Showing results by narrator "Christopher Hurt" in All Categories

One of the 20th century's most challenging novels of ideas, The Fountainhead champions the cause of individualism through the story of a gifted young architect who defies the tyranny of conventional public opinion. The struggle for personal integrity in a world that values conformity above creativity is powerfully illustrated through three characters: Howard Roarke, a genius; Gail Wynand, a newspaper mogul and self-made millionaire; and Dominique Francon, a devastating beauty.

For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.

Professor Kilmer, a renowned historian of war and diplomacy, is collected from his home and whisked off to Washington. Thrust into the highest levels of government as an adviser to the President, the young historian must come to terms with the seemingly impossible, figure out how to navigate a world where not everything is as it appears, and use all the skills and knowledge he has acquired in his life to help save humanity from a conflict of truly epic proportions.

In iLeadership, Jay Elliot gives the listener the opportunity of seeing Steve Jobs as only his closest associates have ever seen him, and to learn what has made him - and the mystique of his management style - capable of creating tools so extraordinary that they have remade three industries and have transformed the way we create, consume, and communicate with each other.

Santa Vittoria is a fictional town, still remote from the rest of war-torn Italy, where the citizens, led by their wine-loving mayor Bombolini, scheme and plot to prevent the Germans from locating and looting the town's only treasure - its fabulous wine cellars. A best seller and the inspiration for the famous film starring Anthony Quinn, this warm, rich novel has already drawn thousands upon thousands into the exuberant and perilous life of Santa Vittoria and its affirmation of the fundamental dignity of man.

Buried deep within the consciousness of Sergeant Raymond Shaw is the mechanism of an assassin, a time bomb ticking toward explosion, controlled by the delicate skill of its Communist masters. Shaw returns from the Korean War to an idolizing and unsuspecting country. What follows is at once a spy story, a love story, and a sobering, yet outrageously funny satire on demagoguery in American politics.

For the past 50 years, popular culture has led us to believe in the left brain vs. right brain theory of personality types. It would be an illuminating theory if it did not have one major drawback: It is simply not supported by science. In contrast, the Top Brain, Bottom Brain theory is based on solid research that has stayed within the confines of labs all over the world—until now.

Howard Hughes lived one of the greatest, most heroic, misunderstood, mysterious, bizarre, and tragic lives in American history. In this brilliantly documented biography, the mythology that surrounded that life is disentangled from the truth.

On Shishmaref Island in Alaska, homes are being washed into the sea. In the South Pacific, small island nations face annihilation by encroaching waters. In coastal Louisiana, an area the size of a football field disappears every day. For these communities, sea level rise isn’t a distant, abstract fear: it’s happening now and it’s threatening their way of life. In The Rising Sea, Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young warn that many other coastal areas may be close behind.

Gregory Lamberson’s well-reviewed first story in his exciting, dark new series The Jake Helman Files (which also includes the second novel, Desperate Souls) is a genre-bender that mixes suspense and horror. When Jake Helman, an elite member of the New York Special Homicide Task Force, faces up against an addiction to cocaine and an elusive serial killer, he finds that the pressure might be too much.

Private investigator Jake Helman has battled a demon, his minions, the walking dead, and beings from the dimensions of the Sphere of Light and the Dark Realm, but now he faces the greatest evil the world has ever known in the third installment of this loosely knit trilogy.

This fourth installment of the Jake Helman Files follows the New York PIon his ongoing quest to save his best friend Edgar Hopkins who’s been transformed into a raven by a powerful witch doctor. In his pursuit through the streets of New Orleans, the nightclubs of Miami, and the jungles of Pavot Island—where undead slaves harvest narcotics for a ferocious dictator named Ernesto Malvado—Jake is joined by beautiful NYPD homicide detective and Edgar’s former partner Maria Vasquez, who is determined to learn Jake’s secrets.

In this incisive new book, Michael Mandelbaum argues that the era marked by an expansive American foreign policy is coming to an end. During the seven decades from the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941 to the present, economic constraints rarely limited what the United States did in the world. Now that will change. The country's soaring deficits, fueled by the huge costs of the financial crash and of its entitlement programs - Social Security and Medicare - will compel a more modest American international presence.

In this action-packed novel, Jake Helmanthe ex-cop and zombie killer has set up shop as a private investigator in lower Manhattan. When a woman hires Jake to prove that her dead grandson is dealing a deadly new drug called Black Magic on a Brooklyn street corner, Jake uncovers a plot by a vicious drug lord to use voodoo to seize the streets of New York City.

Selections include "The Robber Bridegroom" by Washington Irving, "The Stolen White Elephant" by Mark Twain, "Chickamauga" by Ambrose Bierce, "The Mission of Jane" by Edith Wharton, and "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe.

For more than a century before gay marriage became a hot-button political issue, same-sex unions flourished in America. Pairs of men and pairs of women joined together in committed unions, standing by each other "for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health" for periods of 30 or 40 - sometimes as many as 50 - years. In short, they loved and supported each other every bit as much as any husband and wife. In Outlaw Marriages, cultural historian Rodger Streitmatter reveals how some of these unions didn’t merely improve the quality of life for the two people involved but also enriched the American culture.

This is the hilarious story of the American Everyboy. Join the society of such unforgettable characters as the miscievous Tom, kindly Aunt Polly, the heart-stoppingly beautiful Becky Thatcher, the malevolent Injun Joe and a free-spirited young lad by the name of Huckleberry Finn.

In this classic 19th century comedy of manners, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrief masquerade under the name of Earnest in order to win the love of Gwendolyn and Cecily. But first they must match wits with the inimitable Lady Bracknell!

The year is 1964. Faced with a hard-hitting presidential campaign and a deteriorating situation in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson dispatches Oakes and a swashbuckling soldier of fortune named Tucker on secret missions to Southeast Asia. Tucker is to figure out how to interdict military traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Who are the Kennedys? Are they the brilliant, heroic, extraordinary people their admirers believe them to be? Or are they arrogant, competitive, self-absorbed children of a willful and immensely rich patriarch, as their detractors claim? In fact, they are all of these things, and more.