Showing results by narrator "Stephen Hoye" in All Categories

The prison at Abu Ghraib was still a relatively unknown part of America's War on Terror when - with no special training and their gear lost somewhere between the United States and Baghdad - the 152nd Field Artillery Battalion of the Maine National Guard was sent there to serve as guards in February 2004. Just before their arrival, the now infamous photos of the abuses suffered by the prisoners hit the world stage. Abu Ghraib became the focal point not only for global condemnation, but for the insurgents' outrage.

Kinky Friedman, the original Texas Jew boy, guides readers through the sights, sounds, food, and sundry oddities of his favorite Texas city. Known for live music and food, Austin is also the home of Willie Nelson, Janis Joplin, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and a number of other music legends.

For two years, Eddie Donagan was on track to become the greatest Red Sox pitcher of all time. Then one day, without warning, he went from unhittable to ineffective - forcing him to drop out of the Majors before he even hit his prime. Attorney Brady Coyne met Donagan before he turned pro, and stays friends with him even as the faded star drifts into depression, disappearing from his wife and child for days at a time. Finally, the Donagans are thrown into crisis - but it isn't Eddie's disappearance that causes it. It's his son's.

The world's most forward-looking CEOs recognize the real challenge facing business today: a fundamental shift in the nature of commerce. While sustainability programs, government action, and nonprofits are all parts of the solution, CEOs and other leaders must focus on social, environmental, and economic benefits - not only because it will make the world a better place but because it will ensure lasting profitability and success in the business climate of tomorrow.

In Bomb Power, Garry Wills reveals how the atomic bomb transformed our nation down to its deepest constitutional roots - by dramatically increasing the power of the modern presidency and redefining the government as a national security state---in ways still felt today. A masterful reckoning from one of America's preeminent historians, Bomb Power draws a direct line from the Manhattan Project to the usurpations of George W. Bush.

When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, the new German luxury ocean liner SS Vaterland was interned in New York Harbor, where it remained docked for nearly three years - until the United States officially entered the fight to turn the tide of the war. Seized by authorities for the US Navy once war was declared in April 1917, the liner was renamed the USS Leviathan by President Woodrow Wilson and converted into an armed troop carrier.

From the introduction by David L. Ulin: "For me, Cape Cod is a repository of memory: forty summers in the same house will do that to you. But it is also a landscape of hidden tensions, which rise up when we least anticipate. In part, this has to do with social aspiration, which is one of the things that brought my family, like many others, to the Cape. In part, it has to do with social division, which has been a factor since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when then summer trade began."

Years after a war that destroyed America, Sam Monson, the governor of the state of Deseret, negotiates a peace treaty with a woman out of his past - on behalf of the son he left behind.

This story is included in Orson Scott Card's collection The Folk of the Fringe.

As travellers, we are always walking backwards, forever on the verge of stepping into the unknown, never knowing what waits around the next corner. Walking Backwards is a return to 10 cities and what happened there. Whether inadvertently smuggling cloth into Istanbul, reading poetry in New Delhi to a crowd expecting a world-famous pianist, or wandering endlessly through Mantua searching for a non-existent hotel on a street that's fallen off the map, Mark Frutkin is a master at rediscovering the magic at the heart of all travel.

In late 1971 John Lennon left London behind and moved to New York, eager to join a youth movement rallying for social justice and an end to the Vietnam War. Lennon was quickly embraced by radicals and revolutionaries, the hippies and Yippies at odds with the establishment. Settling in Greenwich Village, the heart of Manhattan's counterculture, the former Beatle was soon on the frontlines of the antiwar movement and championing a range of causes and issues.

For this special edition, Susie Bright has gathered human sexuality in all its diversity: pleasure and desire in all its forms. Featuring erotic stories by: Bret Easton Ellis, Poppy Z. Brite, William Harrison, Michelle Tea, Aimee Bender, and Molly Weatherfield.

In The Best American Erotica 2001, Marge Piercy introduces us to the nerd kid sex club, Nathan Englander explores the addictive power of a peep show, Jerry Stahl relates a dare from an extremely demanding girlfriend, and Dani Shapiro proves the difference between the fantasy and the reality of losing your virginity.

