a bursting shell blew Col. Joshua L. Chamberlain from the saddle and wounded his horse. After the enemy battery skedaddled, the brigade took the hill and dug in, and up came supporting Union guns. Chamberlain figured the day’s fighting ended. Then an unidentified senior officer ordered his brigade to charge and capture the heavily defended main Confederate line.

World War II has ended, and Sicily lies in ruins. As money flows in from Italy, the black market becomes the lifeblood of the island's inhabitants. At the same time, with the defeat of Mussolini and fascism, an old nemesis re-emerges from the ashes—the mafia. Exiled during Mussolini's dictatorship, the Mafia has returned to fight for control of the black market.

Boule de Suif (1880) is a short story by the late-19th century French writer Guy de Maupassant. It is arguably his most famous short story, and is the title story for his collection on the Franco-Prussian War, entitled "Boule de Suif et Autres Contes de la Guerre" ("Boule de Suif and Other Stories of the War"). John Ford said that his film Stagecoach was in many ways a western rewrite of Boule de Suif.

Thundering across the screen, Judah Ben-Hur’s iconic chariot race against his former friend turned bitter foe remains an indelible part of cinematic history, and established Charlton Heston as an international superstar. In many ways, the race was a metaphor for the actor’s dynamic life, symbolizing his struggle to establish himself in his profession.

The main characters are police officer Tom Jennings, obese as a mutant Idaho potato in a jiggling gelatin suit; James Odessa-Smith, with his schizoaffective disorder; and young Suanna Morningcloud, a person with albinism, half Nez Perce Indian and half Caucasian. Meeting during a botched bank robbery in Prairie Grove, Kansas, they experience tragedy and trauma. Forever changed and connected, they are forced to ask, “Who am I and where do I belong?"

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is an 1876 novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River. It is set in the 1840 in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, inspired by Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived as a boy. In the novel, Tom Sawyer has several adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn. Originally a commercial failure, the book ended up being the best selling of any of Twain's works during his lifetime. Although overshadowed by its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book is considered a masterpiece of American literature.

Hard Times is the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book surveys English society and satirizes the social and economic conditions of the era. Hard Times is the shortest of Dickens's novels. It is his only novel not to have scenes set in London. Instead the story is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town, in some ways similar to Manchester.

Deputy Tom Jennings, a patrol officer for the Cottonwood County Sheriff’s Office, is a caring cop. He doesn’t understand the Old Order Amish. After being assigned to investigate the theft of soil from a county ditch, he meets Mrs. Rebecca Borntrager Yoder. Rebecca and Adam, her husband, help Jennings begin to learn how the Amish and the English are different and alike.

Ethan Frome is a novel published in 1911 by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Edith Wharton. It is set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts, New England, where an unnamed narrator tells the story of his encounter with Ethan Frome, a man with dreams and desires that end in an ironic turn of events.

All hell has broken loose in the Forest of Tar. Thousands of demonic Feeders consume everything in their path, but top of the menu is dwarf flesh. Nils has been captured by the Liche Lord Otto Blightey but would sooner be dead, and Nameless is on the run, carrying a warning of doom to the last of his people. As the Liche Lord and his horde of Feeders relentlessly pursue him, there is little time for Nameless to settle old scores, mend bridges, and pray that the survivors of his butchery at Arx Gravis can forgive him just enough for him to save them.

Nils Fargin wishes he’d never taken the job to escort a dwarf with no name on a madcap quest for redemption. Ilesa reckons she should have asked for a bigger bounty, and Silas is beginning to think the grimoire he stole from the Academy has a sinister will of its own. Nameless, on the other hand, is having the time of his life. After all, what more could a dwarf want than a horde of undead to splatter with his axe, a shape-shifting woman who does dwarf especially well, and a wizard who can produce ale out of thin air?

The dwarves have captured Nameless and left the Axe of the Dwarf Lords abandoned on the shore of the serpent’s lake. With Ilesa gone, it’s down to Nils and Silas to stage a rescue, but first they’ll have to stop squabbling and find something they can agree on. Meanwhile, the legendary prevarication of the dwarven Council of Twelve is under threat from a people grown tired of indecision. The survivors of the Ravine Butcher’s massacre want their pound of flesh.

When the wolf-men attack and the companions are split up, Nameless and Ilesa find themselves marooned on an island at the center of a newly formed lake. With the dwarf unable to swim, and a monstrous serpent patrolling the water, it's down to Ilesa to get them back to shore. But can she be trusted, what with the bounty on Nameless' head and her long history of betrayal?

Sickles at Gettysburg by licensed battlefield guide James Hessler, is the most deeply-researched, full-length biography to appear on this remarkable American icon. No individual who fought at Gettysburg was more controversial, both personally and professionally, than Major General Daniel E. Sickles. By 1863, Sickles was notorious as a disgraced former Congressman who murdered his wife’s lover on the streets of Washington and used America’s first temporary insanity defense to escape justice.

It's London, 1907. Journalist Edward Malone, rejected by the woman he loves because he is too prosaic, decides to go in search of adventure and fame to prove himself worthy of her. Soon after, he meets Professor George Challenger, a scientist who claims to have discovered a 'lost world' populated by pterodactyls and other prehistoric monsters.

Beginning with the Continental Navy, Small Boats and Daring Men traces maritime missions through the wars of the early republic, from the coast of modern-day Libya to the rivers and inlets of the Chesapeake Bay. Armstrong brings a uniquely informed perspective to his subject; and his work is at once an exciting narrative of danger and combat at sea and a thoroughgoing analysis of how these events fit into concepts of American sea power.

Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author’s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel’s corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, "a terrible moral in Dorian Gray." Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde’s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment.

Although his work has somewhat fallen into obscurity, Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-1886) is considered to be one of the greatest of Russian dramatists. He was one of the pioneers of a realistic style, which later found exponents in celebrated European dramatists like Ibsen and Strindberg. Of Ostrovsky's 47 plays, one of the best known is The Storm, the portrait of an idealistic young woman trapped in a world of crushing and venal orthodoxy. The Storm formed the basis of Janacek's opera, Katya Kabanova.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to “Too Much for Human Endurance” and learn about the George Spangler farm hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg.

Ichabod Crane, a schoolteacher, came to Tarry Town in the glen of Sleepy Hollow to ply his trade in educating young minds. He was a gullible and excitable fellow, often so terrified by locals' stories of ghosts that he would hurry through the woods on his way home, singing to keep from hysterics. Until late one night, he finds that maybe they're not just stories. What is that dark, menacing figure riding behind him on a horse? And what does it have in its hands? And why wasn't schoolteacher Crane ever seen in Sleepy Hollow again?