Showing results by narrator "Traber Burns" in All Categories

In The Last of All Possible Worlds, royalty, bankers, lovers, and wives intertwine to create a vivid portrait of Europe in the early 1900s. We meet wise and worldly Prince Sobieski, Vienna's ambassador in London, his enchanting wife, her English lover, and her enigmatic lifelong companion, Josefa. When Sobieski's illegitimate daughter makes a demand of her influential father, the unspoken rules of the family are challenged.

Captured by History is an autobiography like none other, for few historians have interviewed as many men and women who helped shape the most momentous events of our century than John Toland. Here, for the first time, Toland reveals how he found these key players and how he persuaded them to talk to him. From disgraced Japanese generals to the German doctor who nearly succeeded in assassinating Hitler, Toland’s sources are remarkable for what they reveal about their subjects, along with the secrets and stories they would tell no one else. 

A documentary drawn from testimony at the Coast Guard’s official inquiry looks anew at one of the most storied, and mysterious, shipwrecks in American history. The sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald is one of the most famous shipwreck stories in Great Lakes history. It is also one of maritime lore’s great mysteries, the details of its disappearance as obscure now as on that fateful November day in 1975.

Amanda Baron died in a boating accident on the Ohio River in 1953. Or did she? While it was generally accepted that she had died when a coal barge rammed the pleasure boat she was sharing with her lover, her body was never found. Travis Baron was an infant when his mother disappeared. After the accident and the subsequent publicity, Travis’ father scoured the house of all evidence that Amanda Baron had ever lived, and her name was never to be uttered around him. Now in high school, Travis yearns to know more about his mother.

Hugh McVey is an inventor who moves from Missouri to Bidwell, Ohio. He creates a mechanical cabbage planter to ease the workload of farmers, but an investor exploits his product. His next invention, a corn cutter, makes him a fortune and transforms the small town in Ohio into a center of manufacturing. McVey, lonely and ruminative, meets Clara Butterworth, who attends Ohio State.

One of the most important and objective firsthand accounts of the Civil War. Unlike some other Confederate memoirists, General Edward Porter Alexander objectively evaluated and criticized prominent Confederate officers, including Robert E. Lee. The result is a clear-eyed assessment of the bloody conflict that divided but subsequently united the nation.

The grandson of a US senator has been brazenly kidnapped out of a hotel room in St. Louis. His life has been threatened if the senator cannot raise the ransom money, an exorbitant amount that even he can’t scrape together. Ultimately, the boy’s fate falls into the hands of a select group of undercover agents known for their discretion, cleverness, and bravery - the Pinkertons. When Allan Pinkerton realizes the confidential nature of the kidnapping, he calls in his best field agents, a group of five professionals with specialized skills and unconventional backgrounds.

In Entrapment and Other Writings - containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays - Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon, despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure. 

This timely new book, edited by celebrated scholar Daniel C. Esty, offers fresh thinking and forward-looking solutions from environmental thought leaders across the political spectrum. The book’s 40 essays cover such subjects as ecology, environmental justice, Big Data, public health, and climate change, all with an emphasis on sustainability. This book focuses on moving toward sustainability through actionable, bipartisan approaches based on rigorous analytical research. 

A young US Marine officer recounts his experiences of the Vietnam War over a 19-month period. He graphically describes what it was like to perform three distinct combat missions: long-range ground reconnaissance in the Annamite Mountains of I Corps, infantry operations in the rice paddies and mountains of Quang Nam Province, and special police operations for the CIA in Tay Ninh province. Using official Marine Corps unit histories, CIA documents, and his weekly letters home, the author relies almost exclusively on primary sources in providing an accurate and honest account.

 James Marsh's Four Years in the Rockies gives brilliant insight into the life of Isaac P. Rose, a man who forged his own path in the wilderness of the far west. This thrilling account of one mountain man's life at the height of the 19th-century fur industry follows Rose as he overcomes adversity, learns from those around him, and becomes one of the most successful trappers of the Rockies. Four Years in the Rockies is essential listening for anyone interested in the 19th-century fur trade and the adventurers who risked their lives to be part of it.

Town of Twenty Triggers opens this new trio of short novels by Les Savage Jr., marking their first appearance in book form. He was known only as the Joker, a portly, chuckling man with a bland smile, a poker face, and an amazing ability to make a deck of cards perform any trick he desired. His traveling companion is Emmet Pierce, a Texan fast with his gun. When this duo arrives in the small ranching town of Benton, the Joker is ready to take it over and claim it for his own.

With Mental Health, Inc., award-winning investigative journalist Art Levine delivers a Shock Doctrine-style exposé of the failures of our out-of-control, profits-driven mental health system, with a special emphasis on the failures of the pharmaceuticals industry, including the treatment of children with antipsychotics and disastrous PTSD protocols for veterans.

Seventeen-year-old Silver King dreams of becoming a working cowboy. His mother, however, has pushed him to be a baseball player - and King certainly has the arm to be a star pitcher. When the National League forms a team in Kansas City in 1886, both mother and son get their wishes.

They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. But it’s hard to know what’s going on inside the twisted mind of Magnus Lamb, the charismatic leader of an isolated logging town known for its healing hot springs. Some might say he’s created a peaceful utopia here on Gunmetal Mountain. But for Cleveland Trewe and his lovely traveling companion Berry, this little piece of heaven is more like hell on Earth. Cleve and Berry first discover the town after an encounter with a dangerous band of Indians. Cleve vows to find “the Coyote,” a young brave last seen headed for Lambsville.

Michael Tougias and Adam Gamble had good lives: married with two children each, nice homes in the suburbs, jobs that paid the bills, and frequent fishing trips out on the ocean. But those comfortable lives had cracks in them and soon they found themselves hit by a rogue wave of divorce, financial hardship, addiction, and career upheaval. What kept them going—and helped them navigate the rough waters of middle age—was fishing and friendship.

J-Bee, son of a military officer, is raised in a violent milieu during the 1960s. After his little brother is persecuted by bullies, J-Bee commits a retaliatory act of brutality, the nature of which scars him. When his best friend, Gilly, volunteers to fight in Vietnam, J-Bee - repulsed by his own violence - refuses to follow either his father or Gilly into the military. Instead, he matriculates at Columbia in 1971, an era of counterculture, drugs, sex, and rock ’n roll, in order to seek his redemption.

New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was a writer with a poet’s economy of style and trencherman’s appetites and ribald humor. In The Search for the Genuine, a collection of new and previously published essays, the giant of letters muses on everything from grouse hunting and fishing to Zen Buddhism and matters of the spirit, including reported pieces on Yellowstone and shark-tagging in the open ocean, commentary on writers from Bukowski to Neruda to Peter Matthiessen, and a heartbreaking essay on life on the US/Mexico border.

James Still left eastern Kentucky for Europe in 1941 after enlisting in the US Army during World War II, leaving behind a recently published, semi-autobiographical work of fiction, On Troublesome Creek. Even as he developed a broader worldview, his work continued to draw from the agrarian and regional sources of life in the Cumberland Plateau that supported the American war effort. Like the riverbeds and creeks he so often evoked, Still reminds listeners of the local and regional founts that they were fighting for in the century’s second global war.

Shortly after her brother, Stormy, is convicted of the brutal murder of a classmate, seventeen-year-old Lizzy Greiner is found dead in an abandoned mountain shack, the result of an apparent suicide by fire. Next to Lizzy’s charred body, investigators find several of her journals, safely stored inside a fireproof box. It soon becomes evident that these journals contain a narrative that Lizzy wanted the police to read, the truth that she wanted them to know.