Showing results by narrator "Jeff Cummings" in All Categories

Child prodigy Joshua Bland’s life has been anything but bland. Joshua’s father abandons him and his mentally imbalanced mother when he is a young boy, leaving him to be raised by a cynical, hostile, and self-doubting stepfather. When Joshua loses a national knowledge competition, his family’s reaction puts him on the path to becoming a World War II veteran, best-selling author, successful producer, and absentee father.

An attractive sous chef at the famous L’Elfe is murdered and half of the employees are suspect. Lacking confidence in the police to solve the murder, Chef Jean Bouvier seeks a quicker solution. He hires private eyes James Lessor and Skip Moore to go undercover and discreetly investigate his restaurant staff. But their investigation turns up far more than they bargained for. Skip’s girlfriend, Emily, confesses that the murder victim and she had been close friends at one point in their lives and had shared a very dark secret.

Under the pseudonym S.S. Van Dine, Wright has booked passage on what would be the luxury liner’s disastrous final crossing. He claims to be interviewing celebrity passengers, but the reporter is actually investigating rumors that the ship is ferrying an illegal cache of weapons to aid the British war against Germany. His investigation is put on hold when three German stowaways are discovered and then - in an unexpected and violent twist - killed.

Since Andrew Hudgins was a child, he was a compulsive joke teller, so when he sat down to write about jokes, he found that he was writing about himself — what jokes taught him and mistaught him, how they often delighted him but occasionally made him nervous with their delight in chaos and sometimes anger. Because Hudgins’s father, a West Point graduate, served in the US Air Force, his family moved frequently; he learned to relate to other kids by telling jokes and watching how his classmates responded. And jokes opened him up to the serious, taboo subjects that his family didn’t talk about openly — religion, race, sex, and death. Hudgins tells and analyzes the jokes that explore the contradictions in the Baptist religion he was brought up in, the jokes that told him what his parents would not tell him about sex, and the racist jokes that his uncle loved, his father hated, and his mother, caught in the middle, was ambivalent about. This audiobook is both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated, delighted, and occasionally horrified him as he grew.

John Lincoln needs a hot best seller, and finds his salvation in Amy O’Malley, a recent University of Chicago grad who’s worked on the school’s famous sex survey. With Lincoln’s prodding, Amy writes an erotic thriller that draws on her research experience. Her book indeed opens doors for Lincoln — but not in the way he imagined. Meanwhile, Tony Buford, a “professor of happiness studies” at a local college, gently blackmails him into publishing his fantastically mundane poetry.

Welcome to 1968 - a revolution in a book. Essays, memoirs, and more by fourteen award-winning authors offer unique perspectives on one of the world’s most tumultuous years.... To capture that extraordinary year, editors Marc Aronson and Susan Campbell Bartoletti created an anthology that showcases many genres of nonfiction. Some contributors use a broad canvas, others take a close look at a moment, and matched essays examine the same experience from different points of view.

Immerse yourself in this insightful and entertaining collection of interviews given by Gore Vidal over the span of 20 years. Listen to the author’s witty, candid, and unconventional observations of his own life and work, plus his take on sexuality, society, American politics, and more. This unique audiobook provides an enlightening look at the world through Gore Vidal’s own words.

Discover Venice through the vibrant and personal observations of Gore Vidal. Listen as he walks the storied streets, recounting the city’s rich history and exploring his own family ties to the area. Filled with insightful impressions of Venice’s culture, fine art, and architecture, this audiobook is an unforgettable adventure by one of America’s most significant writers.

When Gore Vidal’s New York Times bestseller Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace was published, the Los Angeles Times described Vidal as the last defender of the American republic. In Dreaming War, Vidal continues this defense by confronting the Cheney-Bush junta head-on in a series of devastating essays that demolish the lies American Empire lives by, unveiling a counter-history that traces the origins of America’s current imperial ambitions to the experience of World War Two and the post-war Truman doctrine.

When a woman in Bel Air dies of a rattlesnake bite, the case doesn’t seem to fit the usual purview of LAPD’s Special Cases Unit. But Carrie Holder was no ordinary LA woman. She was a member of the city's latest cult, the Church of the Gate, which counts Hollywood's movers and shakers among its devotees. Investigating the cult's secrets takes Detective Michael Gideon, his German shepherd K-9 partner, Sirius, and pit bull rescue Emily across Los Angeles's canyons, neighborhoods, and movie studio lots - but all the while, an even darker threat looms closer.

For more than 200 years, the wreck of the Whydah (and the riches that went down with it) eluded treasure seekers, until the ship was finally found in 1984 by marine archaeologists. The artifacts brought up from the ocean floor are priceless, both in value and in the picture they reveal of life in that much-mythologized era, changing much of what we know about pirates.

Death seemed to be part of Garrett Wilson's life. Both of his parents had died by the time he was in his early twenties. So friends shrugged when sadly, an infant daughter, and then a son, succumbed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Six years later, after he divorced his wife, Missy, and married another woman, his former spouse became convinced that their child's passing was anything but natural. Was it cold-blooded murder by Garrett, or a quest for revenge by his ex-wife? Missy's own investigation that led to Garrett Wilson's arrest and eventual trial will keep the listener guessing until the final sentences. Havill takes us through each stage of this intricate and chilling story all the way to the courtroom, where the jury's stunning verdict is given.

It was supposed to be a simple proof of concept. The physics were sound. Over 100 teleportation experiments had already been successfully performed.... Debate raged over whether the Reidier Test's disastrous outcome resulted from human error, government conspiracy, or sabotage. No one had actual knowledge of the truth. But hidden from the public eye, there existed a government report commissioned from criminal psychologist Dr. Hilary Kahn, chronicling the events that took place.