Showing results by narrator "C. James Moore" in All Categories

It is 1934. Red-headed Henry Cook, fresh out of Amherst and excited about working on his first book at an infamous writers' colony, arrives at the Vermont island retreat at the invitation of its owner, Thaddeus Hulbert, a boisterous, bellowing, bloviated curmudgeon, whose reputation as a novelist, columnist, and radio commentator has vaulted him to national prominence.

The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 novel, introduced Fitzgerald fans to 22-year-old Gloria Gilbert, a drop-dead gorgeous, selfish, gumdrop-addicted beauty from Kansas City, and 25-year-old Anthony Patch, a handsome, heir-to-a-fortune, careless, spoiled Harvard graduate and New York bon vivant. The novel opens in 1913, a time of flappers, jazz clubs, silent movies, and, for those who could afford it, a 24/7 world of parties, booze, and social extravagances.

How could things have gone so badly wrong? Writing with customary calmness and clarity, and drawing on unrivaled experience as a reporter in the region, Cockburn analyzes the unfolding of one of the West's greatest foreign policy debacles and the rise of the new jihadis.

"Pillar of Fire", a great Ray Bradbury short story, is one of those horror tales that is guaranteed to raise goosebumps at every step of the bizarre way...from the graveyard to, well, a golden box launched into forever.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is more than one of America's most-read, taught, and debated novels. Gatsby represents a paradigm shift in the novel form, a deep dive into the intimacies of the dark and selfish aspects of human nature. The novel is an over-the-top display of the Jazz Age as seen through the eyes of a staid and - by his own account - honest Midwestern man, Nick Carraway.

As tense, short story Westerns go, W.C. Tuttle's "Spawn of the Desert", set in the 1850s rugged Southwest mountains, is a splendid, fast-paced example of the classic genre of tales of gold and silver mining towns run by ruthless men, and inhabited by an eclectic population of miners, gamblers, gunmen, drunks, hardscrabble women, and the obligatory "colorful" characters. Tuttle (1883-1969) was one of the most prolific Western writers of his day, with more than 40 novels and short stories to his credit.

The Russians were playing Donald Trump and his allies long before the 2016 election - and continue to do so to this day. That much, and more, is made clear in this masterfully narrated audiobook.

"On the Duty of Civil Disobedience", published by Henry David Thoreau in 1849, speaks eloquently and personally about one man's desire to live a peaceful, government-free life. In this short essay, Thoreau lays out his philosophy best summed up by the author as, "That government governs best that does not govern at all." Thoreau takes on the key issues of his day: slavery and the Mexican war.

Old Judge Anderson feared the inevitable - he was to be replaced by a Cyber, a lightning-fast, softly-speaking machine that deals out decisions from its cyber-bench free of human errors and motions. The District Attorney has a surprise up his sleeve for the Judge, a case against a man who claims he can outwit any Cyber, and is willing to prove it in Judge Anderson's court room. As the trial gets underway, Judge Anderson must come to grips with a future he wishes would just go away. What would his judicial and ethical hero, Justice Holmes, think?

Released not long after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, in the run-up to the 1964 national election, Eugene Burdick's blockbuster political novel, The 480, foresaw the rise of social media and 21st century analytical data manipulation, the use of computer-generated voter profiles to shape-for better or for worse - the outcome of a major national election. Burdick - coauthor of The Ugly American and Fail-Safe - was a true socio-political visionary, ahead of his time by more than half a century.

From Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address in 1861 to his brief remarks on the Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, battlefield in 1863 to his Second Inaugural Address given in 1865, America's 16th president, in three key speeches, defined the course of the nation's entry into, through, and out of the Civil War. These three speeches tell the story of a nation's stubborn reluctance to face peacefully the challenge of slavery, disunion, and war among the states.

Kenneth Grahame's 1898 children's story, "The Reluctant Dragon" (read here in its abridged version), is a lovely fable about a small boy's efforts to save the life of a large, lazy (self-professed), and droll blue-scaled dragon who prefers poetry to rampaging. Having taken up residence in a cave overlooking the beautiful English countryside, the dragon must contend with a challenge to fight none other than St. George, called by local villagers to slay the beast.

In the rip-roaring, true saga of the Comstock Lode, Dennis Drabelle skillfully brings to life silver-mining in the late-nineteenth-century American West. The immense wealth extracted from the Lode spurred the growth of San Francisco, and Virginia City, the hell-raising town that sprang up above the mines, was the inspiration for the TV series Bonanza.

Written first as a series of stories in the late 19th century and published later as the quintessential Western novel in the early years of the 20th century, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains by Owen Wister contains elements of breathtaking adventure, courage, grit, conflict, humor, and heartfelt emotions that continue to resonate in the 21st century.

By the end of the 21st century, a deep-state human-systems organization, the Psychotechnic Institute, has begun melding neuroscience and psychoanalytics to create the foundation for generations of more peaceful, more powerful, more "sensitive" human beings. In Poul Anderson's 1954 science-fiction thriller, The Sensitive Man, one such human, Simon Dalgetty, is on the trail of brutal men who kidnapped Michael Tighe, keeper of the keys to the Institute's secrets, and, thus, to the fate of world order.

In this compact audiobook, David L. Holmes offers a clear, concise and illuminating look at the spiritual beliefs of our founding fathers. He begins with an informative account of the religious culture of the late colonial era, surveying the religious groups in each colony. In particular, he sheds light on the various forms of deism that flourished in America, highlighting the profound influence this intellectual movement had on the founding generation.

When Ben Hewitt met Erik Gillard, he was amazed. Here was a real-life rebel living happily and comfortably in small-town Vermont on less than $10,000 per year. Gillard's no bum. He has a job, a girlfriend, good friends, and strong ties to the community. But how he lives his life - and why - launches Hewitt on a quest to understand the true role of money and mindless consumerism in our lives. By meeting and befriending people like Erik Gillard, Hewitt realized that their happiness was real. What was he - and the rest of a deeply unhappy population - missing?

Tales of the Jazz Age is a delightful, sobering, thought-provoking, and downright curious collection of 11 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories, published after his first two novels - This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922) - but before The Great Gatsby (1925).

In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives us Amory Blaine, who, from boyhood through his early 20s, is on a quest for his identity, his philosophy, and his sense of place in a world never quite his own, a world in which he moves with barely concealed ego-fueled disgust and contempt. Fitzgerald's breakthrough novel, written in 1920 when the author was 23, manages to be both a thinly veiled autobiography and a sincere attempt by Fitzgerald to get into the head of the young, privileged personages of his time.

Here, political scientist Jakub J. Grygiel brings to light the importance of incorporating geography into grand strategy. He argues that states can increase and maintain their position of power by pursuing a geostrategy that focuses on control of resources and lines of communication.