Showing results by narrator "Jim Roberts" in All Categories

Jean Robert-Houdin was a Frenchman widely known as the father of modern conjuring. Magician and escape artist Harry Houdini later paid tribute to his skill by adopting his name. In addition to being a gifted magician and conjurer, he was the creator of a trick that became extremely popular. He called it "Second Sight". All the mind reading tricks and performances we see today came from Houdin's original inspiration. This audiobook is extraordinary in that it actually explains the secrets of many of his conjuring tricks.

The Japanese military has turned the once-thriving Chinese city of Nencheng into a reeking pile of blood and ash. And now the Japanese Rising Sun threatens to scorch the ancient - and oil-rich - Kingdom of the Silver Lake. Can the Chinese survive the onslaught? Do they have a prayer? The answer is about to fall out of the sky. He is The Falcon Killer.

James Fenimore Cooper was America's first successful popular novelist. Son of the prominent federalist William Cooper, founder of the Cooperstown settlement, James was educated at Yale in preparation for a genteel life as a federalist gentleman. After his father's death in an 1809 duel, Cooper quickly squandered his inheritance, and at thirty was on the verge of bankruptcy. He turned to writing but his first book, Precaution (1820), was a failure.

Jack Glenarm never liked architecture. He preferred adventure and excitement. His grandfather adored archeticture and lived in a strange incomplete mansion he called "The House of a Thousand Candles." Jack returns from his travels just in time to hear the reading of the old man's will. Jack is instructed to live in this odd out-of-the-way dwelling for a full year without leaving it in order to inherit it. With few other options he decides to move in.

This collecton features some of Twain's best known stories as well as some lesser-known gems, such as "A Mysterious Visit", "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut", and "The Loves Of Alonzo Fitz-Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton".

Horatio Alger, was a 19th-century American author who wrote over 100 novels. Many of his works have been called "rags to riches" stories, describing how down-and-out boys achieve the American Dream of wealth and success through hard work, courage, determination, and concern for others. Because of this Alger is a a significant figure in the history of American cultural and social ideals.

A fascinating account by an eyewitness of the formation and heroic deeds of the first black regiment in the civil war.

The setting is the civil war, and the hero (or anti-hero as it seems at first) is Henry Flemming, a young Northern boy who, swept up in the patriotic tide, joins the Union Army. He is plunged into the conflict, and his courage fails him - he runs from his first battle. He finds out later that his side was victorious, and he feels that he will never be able to face himself or his comrades again. He slowly recovers his courage in time for a crucial confrontation.

Every man walks with a shadow...but what happens when he acquires a second one? Just ask Brazos, a cold-blooded killer for hire with blood on his hands and a posse on his tail. Desperate for cash, Brazos accepts $200 to gun down a local man named Brant. He’ll earn every penny...but in the end there’ll be the devil to pay. Because to put a bullet in Brant means putting one in his partner as well - an eerie stranger schooled in the black art of witchcraft. This is one killing that brings with it a deadly curse - and a second shadow.

In Mastery of Destiny, James Allen delves even farther into the themes in that famous work, the ideas that concentrations, willpower and motivation and lead to happiness and prosperity.

An obscure original manuscript of Marco Polo’s travels ... A tantalizing clue to the site of Kublai Khan’s fabled burial site ... A chance to unearth the truth behind a long-lost treasure. It’s an opportunity that would make Indiana Jones drop everything but his whip and race off to China. But he’d be too late. Lieutenant Jonathan Daly is way ahead of him. Two bullet holes and a bad case of malaria may not be enough to stop Daly, but a crew of criminals, a brood of British agents, and the entire Chinese army are all in the game ... and determined to keep him out of it.

This story recounts the legend of Keesh, an Eskimo boy who used "brains not brawn" to defeat a powerful polar bear and save his people from starvation.

Francis Parkman has been hailed as one of America's first great historians and as a master of narrative history. His work has been praised by historians who have published essays in new editions of his work, including Pulitzer Prize winners C. Vann Woodward, Allan Nevins and Samuel Eliot Morison. Numerous translations have spread the books around the world. Be forewarned that Parkman was a man of his time and he does little to hide his prejudices, especially against native Americans.

Jack London is among the greatest adventure writers in American Literature, and The Call of the Wild is his masterpiece, a work that takes us where few tales have dared: into the mind of an animal. Buck is taken from the warmth of the Santa Clara valley to work as a sled-dog in the frozen Yukon during the Gold Rush. There he is forced to lose his domesticated ways and rediscover his natural instincts.

Joseph Conrad was a native of Poland, yet many critics regard him as one of the greatest English novelists. This is all the more remarkable, since he did not learn to speak English fluently until he was in his 20s. He became a naturalized British citizen in 1886. He wrote many books and stories, but the two that remain most popluar are Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Lord Jim is both an adventure story and a story of tragedy and repentence.

Jack London gained his first and most lasting fame as the author of tales of the Klondike gold rush. This, his first collection of stories, draws on his experience in the Yukon. The stories tell of gambles won and lost, of endurance and sacrifice, and often turn on the qualities of exceptional women and on the relations between the white adventurers and the native tribes. Stories included are: "The white Silence," "The Son of the Wolf," "The Men of Forty Mile," "In a Far Country," "To the Man on Trail," "The Priestly Perogative," "The Wisdom of the Trail," "The Wife of the King.""An Odyssey of the North."

Silas Blackburn is killed on the day before he intended to remove his grandson from his will. For some strange reason he decided to sleep where many of his family have died in agony and he is found dead in this locked and abandoned room. How did someone get in? And who did it? The detectives who show up to investigate the case suspect any number of characters, including the grandson who has no memory of what he did that night but who was in the area.

An officer accused of being a traitor says he "never wants to hear of the United States again". His wish is granted - and ends up being a terrible punishment.

The Four Million was written in 1906 when roughly four million people lived in New York City. It opens with a reference to Ward McAllister's "assertion that there were only "400" people in New York City who were really worth noticing.

Guy de Maupassant is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story as well as one of the form's finest writers. His stories are characterized by their economy of style and efficient, seemingly effortless dénouements