Showing results by narrator "Malcolm Hillgartner" in All Categories

One day Ben Gould slips on the ice, hits his head, and is supposed to die. But he doesn’t. Instead, Gould finds himself in a strange situation where he continues to live as if nothing happened. As a result, a ghost that was originally sent to guide Ben to the Afterlife is stuck on earth while its bosses try to figure out what went wrong. The situation catches the attention of various supernatural entities, besides the ghost.

At the end of the American Revolution, Britain and the United States imagined a future for each of their nations that stretched across a continent. They signed treaties with one another dividing lands neither country could map, much less control. A century and a half later, Canada and the United States had largely fulfilled those earlier ambitions. Both countries had built nations that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and had made an expansive international border that restricted movement.

Jonathan Starr is not your traditional do-gooder, and in 2009, when he decided to found Abaarso, a secondary school in Somaliland, the choice seemed crazy to even his closest friends. Why, they wondered, would he turn down a life of relative luxury to relocate to an armed compound in a breakaway region of the world's number one failed state? To achieve his mission, Starr would have to overcome profound cultural differences, broken promises, and threats to his safety and that of his staff.

When talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman makes his pilgrimage to sit at the feet of his hero, the reclusive master of American Literature, E. I. Lonoff, he soon finds himself enmeshed in the great Jewish writer's domestic life, with all its complexity, artifice and drive for artistic truth. As Nathan sits in breathlessly awkward conversation with his idol, a glimpse of a dark-haired beauty through a closing doorway leaves him reeling. He soon learns that the entrancing vision is Amy Bellette, but her position in the Lonoff household - student? mistress? - remains tantalisingly unclear.

A society matron's life is threatened after she engineers the theft of her own priceless jewelry to pay off a gambling debt. Only a debonair connoisseur of crime can save her and recover her gems. For a price.

Jake Reese is a writing teacher at an American university. He lives in a small brick Tudor close to campus with his art-buyer wife, Diane. His life is quiet - ordinary even. And he likes it that way. But it wasn’t always quiet. Jake’s distant past was a life on the streets, inflicting damage and suffering on more people than he can count. And now someone from his past, it seems, has come looking for him.

One of the most significant literary events of the century, the discovery of manuscript pages containing early drafts of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time put an end to a decades-long search for the Proustian grail. The Paris publisher Bernard de Fallois claimed to have viewed the folios, but doubts about their existence emerged when none appeared in the Proust manuscripts bequeathed to the Bibliotheque Nationale in 1962. The texts had in fact been hidden among Fallois's private papers, found upon his death in 2018.

A tense, dangerous thriller of CIA operations in Latin America, guerrilla wars, drug flights, environmental catastrophes and genocides. Shot down over the Guatemalan jungle with a planeload of marijuana, Vietnam veteran Joe Murphy gets caught up in the country's brutal Civil War, and in an attack on a Mayan village by the Guatemalan Army and its CIA "advisors". Badly injured, he escapes on a nightmare trek through the jungle, hunted by the Army, the CIA, and death squads.

Just before Thanksgiving in 1950, five months into the Korean War, General MacArthur flew to American positions in the north and grandly announced an "end-the-war-by-Christmas" offensive despite recent intervention by Mao's Chinese, who would soon trap tens of thousands of US troops poised toward the Yalu River border.

Can America's public schools, long resistant to change, meet the challenges of globalization and new educational alternatives? Not by doing what they're doing today. So argues Building Engaged Schools, a book that challenges the faulty assumptions that guide American public education.

Through relatable stories of actual coaching experiences, retirement coaches Charlie Baker, Larry Wofford, and Craig Bothwell highlight common retirement challenges, present habits to overcome them, and help you define your retirement "type".

A Manhattan gumshoe pursues a convict to St. Louis, where he gets mixed up in a cop killing and nearly loses his own life at the hands of a B girl.

For Mark Rohr, a decorated Desert Storm vet, the last 10 years have been filled with shady jobs like his current stint as a bouncer at a red-light-district bar in Thailand. When a beautiful and naïve American girl, Robin Antonucci, arrives in Phuket City from the States and hires him to help find her missing brother, Mark sees the chance to make some easy money.

In Young Mr. Roosevelt Stanley Weintraub evokes Franklin Delano Roosevelt's political and wartime beginnings. An unpromising patrician playboy appointed assistant secretary of the Navy in 1913, Roosevelt learned quickly and rose to national visibility during World War I. Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1920, he lost the election but not his ambitions. While his stature was rising, his testy marriage to his cousin Eleanor was fraying amid scandal quietly covered up. Even polio a year later would not suppress the ever indomitable Roosevelt and his inevitable ascent.

Alex Ostermann lives in an apartment block with his family in East Berlin. He hates the regime and his parents are worried that Alex and his sister, Geli, aren't displaying the correct ‘socialist attitude'. After school they are often followed. Friends suddenly break off relations. The final straw comes when Alex is arrested.

In the 1970s, Frank Lucas was the king of the Harlem drug trade, bringing in over a million dollars a day. He lived a glamorous life, hobnobbing with athletes, musicians, and politicians, but Lucas was a ruthless gangster. He was notorious for using the coffins of dead GIs to smuggle heroin into the United States, and, before being sentenced to 70 years in prison, he played a major role in the near death of New York City.

For more than a decade, French journalist Nicolas Hénin has reported from the front lines of conflict in the Middle East, much of his time spent in Iraq and Syria. He witnessed the events leading to the rise of Islamic State, and, in June 2013, he was captured by IS and spent 10 months in captivity with James Foley and others who were beheaded soon after Hénin was released.

On a train in 1876, Henry James is returning home from his journalistic tour under a cloud of psychosomatic symptoms. Across the aisle sits the beguiling Elena Hite, the daughter of a railroad baron, who will soon know all of the James boys' secrets. But their conversation comes to a halt when the train is stopped and boarded by the notorious James Gang, led by Frank and Jesse, who stride into the coach with guns ablaze.

San Francisco, 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets. A disgraced professor takes a downtown office to plot his return. But the walls are thin, and he’s distracted by voices from next door—his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of her patients dislikes the hum of the white-noise machine. And so he begins to hear about the patient’s troubles with her female lover, her conflicts with her adoptive WASP family, and her quest to track down her birth mother.

Michael Tougias and Adam Gamble had good lives: married with two children each, nice homes in the suburbs, jobs that paid the bills, and frequent fishing trips out on the ocean. But those comfortable lives had cracks in them and soon they found themselves hit by a rogue wave of divorce, financial hardship, addiction, and career upheaval. What kept them going—and helped them navigate the rough waters of middle age—was fishing and friendship.