Mostrando resultados por narrador "Norman Dietz" en Todas las categorías

In one of Mark Twain's most biting social satires, the allegedly pious town of Hadleyburg has its moral character put to the test. When a sack purportedly loaded with gold is offered to one citizen in return for a good deed done long ago, the upright citizens of Hadleyburg learn a lesson in humility as, one by one, their greed bubbles to the surface.

Originally published in 1865, "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" began Mark Twain's remarkable career, and immediately demonstrated his masterful storytelling and brilliant sense of humor. This delightful tale introduces Jim Smiley, a man who loved to gamble, whether on horse races, dogfights, catfights, or even how long it took bugs to cross the Mexican border. When a gullible stranger came to town, Smiley boasted that his pet frog, Dan'l Webster, could outjump any frog in the county.

"The chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it," wrote Jonathan Swift in a letter to his friend Alexander Pope. Vexing works collected here are "A Modest Proposal," "Directions to Servants," "The Art of Political Lying," "A Digression Concerning the Critics," and "Sweetness and Light."

Call If You Need Me includes all of the prose previously collected in No Heroics, Please, four essays from Fires, and those five marvelous stories that range over the period of Carver's mature writing and give his devoted fans a final glimpse of the great writer at work. The pure pleasure of Carver's writing is everywhere in his work, here no less than in those stories that have already entered the canon of modern literature.

Written during a period of great tragedy in Mark Twain's life and great social unrest in America, Pudd'nhead Wilson rises above its farcical plot to ask pointed philosophical questions about society, values, and racism.

Part Two: 1979-1984 includes: The Orient Express; Rudyard Kipling; Railways of the Raj; Graham Greene's Traveling Companion; and Sunrise with Seamonsters.

The driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, which marked the completion of the country's first transcontinental railroad, was only the beginning of the race for railroad dominance. In the aftermath of this building feat, dozens of railroads, each with aggressive empire builders at their helms, raced one another for the ultimate prize of a southern transcontinental route that was generally free of snow, shorter in distance, and gentler in gradients. With a meticulous, loving eye, Walter Borneman picks up where most other histories leave off....

For centuries two meg-powers from the future have been waging war for control of timelines of history. Alan Norlund, a WWII airman vet, is promised a lifesaving cure for his granddaughter, if he will undertake a mission 50 years back in time to the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Hitler with his "angels" from the opposing power would like to take over our timeline and 1933 Chicago may be just the place to start.

With a new afterword covering the two decades since its first publication, two of Washington, D.C.'s most respected journalists expose one of America's most tragic ironies: How the nation's capital, often a gleaming symbol of peace and hope, is the setting for vicious contradictions and devastating conflicts over race, class, and power. Jaffe and Sherwood have chillingly chronicled the descent of the District of Columbia.

It's a classic story of the American Dream. George Mitchell grew up in a working class family in Maine, experiencing firsthand the demoralizing effects of unemployment when his father was laid off from a lifelong job. But education was always a household priority, and Mitchell embraced every opportunity that came his way, eventually becoming the ranking Democrat in the Senate during the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

When Guthrie leaves his job, his car, and his apartment behind and starts walking, he has no plan. But day by day, he finds direction, company, and a vision that gets clearer with each passing mile. Lawrence Block is widely known for his best-selling mysteries. Here, in an early work that is now reissued, the Edgar and Shamus Award-winning author offers a provocative fantasy that has changed the lives of many readers.

Shuttled among orphanages and foster homes since he was 11, Wesley Benfield - newly converted - is trying to turn over a new leaf. But two things are keeping him from a straight-and-narrow kind of existence: lust for Phoebe, and a National Steel Dobro bottleneck guitar. There’s more than one way for an ungainly white boy to find a little soul, and Wesley strikes out on his own path of redemption.

On April 18, 1775, a riot over the price of flour broke out in the French city of Dijon. That night, across the Atlantic, Paul Revere mounted the fastest horse he could find and kicked it into a gallop. So began what have been called the "sister revolutions" of France and America. In a single, thrilling narrative, this audiobook tells the story of those revolutions and shows just how deeply intertwined they actually were.

How often can you peek behind the curtains of one of the most secretive governments in the world? Prisoner of the State is the first book to give listeners a front row seat to the secret inner workings of China's government. It is the story of Premier Zhao Ziyang, the man who brought liberal change to that nation and who, at the height of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, tried to stop the massacre and was dethroned for his efforts.

Mosby's Men is John H. Alexander's eyewitness account of his days with Mosby's Confederate Raiders, a small band of about 400 rough riders who chased 40,000 Union soldiers during the height of the Civil War. Riding 50 miles a day with very little rest, Mosby's Men perfected the "skedaddle", a baffling, highly effective guerrilla tactic that enabled them to make sneak attacks, evade capture, and constantly traverse enemy territory.

Forgotten Patriots is the first-ever account of what took place in these hellholes. The result is a unique perspective on the Revolutionary War as well as a sobering commentary on how Americans have remembered our struggle for independence---and how much we have forgotten.

After the Civil War ended, Edmund McIlhenny, an ambitious and tenacious Louisiana businessman, found himself with few prospects. The South's economy in ruins and his millions of dollars in Confederacy currency worthless, he had no choice but to return with his wife, Mary, to her family home in Avery Island, a former sugar plantation destroyed by Union soldiers. To McIlhenny's surprise, however, the hot peppers he had planted before being forced off the island had flourished.

Of all the sports played across the globe, none has more curses, superstitions, or supernatural events like baseball, America's national pastime. While some of these can easily be explained, there are just as many that cannot. Field of Fantasies delves right into that superstition with short stories written by several key authors about baseball and the supernatural.

An elderly inventor, burning with manic creativity, tries to reconcile with his estranged gay son. A bereaved boy draws a thuggish classmate into a relationship of escalating guilt and violence. A genteel middle-aged woman, a longtime resident of a psychiatric hospital, becomes the confidante of a lovelorn teenaged volunteer. Told with Chekhovian restraint and compassion, and conveying both the sorrow of life and the courage with which people rise to meet it, You Are Not a Stranger Here is a triumph of storytelling.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007), known today as the architect of John F. Kennedy's presidential legacy - and the myth of Camelot - blazed an extraordinary path from Harvard University to wartime London to the West Wing. The son of a pioneering historian - and a two-time Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner in his own right - Schlesinger redefined the art of presidential biography. A Thousand Days, his best-selling record of the Kennedy administration, remains immensely influential.