Showing results by narrator "Julian Elfer" in All Categories

In the disco days and nights of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, the place to be was Studio 54. Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, and Bianca Jagger were among the nightly assortment of A-list celebrity regulars consorting with New York's young, wild, and beautiful.

In the hallowed halls of Oxford’s Merlin College, the most talented - and highest born - sons of the Kingdom of Britain are taught the intricacies of magickal theory. But what dazzles can also destroy, as Gray Marshall is about to discover.… Gray’s deep talent for magick has won him a place at Merlin College. But when he accompanies four fellow students on a mysterious midnight errand that ends in disaster and death, he is sent away in disgrace - and without a trace of his power.

The Pharmacist of Auschwitz is the little-known story of Victor Capesius, a Bayer pharmaceutical salesman from Romania, who, at the age of 35, joined the Nazi SS in 1943 and quickly became the chief pharmacist at the largest death camp, Auschwitz. Based in part on previously classified documents, Patricia Posner exposes Capesius's reign of terror at the camp, his escape from justice, and how a handful of courageous survivors and a single brave prosecutor finally brought him to trial for murder 20 years after the end of the war.

In one of the most amazing rescues of WWII, the Swedish head of the Red Cross rescued more than 30,000 people from concentration camps in the last three months of the war. Folke Bernadotte did so by negotiating with the enemy - shaking hands with Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo. Time was of the essence, as Hitler had ordered the destruction of all camps and everyone in them.

With Allied armies poised on the banks of the Rhine, Nazi Germany tottered on the brink of collapse. The ensuing battles on German soil - especially those in the so-called Ruhr Pocket - were as fierce and hard-fought as any in the European theater. Going well beyond previous accounts, Derek S. Zumbro chronicles this key military campaign from a unique and fresh perspective - that of the defeated German soldiers and civilians caught in the final maelstrom of the war's Western front.

We speak English today because the Anglo-Saxons took over most of post-Roman Britain. How did that happen? There is little evidence: not much archaeology, and even less written history. There is, however, a huge amount of speculation. King Arthur's Wars brings an entirely new approach to the subject - the answers are out there, in the British countryside, waiting to be found. Months of field work and map study allow us to understand, for the first time, how the Anglo-Saxons conquered England, county by county and decade by decade.

Marlin is not slow or mute; he is a stutterer, and that makes it impossible for him to convince people otherwise. He is also a Rackham: the youngest son of the world-famous explorer Roland Rackham, who is the owner and proprietor of the Zoo at the Edge of the World, a resort where the well to do from all over the world can come to experience the last bit of the wild left in the world at the end of the nineteenth century.

Growing up Jewish in London with a difficult home life, Jonathan Wilson had plenty of reasons to feel he didn't belong, and one reason to feel certain he did: football. Wilson discovered his love for the game as a young boy; through his adolescence and adulthood and well into his later years it remained an important part of his life.

When, on the spur of the moment, Norman Huntley and his friend Henry invent an 83-year-old woman called Miss Hargreaves, they are inspired to post a letter to their new fictional friend. It is only meant to be a silly, harmless game - until Miss Hargreaves arrives on their doorstep. She is, to Norman’s utter disbelief, exactly as he had imagined her: enchanting, eccentric, and endlessly astounding. He hadn’t imagined, however, how much havoc an imaginary octogenarian could wreak on his sleepy Buckinghamshire hometown.

Jomier has reached the age of retirement, his children are grown up and his wife, after having an affair, has left him. Embittered and humiliated, he lives alone in London, mourning the disintegration of his marriage as he broods about the past and the present. When he falls for Judith, things begin to improve. Yet he still cannot escape his old habits and it is only when his daughter falls ill that he begins to reassess his feelings toward those he loves and his ability to forgive.

Dylan Mint has Tourette's. His life is a constant battle to keep the bad stuff in - the swearing, the tics, the howling dog that seems to escape whenever he gets stressed. But a routine visit to the hospital changes everything. Overhearing a hushed conversation between the doctor and his mum, Dylan discovers that he's going to die in March. So he makes a list of things he must do before he dies: First, he wants to have real sex with gorgeous Michelle Malloy; Second, he's got to find his autistic best friend Amir a new best bud; Third, he's got to get his dad back home from the army so they can say goodbye properly.

It is 1919. Elizabeth Whitman is working as a nurse in the local hospital, waiting for her husband to return from war, though he is missing in action, 'presumed dead'. She keeps him alive for their four-year-old son, Jack, by telling the story of a man she calls The Balloonist, who went away in a hot-air balloon and has adventures in exotic countries.

After the war in the Parish, Adam is looking forward to a period of peace, but his superiors have other ideas. There are rumours from Oxford and the Cotswolds that Father John—who once almost overthrew Plymouth—is building an army, and someone has to go and investigate. Arriving in Oxford, Adam is surprised to find a thriving city with a healthy populace and technology not seen since before the fall of The Sisters. He also finds it patrolled by the descendants of the Thames Valley Police, among them Detective Inspector Leonie Mellow.

Opium's Orphans is the first full history of drug prohibition and the "war on drugs." A no-holds-barred but balanced account, it shows that drug suppression was born of historical accident, not rational design. The war on drugs did not originate in Europe or the United States, and even less with President Nixon, but in China. Two Opium Wars followed by Western attempts to atone for them gave birth to an anti-narcotics order that has come to span the globe. But has the war on drugs succeeded? 

There is an African proverb, “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi,” which translates as “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.” This is why we continue to remember the tales of struggle and tales of perseverance, even as we look to tales of hope. What a people choose to remember about their past, the stories they pass down, informs who they are and sets the boundaries of their identity. We remember the pain of our past to mourn, to heal, and to learn. Only in that way can we ensure the same mistakes are not repeated.

In The Most Human Right, Eric Heinze explains why global human rights systems have failed. International organizations constantly report on how governments manage human goods, such as fair trials, humane conditions of detention, healthcare, or housing. But to appease autocratic regimes, experts have ignored the primacy of free speech. Heinze argues that goods become rights only when citizens can claim them publicly and fearlessly: free speech is the fundamental right, without which the very concept of a “right” makes no sense. 

By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland. The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries. The east coast, however, was another story. In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed “Gino”), a twenty-three-year-old British explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious expedition to the east coast of Greenland and into its vast and forbidding interior to set up a permanent meteorological base on the icecap, 8,200 feet above sea level.

In the year 493, the leader of a vast confederation of Gothic warriors, their wives, and children personally cut down Odoacer, the man famous for deposing the last Roman emperor in 476. That leader became Theoderic the Great (454-526). This engaging history of his life and reign immerses listeners in the world of the warrior-king who ushered in decades of peace and stability in Italy as king of Goths and Romans.

During the eighteenth century, Britain's slave trade exploded in size. Formerly a small and geographically constricted business, the trade had, by the eve of the American Revolution, grown into a transatlantic system through which fifty thousand men, women, and children were enslaved every year.

The second I stepped through the doors of Gray Wolf Academy, my world disintegrated. Here, time is malleable. It can be manipulated, shifted. Changed. And for those of us who Trip—or travel through time—the possibilities are infinite and perilous. Now my life is caught in the secrets of everyone around me. Arthur, the eccentric billionaire who rules this school. Killian, who could be the only honest person here…or the biggest liar. And Braxton, magnetic, gorgeous, and unfathomable. The only thing I trust about him is our electric connection.