Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Davis" in All Categories

A shocking exposé of rampant, decades-long incompetence at the National Rifle Association, as told by a former member of its senior leadership.

In the wake of a tragedy, 13-year-old Graham moves with his family to Beirut, Lebanon, a city on the edge of the sea and cataclysmic violence. Inquisitive and restless by nature, Graham suspects his State Department father is a CIA operative, and that their family’s fragile domesticity is merely a front for American efforts along the nearby Israeli border. Over the course of one year, 1974, Graham’s life will utterly change. Two men are murdered, his parent’s marriage disintegrates, and Graham, along with his two ex-pat friends, run afoul of forces they cannot understand.

Herman J. (1897-1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture's only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture.

This friendly, fun biography series focuses on the traits that made our heroes great - the traits that kids can aspire to in order to live heroically themselves. Each book tells the story of an icon in a lively, conversational way that works well for the youngest nonfiction listeners and that always includes the hero's childhood influences. This volume features Founding Father and scientist Benjamin Franklin.

In the 1970s, the behavioral psychologist Herbert S. Terrace led a remarkable experiment to see if a chimpanzee could be taught to use language. A young ape, named “Nim Chimpsky” in a nod to the linguist whose theories Terrace challenged, was raised by a family in New York and instructed in American Sign Language. Initially, Terrace thought that Nim could create sentences but later discovered that Nim’s teachers inadvertently cued his signing. Terrace concluded that Project Nim failed - not because Nim couldn’t create sentences but because he couldn’t even learn words.

Tom Honeyman made his name cracking a horrific double murder in his hometown of Prosper, New York. He got an international best seller out of it, made a small fortune, and left his newspaper reporting days behind. But was it all based on a lie? Now, more than a decade after his only success, Honeyman’s life is in tatters. His wife committed suicide, his daughter hasn’t spoken to him in years, and his books don’t sell. But Tom Honeyman is not alone. An unseen stranger tells Honeyman he got it wrong all those years ago. And he has just four days to uncover the real murderer.

During the summer of 1997, a series of bombings terrorize Havana hotels. The targets are tourists, and the terrorists are exiles seeking to cripple Cuban tourism and kill the revolution. After Mano finds himself helpless to save one of the victims, his nemesis Colonel Emilio Perez of the National Revolutionary Police recruits him into Havana's top-secret Wasp Network of spies for a job that only he can perform - but for reasons he never would have believed or expected. 

Moments after Sen stepped through the revenant arch, an inky darkness flooded out across his world. Over the wreckage of a city broken by revolution it surged, engulfing the grand Grammaton tower, smothering the King's Aigle palace and drowning every last caste in the dark. Sen alone escaped; a young man prophesied to raise the Saint and save his world for good. But he failed. Now his world is gone, and his friends are just memories swallowed by the endless dark. 

From a writer whose work has been praised by Junot Díaz as “Latin American fiction at its pulpy phantasmagorical finest,” Don’t Send Flowers is a riveting novel centered on Carlos Treviño, a retired police detective in northern Mexico who has to go up against the corruption and violence that caused him to leave the force, when he’s hired by a businessman to find his missing daughter. A 17-year-old girl has disappeared after a fight with her boyfriend that was interrupted by armed men, leaving the boyfriend on life support and the girl an apparent kidnapping victim.

Three thousand years ago, the world fell into darkness, when the great black mouth of the Rot ravaged the land. Across the glorious library city of Aradabar, its dark tongues hammered down, leveling the glass towers of learning and entombing the bookyards in a thick blanket of lava. Only a single child survived the devastation: an infant with a prophecy carved into his skin, promising the rise of a hero powerful enough to slay the Rot for good. Now that child is a young man, beginning to question the meaning of his many scars.

Harry Tabor is about to receive the Man of the Decade award. As he enters his twilight years, this distinction seems like the culmination to a life well lived. A perfect life. A life spent helping Jewish refugees from all over the globe find better lives in America, giving them a second chance. Harry knows all about second chances. He has the perfect marriage - his wife, Roma, is an eminent child psychologist, and they tell each other almost everything. His three grown children, Phoebe, Camille, and Simon, are all accomplished.

Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum. Here is the poignant journey of a "minority student" who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation - from his past, his parents, his culture - and so describes the high price of "making it" in middle-class America.

As a citizen, Nicholas Payne is not in the least solid. As a boyfriend, he is nothing short of disastrous, and his latest flame, the patrician Ann Fitzgerald, has done a wise thing by dropping him. But Ann isn't counting on Nicholas's wild persistence, or on the slapstick lyricism of Thomas McGuane, who in The Bushwhacked Piano sends his hero from Michigan to Montana on a demented mission of courtship, whose highlights include a ride on a homicidal bronco and apprenticeship to the inventor of the world's first highrise for bats. The result is a tour de force of American Dubious.

In 1965, following his mother's death, Infante returns to Cuba from Brussels, where he is employed as a cultural attaché at the Cuban embassy. When a few days later his permission to return to Europe is revoked, Infante begins a period of suspicion, uncertainty, and disillusion. Unable to leave the country, denied access to party officials, yet still receiving checks for his work in Belgium, Infante discovers the reality of Cuba under Fidel Castro.

A powerful banker, gunned down in cold blood. A military family, senselessly slaughtered as they sleep. A four-star general, hacked and framed by virtual assassins. Another key general, kidnapped from his farm near Fort Bragg. Atrocities like these are all too common in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. But this is the United States of America. When Jake Mahegan receives a distress call from General Savage in North Carolina, he rushes to the commander's home - and walks right into an ambush. The terrorists are here...and no one is safe.

Betrayed and left for dead by his CIA handler, Thomas Caine suffered captivity and torture. He was hunted for crimes he did not commit. And he was forced to watch his partner die, gunned down before his eyes. Now, he has found the man responsible for all his pain and suffering. But the cost of revenge may prove too high. His target reveals that Caine's partner had a son, now a young man, named Sean. And Sean is in terrible danger.

With Their Bare Hands traces the fate of the US 79th Division - men drafted off the streets of Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia - from their training camp in Maryland through the final years of World War I, focusing on their most famous engagement: the attack on Montfaucon, the most heavily fortified part of the German Line, during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in 1918.

Vice Admiral John L. McCrea worked with the president of the United States on difficult and unusual assignments, associated with royalty and world-famous political and military leaders, and he commanded the USS Iowa and a task force in the Pacific. Over the years, many urged him to write a book, and before his passing he finally recorded his reminiscences. Captain McCrea's War captures his amazing tales from the World War II years.

At the dawn of the 20th century, a young Lebanese adventurer leaves the Levant to explore the wilds of Africa, encountering an eccentric English colonel in Sudan and enlisting in his service. In this lush chronicle of far-flung adventure, the military recruit crosses paths with a compatriot who has dismantled a sumptuous palace in Tripoli and is transporting it across the continent on a camel caravan.

Eyewitness to the Alamo is the actual account of the siege and Battle of the Alamo by those who were present during the attack. This book is the first complete accounting of the Battle of the Alamo by one of our country's foremost authorities on the event. Contains over 100 descriptions of the Battle of the Alamo by people who were witnesses or who claimed to have witnessed the event. These accounts are the basis for all of the histories, traditions, myths, and legends of this famous battle.