Showing results by narrator "Stephen Hoye" in All Categories

We're all getting older, all the time, but too often our culture defines the aging process negatively instead of embracing it as a natural part of life. Nowhere is this problem more pronounced than in our health care system, where ageist medicine often serves to worsen our medical issues instead of helping us figure out how to address or avoid them. What we need is an insider's guide to staying healthy.

The Civil War may be over but a new war has begun, one between the past and the present, tradition and technology. On a former marshy wasteland, the daring Massachusetts Institute of Technology is rising, its mission to harness science for the benefit of all and to open the doors of opportunity to everyone of merit. But in Boston Harbor a fiery cataclysm throws commerce into chaos, as ships’ instruments spin inexplicably out of control. Soon after, another mysterious catastrophe devastates the heart of the city.

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.

January 2, 1972: Men in tuxedos rob the Pierre, a New York hotel. They get away with $11 million worth of cash and jewelry. The police are baffled by how large-scale a heist could go off so smoothly. The answer was in the leader of the thieves, a man by the name of Bobby Comfort. Comfort took to crime from a young age, card sharping, petty theft, and eventually robbery. Taking money from the rich, though, was where he excelled.

A woman is shot as she waits for her train to work. An hour later, a second woman is gunned down as she rides an elevated train through the Loop. Two hours after that, a church becomes the target of a chemical weapons attack. The city of Chicago is under siege, and Michael Kelly, cynical cop turned private investigator, just happens to be on the scene when all hell breaks loose. Kelly is initially drawn into the case by the killers themselves, then tasked by Chicago’s mayor and the FBI to hunt down the bad guys and, all things being equal, put a bullet in them.

When two sisters and their aunt are found dead in their suburban Dublin home, it seems that the secret behind their untimely demise will never be known. But then Niall, a young mailman, finds a mysterious diary in the post office's dead-letter bin. From beyond the grave, Fiona Walsh shares the most tragic love story he's ever heard---and her tale has only just begun.

Vienna, 1770: Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen unveils a strange and amazing invention: the Mechanical Turk, a sensational and unbeatable chess-playing automaton. But what the Habsburg court hails as the greatest innovation of the century is really nothing more than a brilliant illusion. The chess machine is secretly operated from inside by the Italian dwarf Tibor, a God-fearing social outcast whose chess-playing abilities and diminutive size make him the perfect accomplice in this grand hoax.

In stories like "A Night in the Cemetery," "Night of Horror," and "Murder," not only will Chekhov's dark humor and twisted crimes satisfy even the most hardboiled of mystery fans, but readers will again appreciate the penetrating, absurdist insight into the human condition that only Chekhov can bring. Whether it is the death of a young amateur playwright at the hands of an editor who hates bad writing, or a drunken civil servant who ends up trapped in a graveyard, these stories overflow with the unforgettable characters and unique sensibility that will forever make Chekhov one of the most fascinating figures in literature.

Jack Caleb is a Gold Coast psychiatrist, wealthy, cultured - and gay. John Thinnes is a burned out Chicago detective. When one of Caleb's clients is found dead in his locked apartment - apparently of a self-inflicted head wound, Thinnes doesn't believe it was suicide. And Caleb is inclined to agree. But Thinnes regards a shrink who makes house calls suspicious and starts his investigation of the murder with the doctor himself.

The past erupts into the present when the police arrest Alexei Volkovoy, known as Volk, at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport and take him to a murder scene. At first, the dead man appears to be just one more victim of Moscow's out-of-control violence.

When Iggy Corso gets kicked out of high school, there's no one for him to tell. His mother has gone off, his father is stoned on the couch, and because the phone's been disconnected, even the social worker can't get through. So he leaves a note and goes out to make something of his life, but that's not so easy when you're 16, living in public housing, have no skills, and your only friend is a law-school dropout who's thinking about joining the Hare Krishnas.

Searching for the source of Zero, a highly addictive drug that threatens Rhadaz society, Chris finds a lethal dose of the untreatable drug in his own veins and turns to Ariadne, a reluctant sword-master, for help.

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.

Berlin, 1933. William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered academic from Chicago, has, to his own and everyone else's surprise, become America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proves to be a turning point in history. Dodd and his family, most notably his vivacious daughter, Martha, observe at first-hand the many changes - some subtle, some disturbing, and some horrifically violent - that signal Hitler's consolidation of power. Dodd has little choice but to associate with key figures in the Nazi party.

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".

Cambridge, England: Outside the city, the badly decomposed body of a teenage girl has washed up in the flooded fens. Detective Inspector Chloe Frohmann and her partner, Morris Keene, must work quickly to identify the victim before the press takes off with the salacious story. Across the hallowed paths and storied squares of Cambridge University, the detectives follow scant clues toward the identity of the dead girl. Eventually, their search leads them to Deeping House, an imposing country manor where, over the course of one Christmas holiday, three families, two nannies, and one young writer were snowed in together.

This new and meticulously researched biography of the controversial American commander Joe Stilwell presents an admirably lucid account of his career and the complex story of the Burma campaign. Stilwell spent most of World War II as Chiang Kai-Shek's chief of staff in China. He was often at odds with the British Generals Wavell, Slim, and Wingate, men with whom he was to co-operate in Burma. These arguments earned him the nickname of 'Vinegar' Joe.

In Washington, word is received that an elite member of the Nazi High Command is willing to defect and divulge information that will shorten the war. But his defection entails the release of the ultra-top-secret file on the Scarlatti Inheritance - a file whose contents will destroy many of the Western world's greatest and most illustrious reputations if they are made known... The Scarlatti Inheritance is a spellbinding story of international terror and intrigue, greed and cunning, suspense and murder.

In this compelling new biography, historian Niccol Capponi frees Machiavelli (1469-1527) from centuries of misinterpretation. Exploring the Renaissance city of Florence, where Machiavelli lived, Capponi reveals the man behind the legend. A complex portrait of Machiavelli emerges - at once a brilliantly skillful diplomat and a woefully inept liar; a sharp thinker and an impractical dreamer; a hard-nosed powerbroker and a risk-taking gambler; a calculating propagandist and an imprudent jokester.

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.