Showing results by narrator "Jim Meskimen" in All Categories

It’s the largest oil spill in history: a crashed supertanker in San Francisco Bay. Desperate to avert environmental damage—and a PR disaster—the multinational oil company releases an untested “designer microbe” to break up the spill. It's an “oil-eating” microbe, designed to consume anything made of petrocarbons: oil, gasoline, synthetic fabrics, and of course plastic. What the company doesn’t realize is that their microbe propagates through the air....

Bryn felt sickened as he felt the ground shake, knowing that one of the two shafts had collapsed. Now, he stood in the pump room and watched the two thrumming pumps as they pulled water out of the deep mines. He knew that one of them would strain when the water became fouled with coal dust and debris from the collapse, and if it was pump number two, it would mean that his father and older brothers were probably dead.

California, 1957. Lee Mellon believes he is the descendant of the only Confederate general to have come from Big Sur and is himself a seeker of truth in his own modern-day war against the status quo. For the first time in audio, A Confederate General from Big Sur was the late Richard Brautigan's first published novel, written when he was 28.

Twenty-five years after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, RFK: His Words for Our Times, a celebration of Kennedy’s life and legacy, was published to enormous acclaim. Now, a quarter century later, this classic volume has been thoroughly edited and updated. Through his own words we get a direct and intimate perspective on Kennedy’s views on civil rights, social justice, the war in Vietnam, foreign policy, the desirability of peace, the need to eliminate poverty, and the role of hope in American politics.

This anthology, with an introduction by Robert Silverberg, offers a sweeping survey of robots as depicted throughout literature. Since the Iliad—in which we are shown golden statues built by Hephaestus “with minds and wisdoms”—humans have been fascinated by the idea of artificial life. From the Argonautica to the medieval Jewish legend of the Golem and Ambrose Bierce’s tale of a chess-playing robot, the idea of what robots are—and who creates them—can be drastically different.

Du Pre remembers when you could send animal skins to Sears Roebuck and get merchandise in return. Now the wolves are gone from the mountains, and outsiders want them back. The trouble is, a tussle over wildlife is getting people killed.First, two activists die by a sniper's rifle. Then four more lives are snuffed out as a brutal winter storm barrels down on a carnival of Feds, reporters, and protestors. Du Pre knows one of his own people must be behind the bloodletting, and that in this rugged land, you don't quit hunting until you're dead.

In The Unspeakable Loss, Nisha offers support, guidance, and wisdom from others who have experienced the death of a child, as well as her personal story after the death of her beloved 17-year-old son, Victor, and her insight as a grief counselor and psychotherapist. Charting the long path from the worst possible nightmare, shock, trauma, and overwhelming pain to a life that once again miraculously contains joy, love, and laughter, The Unspeakable Loss addresses the importance of self-compassion and self-care.

In his haste to escape a scalding death, the engine operator panicked and fell. Dylan lifted his heavy shovel as high as his 12-year-old arms could manage and swung at the thundering machine. It could've killed him, but he had to try. As the shovel’s steel head slammed into the machine, it set in motion a series of events that would shape his entire life.

In this forceful manifesto, Hirsch argues that children in the US are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society. Includes 5,000 essential facts to know.

Open the Writers of the Future and be carried away by stories—and illustrations—that will make you think, make you laugh, and make you see the world in ways you never imagined. Twelve captivating tales from the best new writers of the year as selected by Writers of the Future Contest judges accompanied by three more from L. Ron Hubbard, Nancy Kress, S.M. Stirling.

Every 40 seconds, someone in the US suffers a heart attack or stroke, and every 65 seconds someone develops dementia. The culprit is cardiovascular disease - and rates are soaring in younger, seemingly healthy people. World-renowned cardiovascular specialists Bradley Bale, MD, and Amy Doneen, DNP, have pioneered a lifesaving method to prevent these devastating events - and reverse the disease that causes them.

The electricity has flickered out. The automobile age is over. In Union Grove, a little town in upstate New York, the future is nothing like people thought it would be. Life is hard and close to the bone. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure.

Lieutenant John Patchen has come to Montana to persuade Chappie Plaquemines, his former gunnery sergeant in Iraq and the son of Gabriel Du Pré's girlfriend, to accept the Navy Cross. First, however, Du Pré and Patchen must find the wounded marine, who was last seen drinking heavily in the Toussaint Saloon. They locate him soon enough, disheveled and stinking of stale booze, but a sobering visit to a medicine man's sweat lodge reveals a much greater mystery.

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). This audiobook includes the first four books in the Squish series: Super Amoeba, Brave New Pond, The Power of the Parasite, and Captain Disaster.

A husband’s search for his wife’s lover, lost amid the turbulence of the Yom Kippur War, is the heart of this dreamlike novel. Through five different perspectives, Yehoshua explores the realities and consequences of the affair and the search, laying bare deep-rooted tensions within family, between generations, between Jews and Arabs.

For four generations, the Messmers have raised cattle in the rough country of eastern Montana. When the current owners die in a motor home accident, they leave the ranch to their son - an ominous development for everyone in the area, both human and bovine. Larry Messmer left Toussaint in the 1980s, when he got in trouble for bludgeoning a horse to death, and Gabriel Du Pré hoped he would never come back. Larry announces his return by having his ranch hands kill every weak cow on the property.

A landmark short story collection that put the more character-based New Wave science fiction on the map, Dangerous Visions won several prestigious awards and was nominated for many others. This now-classic anthology includes thirty-three stories by thirty-two award-winning authors, over half of whom have won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards.

In 1970, Asbury Park, New Jersey, was ripped apart by race riots that left the once-proud beach town an hour away from Manhattan smoldering, suffering and left for dead. Four years later, a few miles down the coast in Seaside Heights, two bouncers, Jack Roig and Butch Pielka, tired of the daily grind, dreamt of owning their own place. Under-prepared and minimally funded, the two bought the first bar they considered, in a city where no one wanted to be, without setting one foot in the place. They named it the Stone Pony.

This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. While European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the colonial era’s stifling religion, and its dark and threatening woods.

After he and Garth had built the A-G Connected, Al thought that he’d fulfilled his dream by owning a horse ranch. But when Garth announced that he was going to get married, Al knew that he would only be in the way, so he decided to find his own place. It was after he found his new ranch almost a hundred miles south of the A-G that things changed dramatically, and he realized that just starting a ranch and raising horses wasn’t a dream at all, and it would take a nightmare to discover what that dream truly was.