Showing results by narrator "Geoffrey Blaisdell" in All Categories

What Is Art? is the result of fifteen years’ reflection on the nature and purpose of art. Tolstoy claims that all good art is related to the authentic life of the broader community and that the aesthetic value of a work of art is not independent of its moral content. The book is noteworthy not...

A master of literary naturalism, Dreiser is known for his great intensity and keen journalistic eye as he examines real-life subjects. This powerful novel explores the dynamics of the financial world during the Civil War and after the stock-market panic caused by the Great Chicago Fire. The...

In Venice in 1742, a courtesan tumbles from an opera box. On stage was singer Tito Amato, the only one to see the masked man who pushed Zulietta to her death. Now Tito is asked to help the police with the investigation.

Venice, 1734. Castrato soprano Tito Amato, star of Venice opera, has let fame go to his head. Neglecting his vocal practice for dubious pleasures, Tito finds himself demoted to secondary roles and overshadowed by a visiting singer who usurps his position. But when the murder of scene painter Luca Cavalieri threatens to close the opera house, Tito sees an opportunity to reclaim his status and jumps at the chance to find the killer.

Venice, 1731. Opera is the popular entertainment of the day, and the castrati are its reigning stars. Tito Amato, mutilated as a boy to preserve his enchanting soprano voice, returns to the city of his birth with his friend Felice, a castrato whose voice has failed. Disaster strikes Tito’s opera premier when the singer loses one beloved friend to poison and another to unjust accusation and arrest.

The story begins 30 years after Francis' death, when Father Leo, Francis's closest friend, is dying. Bound to a vow of silence, Leo sends a cryptic message to Conrad, his own favorite student, connecting him with an unlikely companion, 16-year-old Sister Amata. The two begin to search for the truth about St. Francis, a truth that will shake the faith of the masses to the core and bring into question the foundation of the Franciscan Order.

In September 1740, singer Tito Amato is offered the lead role in an opera being staged at an isolated villa in the Italian hills. Puzzled by the air of secrecy that enshrouds the production but attracted by a generous fee, Tito agrees.

Delving deep into the motivations, horrific experiences, and ultimate fates of this Harvard-educated quintet - and by extension, of the brilliant young officer class that left its collegiate and postcollegiate pursuits to enlist in the army and lead America’s rough-and-ready doughboys - Five Lieutenants presents a unique, timeless, and fascinating account of citizen soldiers at war and of the price these extraordinary men paid while earnestly giving all they had in an effort to end "the war to end all wars."

The year is 1961; the setting, Havana. CIA super-secret agent Blackford Oakes has been sent there on a mission, only to find himself in the eye of an international political hurricane. President Kennedy has selected Oakes to meet with Che Guevara inside Castro’s Cuba as part of Operation...

Winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize when it was first published, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The family serves as a metaphor for the old society that crumbled after the Industrial Revolution while a middle-western town...

It’s 1956, and the Cold War is hot. Hungary has just fallen, and Blackford Oakes is back from Budapest, puzzling over a betrayal and mourning a tragedy he couldn’t prevent. But in Washington, as in the Kremlin, all attention is focused on the race to put the first satellite in space...

CIA superspy Blackford Oakes, fresh from his daring exploits at Windsor Castle, has been entrusted with a matter of some delicacy: finding the perfect blue to restore the war-damaged windows of a thirteenth-century German chapel. The owner of the chapel, Axel Wintergrin, is not only an old...

Master of espionage fiction and National Book Award winner William F. Buckley Jr. brings us another in his bestselling series starring the intrepid CIA agent Blackford Oakes. When a shadowy Russian mole threatens to undermine the free world's defenses by infiltrating President Eisenhower's...