Showing results by narrator "John Lescault" in All Categories

A powerful memoir by one of America’s most accomplished public servants and legal thinkers—who spent years denying and working around his blindness, before finally embracing it as an essential part of his identity. "Moving, thoughtful, and inspiring." —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy...

In this biography of Maimonides, the medieval philosopher, physician, and religious thinker, Alberto Manguel examines the question of his universal appeal. Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides (1138–1204), was born in Córdoba, Spain. The gifted son of a judge and mathematician, Maimonides fled Córdoba with his family when he was thirteen due to Almohad persecution of all non-Islamic faiths. Forced into a long exile, the family spent a decade in Spain before settling in Morocco. From there, Maimonides traveled to Palestine and Egypt, where he died at Saladin’s court.

From the author of the National Book Award-winning An American Requiem and the classic bestseller Constantine’s Sword comes the story of Colman Brady, an Irish farmer who involves himself in the Irish rebellion of the early 1920s and later escapes to Boston where he rises to and falls from political power and seeks a second chance through the life of his son.

In 1980s New York City, young lawyer Nick Coleman meets free spirit Caroline Sedlak in an evening fiction writing course. A vivacious fixture at a Greenwich Village bar, she remains mysterious about her life until their teacher reads her story submission to the class, and Nick realizes that a darker past lurks beneath her happy-go-lucky exterior. Nick must confront demons of his own while struggling to prove himself to his colleagues as a young blind lawyer at an office that handles appeals for indigent convicted felons.

This is the story of Clarence Henderson, a wrongfully accused Black sharecropper, who was sentenced to die three different times for a murder he didn’t commit, and of the prosecution desperate to pin the crime on him despite scant evidence. His first trial lasted only a day and featured a lackluster public defense.

Although American author Bret Harte is most readily associated with stories about the West, it is his skill with characterization that distinguishes him from the hundreds of others who set fictional tales in the region. The miners, soldiers, gamblers, entrepreneurs, and lost souls who populate these pages are limned with Harte's unique combination of dry wit and tender pathos. This charming collection of Harte's short stories focuses on life in old California.

What is the unique and most important feature that distinguishes man from all other living beings? Why is it that, contrary to the instinct of self-preservation, a parent will throw themselves headlong into fire or water to save their child? Why do people get married and why do they get divorced? Why do people have extramarital affairs and why do two people in a couple become jealous of one another? What is love?

As a young man, Gigi Paulo arrives in New York and is immediately drawn to a girl he sees in a bar near Penn Station. Before he can approach her, she is gone. He returns to the bar for weeks in hopes of seeing her again, dreams of her at night, and searches the crowds for her face. Quiet and careful, he is not the type to become obsessed by a stranger. But obsessed he is. Two years later he meets her at a party. Her name is Corrine.

Stillton Academy, a small art college on the New England coast, is in financial trouble, and its days are numbered unless someone provides extraordinary help. The final straw may be the disappearance of an instructor with a female student - the daughter of the Academy’s only significant donor. Art critic Fred Taylor, called in to troubleshoot, goes undercover as a member of the faculty and shortly finds himself enmeshed in the conflicting motives and designs of faculty and students....

A young woman in the hair salon raises her a in a furtive gesture, frank and tantalizingly brief, to show a friend the work in progress: a riot of stunning tattoos. From his accidental vantage point in the barber’s chair, Fred Taylor knows that those images—weird insects, beasts, and naked human figures—could only come from something nice, a painting that, if he could only see the original in person, might prove to be rare and of significant value. And the girls don’t have a clue.

History records few individuals as brilliant, powerful, and ruthless as Julius Caesar. Born into the Roman aristocracy, he surpassed the reputation of his family and altered the history of Rome and the Mediterranean world. When Caesar was born in 100 B.B., Rome was a city-state with a republican form of government. When he died in 44 B.C., Rome was on its way to becoming an empire. In those short 56 years, Caesar conquered the Gauls, began the Roman conquest of Britain, and campaigned from Spain to Egypt.

It’s tough being an author these days, and it’s getting harder. But, as Jason Boog shows in a rich mix of history and politics, this is not the first period when writers have struggled to scratch a living. Between accounts of contemporary layoffs and shrinking paychecks for authors and publishing professionals are stories from the 1930s when writers, hard hit by the Great Depression, fought to create unions and New Deal projects like the Federal Writers Project.

Informative, entertaining, and upbeat, this audiobook continues Grazier and Cass’ exploration of how technology, science, and scientists are portrayed in Hollywood productions. Both big and small-screen productions are featured and their science content illuminated - first by the authors and subsequently by a range of experts from science and the film world. Starring roles in this volume are played by, among other things, computers (human and mechanical), artificial intelligences, robots, and spacecraft.

What are the traits, tactics, and strategies of the business world's most transformative leaders...and what can the rest of us learn from them? In What the Best CEOs Know, leadership authority Jeffrey Krames examines the careers of seven of history's most accomplished CEOs - including in-depth interviews with Michael Dell, Lou Gerstner, and Herb Kelleher - to get candid answers to many of today's most compelling business questions.   

The first of Homer's epic poems tells of the counsel of Nestor, Achilles' slaying of Hector, and the defeat of the Trojans by the Greeks.

Robinson Crusoe flees Britain on a ship after killing his friend over the love of Mary. A fierce ocean storm wrecks his ship and leaves him stranded by himself on an uncharted island. Left to fend for himself, Crusoe seeks out a tentative survival on the island, until he meets Friday, a tribesman whom he saves from being sacrificed. Initially, Crusoe is thrilled to finally have a friend, but he has to defend himself against the tribe who uses the island to sacrifice tribesman to their gods.

In his perilous journey home after the Trojan War, Odysseus must pass through the land of the Cyclopes, encounter Circe the Enchantress, and face the terrible Charybdis and the six-headed serpent Scylla.

This reunion drew over 55,000 official attendees who descended upon a town of four thousand during the summer of 1913 with the promise of little more than a cot and two blankets, military fare, and the presence of countless adversaries from a horrific war. Most were revisiting a time and place in their personal history that involved acute physical and emotional trauma. Contrary to popular belief, veterans were not motivated to attend by a desire for reconciliation, nor did the Great Reunion produce a general sense of a reunified country.

Laura Dearborn, a young woman is courted and pursued by three men: Curtis Jadwin, Sheldon Corthell, and Landry Court. She marries Jadwin, who over time loses interest in her as he gets more involved in wheat speculation at the Chicago Board of Trade. As his risky investments start to lead him to ruin, Laura reunites with Corthell, but she eventually rebuffs him. Jadwin’s fortunes turn as he is able to corner the market and ruin even good friends, but in time his luck runs out, and he is ruined.

The Cotton Kingdom recounts his daily observations of the curse of slavery: the poverty it brought to both black and white people, the inadequacies of the plantation system, and the economic consequences and problems associated with America’s most “peculiar institution.” Disproving the opinion that “cotton is king”, Olmsted examined the huge differences between the economies of the northern and southern states, contrasting the more successful, wealthy, and progressive North with the South, which was stubbornly convinced of the necessity of slavery.