Showing results by narrator "Andy Caploe" in All Categories

In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt. The pharaoh’s army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline, as did most of the surrounding civilizations. After centuries of brilliance, the civilized world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over the course of just a few decades. No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No more Trojans, Hittites, or Babylonians.

The definitive account of Louis Armstrong - his life and legacy - during the most creative period of his career. Thomas Brothers picks up where he left off with the acclaimed Louis Armstrong's New Orleans, following the story of the great jazz musician into his most creatively fertile years in the 1920s and early 1930s, when Armstrong created not one but two modern musical styles. Brothers wields tremendous skill in making the connections between history and music accessible to everyone.

A legendary CEO tells the inside story of building the world's largest insurance company - and the dramatic tale of its near-destruction after he left in early 2005, as successors transformed AIG and drove it to the center of the financial crisis of 2008.

Who are the Minutemen? Patriots? Racists? Vigilantes? Harel Shapira lived with the Minutemen and patrolled the border with them, seeking neither to condemn nor praise them, but to understand who they are and what they do. Challenging simplistic depictions of these men as right-wing fanatics with loose triggers, Shapira discovers a group of men who long for community and embrace the principles of civic engagement. Yet these desires and convictions have led them to a troubling place.

A fly-on-the-wall narrative of the Oval Office in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, using JFK’s secret White House tapes. On October 28, 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba. Popular history has marked that day as the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a seminal moment in American history. As President Kennedy’s secretly recorded White House tapes now reveal, the reality was not so simple.

Equus Insanus, son of Aquila, has been missing for three years on his quest to bring the vile Time Criminal to justice. His Roman half brother, Lucius, nephew to Caesar, fears him dead - until he begins receiving strange messages from the lost Lacoti warrior. Then Lucius learns that Equus has been captured by the Time Criminal, who plans to use him as the instrument which will destroy their world. Discovering that the secret to Equus’s salvation may lie in the pyramids of Giza and in the riddle of the Sphynx, Aquila and Lucius set out for Egypt.

Equus Insanus, son of the intrepid Aquila, finds the civilized life of Rome tedious. So he is eager to return to his native land of Terra Novo to assist in the construction of Caesar’s latest fancy - a transprovincial railroad. But on this alternate Earth where the Roman Empire rules America, things seldom go as planned. Soon the project is beset with savage Indian raids and inexplicable disasters…

It is 2050. The USA has just been sold to the highest bidders. Detective Pete Shah is a Memory Association Specialist with the NYPD - he reads the last thoughts of murder victims. When he himself is arrested for murder, though, the secrets he brings to light threaten to bring the city to its knees. No one here gets out alive.

In the sizzling summer of 1871, New York journalist Charles St. Clair is tracking down the story of Lucy Maloney, a “kept woman” found murdered and stuffed in a trunk at the Hudson Railway depot. His search takes him from the mansions of Fifth Avenue to the brothels of SoHo and the seedy and dangerous saloons on Water Street. St. Clair soon uncovers Lucy's connection to a ring of abortionists and to Madame Philippe, a wealthy woman who is known as Madame Killer. St. Clair confronts Madame Philippe at the Tombs Prison, where she awaits the hangman's noose for Lucy's murder.

Finally Jackson Donne has it figured out. After giving up on the private investigation business, he's looking toward the future - one that involves getting married to Kate Ellison. Kate's got him focused on living the good life: planning the wedding, finishing college, and anticipating a romantic Hawaiian honeymoon. Until an anonymous email with a link and an old picture of him on the police force shows up in his mailbox. And once Donne clicks the link, nothing else in his life matters.

In today's terrifying new world, in which small groups of individuals with unlimited resources can wreak incredible havoc and catastrophe, the task of stopping them becomes all the more urgent and compelling. Jon Land's latest topical thriller finds Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea facing just such a threat: an obsessed fanatic plotting nothing less than the total destruction of America.

Even generations later, you can't escape...the evil that men do. Stripped of his private investigator's license and slumming it as a night security guard at a Jersey storage facility, Jackson Donne thinks he's finally hit rock bottom. Then the bottom really falls out: The sister he hasn't seen in years shows up, needing help.

An Argentine playboy races down the darkened alleys of Buenos Aires, a German on his tail. He darts into a steamy tango hall and begs one of the dancers for refuge, but his pursuer is unshakable. The German leaves with the scrap of information that had been destined for the Americans. The playboy was a spy for the Allies, known as Raven.

1945: While liberating a concentration camp, an American medical unit uncovers something beneath a body-laden trench. Sixty years later, the survivors of that unit are systematically murdered because of what they saw. The Present: Enter former Palestinian-American detective Ben Kamal and his Israeli counterpart, Danielle Barnea. Working for the United Nations, Ben and Danielle are forced to return to the Middle East to investigate a massacre in a Palestinian village.

Ben Kamal hasn't investigated a case since his last assignment with Danielle. But missing children in his native West Bank rekindle his interest in his career, reminding him of his own lost children. Danielle Barnea had put her career on hold as well, until a personal tragedy left her with nothing else to turn to. Her first case is the apparently random murder of a Jerusalem shopkeeper who was also one of Israel's earliest war heroes.

American Ben Kamal is a Detroit police detective whose police training makes him valuable to the new Palestinian police force on the West Bank. He's glad to help - but hooking up with the Israelis to find a serial killer was not part of the deal. Danielle Barnea is the best that Shin Bet, Israel's FBI, has to offer, but she, too, resists the assignment. Now Ben and Danielle are forced to leave personal differences behind as they realize that something much more complex than murder is behind the killings.

In the struggle between good and evil, the united forces of good have not consolidated their final victory as the Nine, rulers of hell, form their own empire and plan to invade the world.

Picking America's best presidents is easy. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt usually lead the list. But choosing the nation's worst presidents requires more thought. In Star-Spangled Men, respected presidential biographer Nathan Miller puts on display those leaders who were abject failures as chief executive. With pointed humor and a deft hand, he presents a rogues' gallery of the men who dropped the presidential ball, and sometimes their pants as well.

The photograph in the CIA vault shows four men relaxing in the jungle, green berets draped over their rifles, enjoying a break from combat. On the day after the picture was taken, their friendship was torn apart forever. Now, 10 years after the United States pulled out of Vietnam, the CIA has sent one of the men, Parker, to Thailand to track a troop's movement across the Cambodian border, which is about to explode, luring the Americans back into another disastrous ground war.

From the introduction to Philadelphia Noir: "America's first great city, first capital, and first industrial metropolis contained from the beginning the mix of poor workers and elite culture, of ethnic enclaves and religious intolerance, of easy skullduggery and flesh-pot possibilities, that led Lincoln Steffens in 1903 to famously rule it 'corrupt and contented'."