Toby Lester, author of the award-winning The Fourth Part of the World, masterfully crafts yet another century-spanning saga of people and ideas in this epic story of Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic drawing of a man inscribed in a circle and a square. Over time, the nearly 550-year-old ink-on-paper sketch has transformed into a collective symbol of the nature of genius, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the human spirit.

This collection of short stories displays Ed Gorman's talents as a masterful storyteller across a range of genres.

A mysterious and beautiful girl who teaches arrogant young men about true love, a lonely traveling salesman who learns that his passenger is Death, children who can absorb the psychic pain of their parents, a desperately pursued serial killer who hides his face under gauze in a hospital room, and a woman who loves the alien infant nobody else wants - these stories and 10 others make up this collection by award-winning author Ed Gorman. Here are stories that led him to be called "one of the best" by Dean Koontz and "one of the most original writers in crime fiction today" by Kirkus Reviews. Here, you'll find the extraordinary range of storytelling skill and powerful emotions that won Gorman the prized International Fiction Award.

Included in Different Kinds of Dead, and Other Tales are "Different Kinds of Dead", "Deathman", "A Girl Like You", "Loverboy", "Muse", "Riff", "The Brasher Girl", "Survival", "Masque", "Second Most Popular", and others.

This collection reveals the extraordinary range of storytelling skill and powerful emotions that won Gorman the prized International Fiction Award. His protagonists, gritty and gruff, are strangely likable, and his writing, according to Mystery News, is "powerful, disturbing, [and] often poetic".

"Thinnes specialized in homicide. He hated working rapes. Rape was more like a drive-by shooting than anything else because it was often a matter of the victim being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But drive-bys usually happened in the killer's neighborhood and were perpetrated against known enemies or at least innocent neighbors... With rape it was different. Rape hurt the victim when it went down, and again when the cops investigated - no matter how careful they were - Thinnes hated the whole thing.

Jogging through Chicago's Lincoln Park, Dr. John Caleb comes upon a group of fanatics setting a police car on fire - with the officer inside. Caleb rescues the man but as Chicago heats up in the most brutal summer on record, it becomes clear that this is the first of a series of deadly arsons. As Detective John Thinnes races to find the culprit and Dr. Caleb sets a trap for a murderer, both men are nearly incinerated in the killer's final act.

Six-time Hugo Award winner Bova likes to tell big stories in a small way. This approach both helps and hurts in this collection of stories, excerpts and outtakes from his "Grand Tour" novels (Saturn, etc.), which explore the colonization of the solar system. Despite his vast subject, Bova focuses tightly on the heroes and villains whose striving makes up his future history. While some characters are standards of the SF genre (megalomaniac capitalist, lone-wolf entrepreneur, love object caught between them), Bova imbues each with Homeric virtues and flaws.

Explore one of the greatest scientific mysteries of our time, the Pioneer Anomaly: In the 1980s, NASA scientists detected an unknown force acting on the spacecraft Pioneer 10, the first man-made object to journey through the asteroid belt and study Jupiter, eventually leaving the solar system. No one seemed able to agree on a cause. (Dark matter? Tensor–vector–scalar gravity? Collisions with gravitons?) What did seem clear to those who became obsessed with it was that the Pioneer Anomaly had the potential to upend Einstein and Newton.

He may be a millionaire, but Vern Wheeler never forgot that he is a son of Maine - land of big sky, wide lakes, and the fattest salmon on the East Coast. To escape the boardroom, he buys a rundown fishing lodge in the wilds of his home state, and with his brother turns it into the most fashionable retreat in New England. After years of happy fishing, the Wheelers have no interest in selling Raven Lodge. But a local Native-American group won't take no for an answer.

The man is found on the icy streets of Boston, vomit in his beard, alcohol in his system, and ice in his veins. The police assume he is just another in the dozens of derelicts whom the urban winter claims each year, but Brady Coyne knows better. Attorney to New England's upper crust, he was the dead man's lawyer, and he knows that Stuart Carver was no bum: He was a senator's nephew.