Showing results by narrator "David LeDoux" in All Categories

Robert Lawson - Bubba to his friends - is six feet, four inches of tall, dark, and handsome cowboy, with a panty-melting voice and a face made to launch a country music career. But when his family's ranch hands go down with the flu, Robert cancels his high-profile auditions in Austin, and returns home to Lonesome Point to help out. Fortune and fame are all well and good, but family and friends come first.

A hinge moment in recent American history, 1995 was an exceptional year. Drawing on interviews, oral histories, memoirs, archival collections, and news reports, W. Joseph Campbell presents a vivid, detail-rich portrait of those memorable 12 months.

After receiving an unexpected call from the Australian consulate, Matt Santos becomes aware of a painting that he believes was looted from his family in Hungary during the Second World War. To recover the painting, he must repair his strained relationship with his harshly judgmental father, uncover his family history, and restore his connection to his own Judaism.

Ryan Kealey has no doubt that the forces seeking to tip this teetering world into chaos are just getting better. Better equipped, better organized, and, most terrifying of all, more patient. And despite all the ELINT, the all-seeing electronic intelligence gathered at Langley, nothing stops a devastating attack from ripping through the heart of San Antonio, Texas.

First published nearly a quarter-century ago and one of the very few short-story collections to win the PEN/Faulkner Award, this is American fiction at its most vital - each narrative a masterpiece of sustained power and seemingly effortless literary grace.

Whenever a plane goes down in the U.S., a "Go Team" made up of experts is assembled by the NTSB to investigate. Those people - each of them a leading expert in a specific area - are known as informally as "Crashers."When a passenger plane, a Vermeer One Eleven, slams into the ground outside Portland, Oregon, a team is quickly assembled to investigate the cause.

The stories in Paul Alan Ruben's Terms of Engagement explore father and son as intimate enemies, each yearning to be understood, acknowledged, and validated by the other. Raw and gripping as delivered by a cast of incredible narrators, these nine stories take place in collision territory - where father and son engage in trying to repair their alienation.    

Where Am I Eating? shows how what we eat affects the lives of the people who produce our food, and explores the global food economy including workers' rights, the global food crisis, fair trade, and immigration. Where Am I Eating? does not argue for or against the globalization of food but personalizes it by observing the hope and opportunity, and sometimes the lack thereof, that the global food economy gives to the world's poorest producers.  

Romantic love presents some of life's most challenging questions. Can we choose who to love? Is romantic love rational? Can we love more than one person at a time? And can we make ourselves fall out of love? In On Romantic Love, Berit Brogaard attempts to get to the bottom of love's many contradictions.

Pittsburgh has recently (and more than once) been called the most livable city in America; yet the old image of smoky skies and steel mills spewing forth grit has never quite disappeared. Its history as a dirty industrial center is a part of its residents, a part of their toughness. The people of the steel city fight.

Brand-new stories by: G. M. Ford, Skye Moody, R. Barri Flowers, Thomas P. Hopp, Patricia Harrington, Bharti Kirchner, Kathleen Alcalá, Simon Wood, Brian Thornton, Lou Kemp, Curt Colbert, Robert Lopresti, Paul S. Piper, and Stephan Magcosta. Early Seattle was a hardscrabble seaport filled with merchant sailors, longshoremen, lumberjacks, rowdy saloons, and a rough-and-tumble police force not immune to corruption and graft.

East Texas in the 1960s is not the worst place to have grown up, but for narrator Jake of The Jugheads, it was a minefield. Describing clearly and courageously first jobs and first kisses, family vacations and family fights, Jake takes us through a wild coming-of-age ride, in an ordinary American family that he believes is as violent and dysfunctional as they come. By turns hilarious and moving, The Jugheads is a compelling return to form for a master of the underside of the American psyche.

Real estate shifts are easier to recognize than they are to acknowledge. One day job growth is beginning to stall and, seemingly overnight, vacancies are on the rise. Tenants start asking to downsize. Commercial property valuations level off. Negative news stories feed the worries of buyers and tenants. New development halts. Fear creeps in. Then, the market that was quietly losing ground goes into full retreat as tenant delinquencies turn into owner delinquencies and lenders sever lines of credit.

Recruited by a foreign power in postwar Paris and sent to Washington, Winston Bates is without training or talent. He might be a walking definition of the anti-spy. Yet he makes his way onto the staff of the powerful Senator Richard Russell, head of the Armed Services Committee. From that perch, Bates has extensive and revealing contacts with the Dulles brothers, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, Lyndon Johnson, Joe Alsop, Walter Lippman, Roy Cohn, and even Ollie North - to name but a few of the historical players in the American experience Winston befriends - and haplessly betrays for a quarter century.

The second novel of The Books of the Elements. The wealthy Governor Saxa, of the great city of Carce, has generously and lavishly subsidized a theatrical/religious event. During this elaborate staging of Hercules founding a city on the shores of Lusitania, strange and dark magic turns the panoply into a chilling event. The sky darkens and the waves crash in the flooded arena. A great creature rises from the sea: a huge, tentacled horror on snake legs. It devastates the city, much to the delight of the crowd.

For 15 years, sports agent Josh Luchs made illegal deals with numerous college athletes, from top-tier, nationally recognized phenoms to late-round draft picks. Then, in October 2010, Luchs wrote a confessional article in Sports Illustrated, telling the truth about what he did and didn't do. Since then, he has taken on a new role: whistle-blowing, truth-telling reformer. In telling his own story, Luchs here pulls back the curtain on the real economy - and the broken system - of college football.

Peter Galvin was just 17 when Tracy Whitland - the love of his life - vanished without a trace. In the years after her death, he had finally moved on, gotten married, started a family. He is content with his life now - happy, even - until Tracy suddenly and inexplicably returns.