Showing results by narrator "Jim Meskimen" in All Categories

When Susan Ershler and John Waechter each made the grueling journey to the top of Mount Everest, they were motivated by the desire to join the elite group of climbers that had conquered the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each of the seven continents. It was this same determination that made them star performers in corporate sales, one of the toughest jobs in global business.

It has been said that somewhere in the world you have an exact double. This rocket-ride of a novel ignites with the sudden cry of "Ai! Pedrito!", as Naval Lieutenant Tom Smith discovers that his exact look-alike is the notorious South American revolutionary and spy, Pedrito Miraflores. Inspired by a real incident in the life of L. Ron Hubbard, Ai! Pedrito! is a fun-to-listen-to, compelling novel of what can sometimes happen when intelligence goes wrong.

Itauk the Madman has spread death to the Yukon, throwing the bodies of his victims to his sled team of 12 wolves. Tracking him down are Canadian Mountie Tommy McKenna and his partner, Simmons. But when the pair separate to hunt for food, Itauk attacks Simmons and lets his wolves make an unmentionable feast that Tommy later discovers on his return to camp.

Firsten Guide is a tough, wise-cracking rebel leader who’s light years ahead of his time - and about to lead his crew into a battle that’s Beyond All Weapons. He and his fellow colonizers of Mars have faced a brutal crackdown engineered by Earth’s tyrannical government. But the resourceful Firsten has developed an extraordinary new fuel that enables him and his hardy band to escape into space - and time.

More than ever, Americans are realizing that if we want to keep this country great, we must be citizen-patriots. And here’s the handbook every citizen-patriot needs: The Essential American, featuring the fundamental documents of our nation’s history.

Forged in the hot sun and sand of the Arizona desert, Chinook Shannon is as tough as they come. But Chinook is far from home—in the north country of Montana—and facing a challenge as big as the territory itself. Following his grandfather’s suspicious death, he’s come to Montana to claim his inheritance—the family’s cattle ranch. But the territory’s crawling with bandits and bankers, and they all want a piece of Chinook’s land.

One day Arthur Friedland piles his three sons into the car and drives them to see the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis. Protesting that he doesn't believe in magic even as he is led onto the stage, Arthur nevertheless experiences something. Later that night, while his family sleeps, he takes his passport, empties all the money from his bank account, and vanishes. In time, still absent from his family, he begins to publish novels and becomes an internationally renowned author.

As a lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, Michael Stuart was once considered an officer and a gentleman. But that’s all changed. Now he’s seen as a renegade, a traitor, and a thief. Stuart is a man without a country...and perhaps without a prayer. Why? Because in a daring plot to foil the Japanese puppet regime in China, he set out to reinstate the country’s true emperor. Known now as The Red Dragon, Stuart is a soldier of fortune in war-torn Manchuria - and a man of honor in a world of treachery.

Richard Brautigan was an original - brilliant and wickedly funny. His books resonated with the 1960s, making him an overnight counterculture hero. Dark, funny, and exquisitely haunting, his final book-length fiction explores the fragile, mysterious shadowland surrounding death. Told with classic Brautigan wit, poetic style, and mordant irony, An Unfortunate Woman assumes the form of a peripatetic journal chronicling the protagonist's travels and oblique ruminations on the suicide of one woman and the death of a close friend from cancer.

In his first book, American Underdog, David Brat examines how we brought down the status quo by tapping in to moral and economic lessons as old as our civilization and discusses how Washington can learn from history instead of ignoring it. A fighter for children, he illuminates how our current fiscal policies are selling their future and outlines new ways to move forward with a conservative agenda that provides fairer treatment for all.

In this modern-day fairy tale, the twelve-year-old, telepathic twins uncover a world hidden behind an enchanted mist conjured by five sorcerers to protect all magical beings from the human world. A world that is now terrorized by a dark and destructive force sweeping across the land, threatening their very existence.

Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.

What defines Boston? Its history? Its landmarks? Its sports teams and shrines? Perhaps the question should be, who defines Boston? From Henry David Thoreau to Dennis Lehane, Boston has been beloved by many of America's greatest writers, and there is no better group of men and women to capture the heart and soul of the Hub. In Our Boston, editor Andrew Blauner has collected both original and reprinted essays from Boston-area writers past and present, all celebrating the city they love.

The Triumph of the Egg is a fictional panorama of a great region of our country, unfolded by a writer who - to quote the New York Times - "depicts life in the Midwest as Dostoevsky pictured the many colored life of Russia, with almost as wonderful a touch of genius, with a more concentrated and daring skill." This coveted 1921 collection is an example of what a book of stories can be when a writer of vision deals with the materials of American life.

Portia Kane is having a meltdown. After escaping her ritzy Florida life and her cheating pornographer husband, she finds herself back in South Jersey, a place that remains largely unchanged from the years of her unhappy youth. Lost and alone, looking to find the goodness she believes still exists in the world, Portia sets off to save herself by saving someone else - a beloved high school English teacher who has retired after a traumatic incident.

It's Squish - a graphic novel series, now adapted for audio, about a comic book-loving, twinkie-eating grade school amoeba trying to find his place in the world (or at least trying to make it through a school day). Inspired by his favorite comic book hero, Super Amoeba!, Squish has to navigate school (bullies! detention! Principal Planaria!), family (dad: Hates to wear a tie. Secretly listens to heavy metal in the car), and friends (Peggy-rainbows! happy all the time! and Pod...who's...well, you just have to meet him).

It’s Christmas in Parkland, North Carolina, but PI David Randall is not partaking in the holiday cheer. Years ago, Randall and his psychic friend, Camden, found Jared Hunter stabbed to death. Now Camden is being haunted by flashbacks of the crime. Do the flashbacks suggest that Camden is somehow linked with his friend’s killer?

Simon Inescort is no longer bodily present in his marriage. It's been several months since he keeled over the rail of a Nova Scotia-bound ferry, a massive heart attack to blame. Simon's widow, Lorca Pell, has sold their farmhouse to newlyweds Zachary and Muriel. He spends time replaying his marriage in his own mind, while also engaging in occasionally intimate observation of the new homeowners. But soon the crisis of a missing child, a local 11-year-old, threatens the tenuous domestic equilibrium, as the weight of the case falls to Zachary, a rookie private detective.

Young Kit Kellan has led a rough-and-tumble life - knocking around the Vega System in his youth as a tiger hunter, a brawler, and a bouncer in a bar. But his real fight is just beginning. Summarily expelled from the prestigious Terra University, he is taken into custody by an agent of the System Bureau of Investigation (SBI). Kit's crime: thinking too much and thinking too well. He’s not in custody for long, however. Snatched from captivity by the People’s Revolutionary Society, Kit sets out an epic adventure that will take him to the farthest reaches of the universe.

Brash and bold and daring, Lieutenant Lee Briscoe will never back away from a good cause or a good fight. Briscoe’s gone undercover to infiltrate a slave-labor camp on an island in Southeast Asia, knowing full well that once he goes in, he may never get out. Posing as a man on the run for murder, he may soon wish he had run in the opposite direction. His adversary on the island is Schwenk - a man who is not only a connoisseur of cruelty, but an expert at delivering it.