Showing results by narrator "Jack De Golia" in All Categories

In a land just beyond your mirror lies a realm few discover. It is a magical, dangerous dimension. There lurks your darkest nightmares and your fondest hopes. For nearly two thousand winters there, the seasons have flowed inevitably one into another. Life is as it always has been.

Nella Braddy (1894-1973), a pioneer among female editors, compiled this seven-story collection, and published Masterpieces of Adventure: Stories of Desert Places in 1922. It features seven authors: Edgerton Castle, Stephen Crane, Selma Lagerlöf, Bret Harte, Thomas Hardy, O. Henry, and W. H. Hudson. It’s a stellar group. Braddy went on to write and edit more articles and books, including two more in the Masterpieces of Adventure series; one focused on Helen Keller’s breakthrough teacher, Anna Sullivan Macy; and a biography of Rudyard Kipling.

It wasn't a journey that anyone would make willingly. But Dale Maffitt had little choice. Wanted for hanging on a trumped-up charge of horse-stealing, trailed by a relentless posse, Maffitt's only hope lay in Mexico. To live, he must ride fast and hard over the scorching Texas plains and beat the posse to the border. Once across, he would be safe from arrest, and the posse would have to turn back.

The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 was a monumental achievement. Linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, it transformed New York City into a hub of international trade, drove the rise of industrial cities in once sparsely populated areas, and accelerated the westward expansion of the United States. Yet few of the laborers who toiled along the canal shared in the prosperity it brought.

Mark Twain's "Extracts from Adam's Diary" first appeared in 1893. He based Adam and Eve on himself and his beloved wife Olivia ("Livy") to create a humorous counterpoint the traditional Garden of Eden story, this time centered on what life may have been like for the first man. In this story, we hear Adam trying to work out what the "new creature with long hair" is all about. She names things, much to Adam's annoyance. She follows him around. Then suddenly, there's another creature, which eventually Adam decides is his son Cain. It's all about confusion and curiosity, and finally, love for Eve.

Alias the Lone Wolf, published in 1921, is the third in the 8-book series about a reformed French jewel thief, Michael Lanyard--the Lone Wolf. This story is set in the years after the Great War (World War I), and Lanyard has ended his connection to the British Secret Service. He is enjoying some leisure time in the south of France near an area called the Cévennes. He's using the name Andre Duchemin, which he used in the previous story.

There are ninety thousand registered dams in the United States, fifty thousand of them classified as “major.” Nearly all of this infrastructure was built during a forty-year period, from 1932 to 1972, in an era of public investment and political consensus that seems inconceivable today. These incredible structures—sometimes called the American Pyramids—helped the country rebound from the Great Depression, brought water and electricity to enormous reaches, helped win World War II for the Allies, and became the basis for decades of prosperous stability.

The profit motive destroyed the weak and emboldened the strong, and pitted the ruthless power of the big merchants against the wildness and cunning of the mountain men.

Thunder on the Left is a story about—but not for—children. It's a public domain mystery by one of the foremost mystery writers of the early twentieth century, Christopher Morley. The title also has nothing to do with politics. It's a story about children who make some declarations at a birthday party about growing old, only to find themselves whisked into the future for all but the last chapter of the book. Here they live the lives of adults, wanting more out of life, struggling with issues unimagined in their childhood.

Reaching for a curiously shaped stone in a southern California riverbed, Kurt, a motherless 13-year-old out on a father-son bonding camp trip, feels a pulsing tremor of energy. Confused, he shares this oddly colored rock with his two friends, both who touch it briefly and throw it away in cries of pain. Unsure what to do, the three boys agree to keep this strange phenomenon a secret.

In the eyes of Nadine, a polygamist and serial bride, nudging her husbands into heaven is a testament to love. Even Nancy Neptune, a notorious shock jock, is gobsmacked by Nadine's so-called “Celestial Send-Offs.” Things go to hell in a hurry when Nadine offs the wrong guy and is charged with assisted suicide. Meanwhile, Blue McKenna has problems of her own. A power outage has leveled Blue's medical marijuana dispensary. Scottie Sphincter, lead singer of a band called The Rectal Surgeons, is fingered as a suspect.

Life is hard for Sharkey and the other scrappers in Lawrence. After the Great Oil Crisis the Earth became a hot, wild, dangerous place. Those that could reach the portals left the planet long ago. Those left behind live a desperate and brutal existence, surviving on the bones of a ruined civilization, fighting and killing each other in a world taken back by the earth. But Sharkey has hope.

James Cantrel wants to be braver in his new high school. He wants to pursue a new crush, stand up to new bullies, and create a comic book with his new best friend, Matt. An odd accident derails it all. Aliens in his dreams seem all too real. When he wakes, he finds he's been out, stealing supplies to build an invention he only recognizes from his latest, trance-induced drawings.

The Lone Wolf: A Melodrama, by Louis Joseph Vance, was first published in 1914 and was the first of what eventually became an 8-book series. The main character, Michael Lanyard, also known as The Lone Wolf, is a jewel thief who in later stories reforms and becomes a private detective. In this first book, we learn of his difficult past and his journey that led to this pre-war moment, when he gets entangled with both a Paris crime mob and a woman, confronts his present and future course, and then seeks ways to escape his life of crime.

Nick Carter is a former Recon Marine with a harrowing past. Now he's an elite operative with the PROJECT, a covert counter-terrorism unit answering only to the President. He's no stranger to high-stakes missions. But when Selena Connor enters his life, the stakes get personal. Selena’s wealthy uncle has been brutally murdered by killers looking for an ancient text promising the secret to immortality. Nick is tasked to shield Selena and find the book. It seems simple enough, until they discover they’re up against a ruthless enemy who aims to bring America to her knees.

Nick, Selena and the team are caught up in a devious plot that takes the world to the brink of nuclear war. Who is funding Moscow's militaristic adventures and why? Can the team find a way to stop a confrontation between Russia and the United States before it starts? The stakes for Nick, Selena, Elizabeth Harker and the world have never been higher. If they fail, civilization will be destroyed.

A lethal plague resurrected from the bones of the dead is stolen from a secret biological warfare lab hidden in the mountains of North Korea. There's no cure and it's one hundred percent fatal. If it gets loose, millions will die. The men who have it want to reduce the world's population and bring down the global economy as part of a plan to establish world dominance.

Stag Warren is the happiest cowpoke in Alpine as he rides into town for his wedding to Melody Hale. What he doesn't know is that the town bigwigs suspect he knows about their plot to make themselves the wealthiest men in the West. It's a scheme that will end up with the mass destruction of both settlers and local tribes of Apaches – and they suspect Stag Warren knows about it. So they've hired a gunman to ambush Stag on the edge of town and gun him down in cold blood.

James Gaffney is on the run from the FBI, a crime organization and the police! Can James and Marisa get through all of them and find their way to a better future, or will they be taken done... finally?

All Mark wanted was to find someone to help with his daughter’s paralysis. What he found was a mysterious military organization protecting a one-time medical facility, a nuclear power plant on the verge of a meltdown, an Asian spy and a fortified town run by women for women. Turned away by the facility and the town, Mark is determined to find help and answers to his growing amount of questions. But sometimes answers can be worse than not knowing.