Showing results by narrator "Donald Corren" in All Categories

In this duo's title story, 28-year-old Dave Bradford is close to achieving his dreams. In an effort to expand his cattle ranch and marry Sirral Drury, Bradford plans to sell 400 of his cattle in Wichita. But JJ Farman, owner of the biggest ranch in the basin, calls a meeting and warns Bradford he best not try to take the cattle across Texas Flat, even though it's open range. Going around Texas Flat would add two hundred miles to the cattle drive, another 10-12 days to the journey.

In March 1977, ballistics link murders going back six months to the same Charter Arms Bulldog .44. A serial killer, Son of Sam, is on the loose. But Coleridge Taylor can't compete with the armies of reporters fighting New York's tabloid war. He uncovers other killings being ignored because of the media circus. He goes after one, the story of a young Black woman gunned down in her apartment building the same night Son of Sam struck elsewhere in Queens. The story entangles Taylor with a wealthy Park Avenue family at war with itself.

The Los Angeles Times affectionately referred to Freddy Powers as the "Ol Blue Eyes' of Country Music" and wrote that if you were to "ask country superstars Willie Nelson, George Jones or Merle Haggard (they'll)...tell you that he's one of country music's best-kept secrets". The Texas Country Music Hall of Fame inductee has been to the top of the charts as both a producer for Willie Nelson's Grammy-winning LP Over the Rainbow and a songwriter for many of country music legend Merle Haggard's number one hits.

Coleridge Taylor is searching for his next scoop on the police beat. A source sends Taylor down to Alphabet City, where he finds two dead bodies: a punk named Johnny Mort and a cop named Robert Dodd. Each looks too messed up to have killed the other, so Taylor starts asking around. The punk was a good kid, the peace-loving guardian angel of the neighborhood's stray dogs. What led him to mug a woman at gunpoint? And why is officer Samantha Callahan being accused of leaving her partner to die?

In March of 1975, as New York City hurtles toward bankruptcy and the Bronx burns, newsman Coleridge Taylor roams police precincts and ERs. He is looking for the story that will deliver him from obits. A break comes at Bellevue, where Taylor views the body of a homeless teen picked up in the Meatpacking District. Taylor smells a rat: The dead boy looks too clean, and he's wearing a distinctive army field jacket.

On the eve of the US Bicentennial, newsman Coleridge Taylor is covering Operation Sail. New York Harbor is teeming with tall ships from all over the world. While enjoying the spectacle, Taylor is still a police reporter. He wants to cover real stories, and gritty New York City still has plenty of those in July of 1976. One surfaces right in front of him when a housewife is fished out of the harbor wearing bricks of heroin, inferior stuff users have been rejecting for China White.

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. In the wake of Chicago Noir, Twin Cities Noir, and Kansas City Noir - all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series - comes the latest Midwest installment, St. Louis Noir. Masterfully curated by Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest (adapted for film, starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton), this volume will chill the listener with heartland menace.

Masterfully blending history and fiction, Pfarrer tells the story of a young artillery officer, Philip Nolan, who becomes embroiled in Aaron Burr's 1807 conspiracy to invade the territories of the Louisiana Purchase. Insinuating his scheme has official approval, Burr convinces Nolan to carry a coded message into the Orleans Territory. Nolan has no knowledge of the former vice president's intended treason - and Burr has no idea that Thomas Jefferson has discovered his scheme. Soon Philip Nolan is in military custody with Burr, charged as an accessory to the plot.

Since graduating from college with a journalism degree, Phil Cousineau's wanderlust has driven him to visit nearly 100 countries as a backpacker, a documentary filmmaker, a travel writer, a photographer, and an art and literary tour leader. For him, travel provides what his mentor Joseph Campbell called "the key to the realm of the muses".

This gripping journal of a company commander from 2003 to early 2004, written in some of the most dangerous areas of post-Hussein Iraq, discusses tactics, techniques, and procedures as they evolved in the struggle to maintain order and rebuild the country. The journal tells of the dichotomy of combat operations versus nation building. It vividly captures the stresses of combat and corresponding emotions as they accumulate over time in a combat outfit.

US Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel presents his most important public speeches and writings, compiled and presented over eight decades of adventure and public service, woven together with anecdotes of his colorful life as a second-generation American, a soldier, a lawyer, a political activist, and a diplomat. He touches upon themes that resonate as much today as they did when he first encountered them: the impact of heroes and mentors, the tragedy of the Vietnam War, the problems of racism and desegregation in America, and more.

Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case synonymous with "separate but equal", created remarkably little stir when the justices announced their near-unanimous decision on May 18, 1896. Yet it is one of the most compelling and dramatic stories of the 19th century, whose outcome embraced and protected segregation, and whose reverberations are still felt into the 21st. Separate spans a striking range of characters and landscapes, bound together by the defining issue of their time and ours - race and equality.

In Monticello on the Potomac, James B. Conroy, author of the award-winning Lincoln’s White House offers a vivid, highly listenable account of how life was lived in Jefferson’s White House and the young nation’s rustic capital.

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.

In Blood Brother, the first biography about Jonathan Daniels for young adults, Rich Wallace and Sandra Neil Wallace put their investigative reporting skills to the test. They located the teenagers who protested alongside Daniels, unearthed never-before-published private journals, and uncovered the previously unknown roles Jonathan played in major civil rights events. Weaving a fast-paced, heart-pounding account of the danger Daniels faced and the depth of his activism, this is a passionate and inspiring portrait of an unsung freedom fighter whose story must be told.

The first of a series of high-octane spy thrillers, Into the Shadows: The Fever is the story of Michael Brennan, a career CIA non-official-cover intelligence officer, and his quest to identify and disrupt a plot crafted by the Islamic State terror group. After Michael travels to Israel and meets with Israeli intelligence, he partners with Elif Turan, a Mossad agent working in Turkey as a "false flag" along the Syrian border. Together they must use their skills and tradecraft to stop Islamic State's scheme to introduce the deadly Ebola virus into New York City.

David Henry White, a free Black teenage sailor from Lewes, Delaware, was kidnapped by Captain Raphael Semmes of the Confederate raider Alabama on October 9, 1862, from the Philadelphia-based packet ship Tonawanda. In a best-selling postwar memoir, Semmes falsely described White as a contented slave who remained loyal to the Confederacy. In Kidnapped at Sea, archaeologist Andrew Sillen uses a forensic approach to describe White’s enslavement and demise and illustrates how White’s actual life belies the Lost Cause narrative his captors sought to construct.

Martin Duberman, one of the LGBTQ+ community’s maverick thinkers and historians, looks back on ninety years of life, his history in the movement, and what he’s learned. In the early sixties, Martin Duberman published a path-breaking article defending the Abolitionists against the then-standard view of them as “misguided fanatics.” In 1964, his documentary play, In White America, which reread the history of racist oppression in this country, toured the country—most notably during Freedom Summer—and became an international hit.

Tiny creatures lurk in the warm soil of the American South, waiting to attack a human victim. Once they invade through bare skin, the parasites travel deep into the gut of the unsuspecting host, where they suck blood like a vampire. Hookworm takes center stage in YALSA-winner Gail Jarrow’s third book of the Medical Fiascoes series. In this exciting medical mystery, she reveals how a parasite slowly drained the energy and life from millions of southerners. Can early twentieth-century scientists and doctors uncover its secrets, fight back, and cure the victims?

Assemble Artifacts: A short story magazine that assembles a thrilling new mix of stories from genres including horror, science-fiction, comedy, and suspense. Buried at the heart of every story in the magazine is a unique artifact, an object that has inspired our storytellers to create a big idea, an irresistible question, a new immersive world, or a sense of wonder. Includes “Nothing Was Already Here” by April Wolfe, “Labyrinth Loop” by Isabel J. Kim, “Divine” by Michael Griffo, “Dismantle” by Joshua Sky, “The Twelve Gates Barber Shop” by K.T. Jayne, and “Refrain” by Gretchen McNeil.