Showing results by narrator "Ray Porter" in All Categories

Every morning Boone Daniels is out with the Dawn Patrol: four men and one woman as single-minded about surfing as he is, or nearly. They have real jobs; Boone works as a P.I. just enough to keep himself in fish tacos and in the water. But Boone is also obsessed with the unsolved case of a young girl named Rain who was abducted while he was with the San Diego police.

Why has punditry overtaken news, with so many media outlets pushing partisan agendas instead of information? Comedian Stephen Colbert's catchword "truthiness" has captured something essential about our age: that people are more comfortable with ideas that feel true, even if the evidence for those beliefs is thin.

For over 20 years, Belasco House has stood empty. Regarded as the Mt. Everest of haunted houses, its shadowed walls have witnessed scenes of unimaginable horror and depravity. All previous attempts to probe its mysteries have ended in murder, suicide, or insanity.

But now, a new investigation has been launched, bringing four strangers to Belasco House in search of the ultimate secrets of life and death. A wealthy publisher, brooding over his impending death, has paid a physicist and two mediums to establish the facts of life after death once and for all. For one night, they will investigate the Belasco House and learn exactly why the townsfolk refer to it as the Hell House.

In the weeks before the 1979 Mexican elections, San Diego PI Alvaro Hickey is checking the stories that Baja California campesinos are spreading about visits from the Holy Virgin - an apparition with definite political preferences. Though Alvaro doubts that this visitor is divine, he's firmly on her side. Then, Lourdes Shuler asks him to unite her with her sister, Lupe, whom she claims is the campesinos' Virgin.

George Young is a devoted family man and a Gulf War veteran. After a hometown business venture flops, George accepts work overseas as a contracted civilian interrogator for the U.S. government at Omega, a secret holding facility for suspected terrorists. The work pays well, but his personal life is crumbling.

In one of the most compelling combat narratives ever written, Staff Sergeant David Bellavia, an Army infantry platoon leader in Iraq, gives a teeth-rattling, first-hand account of 11 straight days of heavy house-to-house fighting during the climactic second battle of Fallujah. His actions in the firefight, which included killing five insurgents in hand-to-hand combat, earned Bellavia the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and New York state's highest military honor, the Conspicuous Service Cross.

Phil Spector, born in the Bronx in 1940, grew up an outsider despised by his peers. But he formed a band, and had a number-one hit with "To Know Him Is to Love Him". He quickly became the top producer of early rock and roll and the originator of such girl groups as the Ronettes. Hit followed hit, and for all of them he used a new recording style called the "wall of sound". But the reign of the boy-man who owned pop music was doomed, and Spector spiraled into paranoid isolation and peculiar behavior.

The 4 Hour Work Week explains what a lifestyle entrepreneur is and why you should want to become one. It teaches you how to "kill" your job and design a life, the 80/20 rule and how it increases productivity, how to replace your dreams with goals, and more. Listeners can lead a rich life by working only four hours a week, freeing up the rest of their time to spend it living the lives they want.

Following his departure from office, Ronald Reagan moved to the margins of public interest. But like Lincoln, who was also attacked for decades after his death, Reagan deserves to be regarded as one of our greatest presidents, an exemplar of true conservative values. In this bold and philosophical reevaluation, John Patrick Diggins reveals that Reagan was a far more active and sophisticated president than we ever knew.

In this sequel to Harrison's True North, Donald Burkett, a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man, is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. While his wife, Cynthia, transcribes, Donald begins dictating his family history for the benefit of their children, stories that he never before has shared. As old crimes, dreams, wounds, and sacred moments are revived for the members of Donald's family, each is affected in different and profound ways.

The Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, takes us into the Green Zone, headquarters for the American occupation in Iraq. In this bubble separated from wartime realities, the task of reconstructing Iraq is in the hands of 20-somethings chosen for their Republican Party loyalty. They pursue irrelevant neoconservative solutions and pie-in-the-sky policies instead of rebuilding looted buildings and restoring electricity, angering the locals and fueling the insurgency.

Working with a team to analyze and defeat external threats to U.S. security, Dan must deal with a terrorist plot to smuggle in dirty-bomb material using the established drug-cartel methods. In the meantime, there's an internal threat from disgruntled military elements involving an attempt on the president's life using the "football": the mysterious suitcase that accompanies the president at all times, containing the codes and protocols to launch a nuclear strike.

Traditionally, Robert F. Kennedy has been viewed as either the "Good Bobby", who saw wrong and tried to right it, or the "Bad Bobby" of countless conspiracy theories. Evan Thomas' achievement is to realize RFK as a human being, to bring to life an extraordinarily complex man who was at once kind and cruel, devious and honest, fearful and brave. The portrait that emerges is unvarnished but sympathetic, packed with new details about Kennedy's early life and his behind-the-scenes machinations.

For more than two thousand years, The Art of War has stood as a cornerstone of Chinese culture, a lucid epigrammatic text that reveals as much about human psychology, politics, and economics as it does about battlefield strategy. The influence of Sun-Tzu's text has grown tremendously in the West in recent years, with military leaders, politicians, and corporate executives alike finding valuable insight in these ancient words.