Showing results by narrator "James Patrick Cronin" in All Categories

In 2013 Eli Mandel decided to recreate the 642-mile trek that John Keats completed in the summer of 1818, hoping to learn more about the famous poet who died at the age of 25. As Mandel matches his "ghostly companion's" journey step-for-step, the moments of discovery turn inward and Mandel is forced to face his own ghosts.

There was no distress call, no warning. The airliner and its 115 passengers and crew simply vanished. Get the story behind the detective work that solved the mystery.

In Modern Families, Joshua Gamson brings us extraordinary family creation tales - his own included - that illuminate this changing world of contemporary kinship. Combining personal memoir and ethnographic storytelling, Modern Families tells a variety of unconventional family-creation tales - adoption and assisted reproduction, gay and straight parents, coupled and single, and multi-parent families - set against the social, legal, and economic contexts in which they were made.

Twenty five years ago, Jenna, Donnie, and Nico were the best of friends, having forged a bond through the abuse and neglect they endured as residents of Savior House, a group home for parentless teens. When the home was shut down—after the disappearance of several kids—the three were split up. Though the trauma of their childhood has never left them, each went on to live accomplished—if troubled—lives. They haven't seen one another since they were teens but now are reunited for a single haunting reason: someone is trying to kill them.

Henry Jett's life is slowly going nowhere. His girlfriend recently left, and his job in a local garage is uninspiring, considering that he doesn't particularly like cars. Henry finds solace in his eccentric passion, rebuilding the skeletons of birds and animals. Meanwhile Henry's brother, Dan, is disappearing into an obsession of his own. Without Dan to rely on, Henry begins to engage in new ways with the people around him in his Prairie city.

Believed to be little more than small-town smugglers at first, their trail would lead the FBI to the world's most dangerous terrorists.

"Excuse me, sir, can I help you?" Mike Gibbs asked as a heavyset man with a duffel bag stepped into the driver's well of his 45-foot-long shuttle bus. "You're not allowed down here while the bus is moving." The man responded by leveling a .38-caliber revolver at the driver's right temple. "We're robbing the bus," he said quietly.

The 1967 kidnapping of 10-year-old Kenneth Young loomed as one of the few unsolved major kidnaping cases in the FBI's history. His ransom of $250,000 was the second-largest payoff in the annals of the bureau's cases at the time. Yet more than 30 months had passed without a clue being found to the criminal's identity.

In Modern Families, Joshua Gamson brings us extraordinary family creation tales - his own included - that illuminate this changing world of contemporary kinship. Combining personal memoir and ethnographic storytelling, Modern Families tells a variety of unconventional family-creation tales - adoption and assisted reproduction, gay and straight parents, coupled and single, and multi-parent families - set against the social, legal, and economic contexts in which they were made.

In Modern Families, Joshua Gamson brings us extraordinary family creation tales - his own included - that illuminate this changing world of contemporary kinship. Combining personal memoir and ethnographic storytelling, Modern Families tells a variety of unconventional family-creation tales - adoption and assisted reproduction, gay and straight parents, coupled and single, and multi-parent families - set against the social, legal, and economic contexts in which they were made.

In Modern Families, Joshua Gamson brings us extraordinary family creation tales - his own included - that illuminate this changing world of contemporary kinship. Combining personal memoir and ethnographic storytelling, Modern Families tells a variety of unconventional family-creation tales - adoption and assisted reproduction, gay and straight parents, coupled and single, and multi-parent families - set against the social, legal, and economic contexts in which they were made.

David Shephard, whose wrongful arrest led to 12 years in jail, can't make up for the lost time - but he's determined to try.

Forcing Susan Meyer to lie face-down on the floor, the intruders tied her hands behind her back with nylon rope. "Don't call the police," they warned as they led her 23-year-old daughter, Beth, away, "or you'll never see your daughter alive again." The men then pulled a pillowcase over Beth's head, forced her into the back of her mother's Oldsmobile, and drove off.

It was dangerous enough being an honest prosecutor in Mexico. But "Pepe" Patino had spent more than a year working closely with the US DEA, investigating a vicious drug syndicate run by two notorious brothers that was pumping cocaine into America, murdering their rivals, and routinely torturing and killing informers.

Police cited the deaths of his wife and daughter as a murder-suicide - but he knew that couldn't be.

Nathaniel Carter was stunned by the verdict: guilty - with 25 years to life in prison. To the police, it was an open-and-shut case. To Carter's family and a few concerned friends, it would become a crusade for justice.

Joe "Rock" Musial was the real deal. He was a hero. As one fellow soldier put it, "Rock was an absolute legend.... I can remember guys in other units, when Rock walked around the perimeter, they'd stare and ask, 'Is what they say about him true?'"

They were no elite force. They were just an average lot of men who'd undergone the seemingly magical training process that produces marines. But this proved to be their greatest strength that long and terrible night, fighting one of the truly great final stands in all of history - they were marines.

"I knew in my mind it was a bad situation," Spc. Michael Wolfe later explained of that night in Karbala, one of the holiest Islamic cities in Iraq, in December 2004. The events that followed would change his and two other soldiers' lives forever.

A woman's cry for help prompted US Navy medic Chris Walsh to take on a risky new mission.