Showing results by narrator "Jim Meskimen" in All Categories

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.

By the best-selling author of Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll and Last Train the Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, this dazzling new book of profiles is a culmination of Peter Guralnick’s remarkable work, which from the start has encompassed the full sweep of blues, gospel, country, and rock 'n' roll.

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.

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.

Moss Hart's Act One, which Lincoln Center Theater presented in 2014 as a play written and directed by James Lapine, is one of the greatest American memoirs - a glorious memorial to a bygone age filled with all the wonder, drama, and heartbreak that surrounded Broadway in the early 20th century.

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.

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.

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.

In the sequel to his best-selling World Made by Hand, James Howard Kunstler expands on his vision of a post-oil society with a new novel about an America in which the electricity has flickered off, the Internet is a distant memory, and the government is little more than a rumor. In the tiny hamlet of Union Grove, New York, travel is horse-drawn and farming is back at the center of life. But it’s no pastoral haven.

Joe Sharkey knows he is passed his prime. Now in his 60s, the younger surfers around the breaks on the north shore of Oahu still revere him as the once-legendary 'Shark', but his sponsors have moved on and Joe wonders what new future awaits him on the horizon. Uninterrupted quality time with the ocean, he hopes. Life has other plans. When he accidentally hits and kills a man near Waimea while drunk-driving, he fears he will never rebound. Under the direction of his stubbornly loyal girlfriend Olive, he throws himself into uncovering his victim's story.

Lynn glared at Ryan Mitchell and wanted to smack his smug face. Even though Ryan meant to insult him, Lynn knew that there was a very good chance that what he said was right. He’d suspected for years now that Dylan Evans wasn’t his real father. It didn’t take a math wizard to figure out that he’d been born nine months after his mother had been rescued from Fort Benton. 

As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages - of hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted, so-called “cozy” murders in Britain - the legacy of Sherlock Holmes, with his fierce devotion to science and logic, gave way to street smarts on the one hand and social insight on the other, but even though these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required intelligence and clear-sightedness as characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured here.

Heck Martin battled Indians, bandits, and grizzly bears to make his valley the gem of the frontier. He overcame big obstacles to buy the land, build a town, and bring in a herd of longhorns. Now, ruthless San Francisco gold baron Percival Dumay threatens everything Heck worked so hard to accomplish. With the help of crooked politicians and an army of tough prospectors, he aims to take Heck's gold, his land, and his life. This time, Dumay is fighting dirty against the wrong man.

Ten years after an attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, cries of "Benghazi!" still echo across America. But instead of a landmark event to be taken seriously, it has become a punchline, an empty word, or a code for controversy and political theatre. In this thrilling retelling, Ethan Chorin reveals Benghazi as a watershed moment in American history, one that helped create the world America lives in today: polarized, fearful, and dangerously unstable.

Gabriel Du Pré, the old Montana fiddler at the center of Peter Bowen's atmospheric, engrossing series set in the dirty, dusty Montana that's rarely featured in travel brochures, has a knack for finding trouble. Or rather, trouble has a knack for finding him. There's a rumor going around that Du Pré and his old sorceror friend Benetsee have come across a parcel containing the lost journals of Lewis and Clark, and outsiders, drawn by the spirit of the legendary explorers, are beginning to invade Toussaint.

When a hunted military whistleblower and his family need someplace to hide and someone to trust, Toussaint, Montana, is the place, and Gabriel Du Pre the man. The Metis Indian former cattle inspector and sometimes deputy is happy to offer protection, even though he's got his hands full with an ailing granddaughter, a meddling medicine man, and a Kazakh eagle hunter prowling the hills above town. As a guard at a Kabul prison, Hoyt Poe witnessed his fellow soldiers abusing the Afghan inmates. Poe's testimony threatens to expose the military contractor that led the interrogation program.

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. 

Howard Bloom - called “the greatest press agent that rock and roll has ever known” by Derek Sutton, the former manager of Styx, Ten Years After, and Jethro Tull - is a science nerd who knew nothing about popular music. But he founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry and helped build or sustain the careers of our biggest rock legends, including Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Chaka Khan, and 100 more. What was he after? He was on a hunt for the gods inside of you and me.

When Mark McDonough was a teen, a catastrophic fire claimed the lives of his mother and younger brother. It also left Mark with burns on over 65 percent of his body. During a long and painful recovery, his faltering faith in God was strengthened by a remarkable near-death experience. Inspired to pursue a career as a plastic surgeon to help those who suffer as he has, McDonough has overcome numerous other adversities on his journey, including addiction and a stroke.

Crystal meth, brushfires, and a murderer on the loose threaten Du Pré’s tranquil Montana town. Drought has come to Toussaint, Montana, and appendicitis has stricken the Mtis Indian tracker and investigator Gabriel Du Pré. His appendix is bad enough, but what really hurts is being trapped in the hospital when he learns that Maddy Collins has been killed. As far as Du Pré knows, no one in town had cause to dislike the harmless old coot, much less bash her head in with a cast-iron hatchet. When the doctors release him, he goes looking for answers.