Showing results by narrator "William Dufris" in All Categories

"You want to borrow a casket?" Funeral director and part-time sheriff Barry Clayton finds United States Junior Chamber (Jaycee) member Archie Donovan’s request absurd, until he learns the casket will be the centerpiece of the Jaycees’ haunted house, a charity event with all proceeds going to the children’s hospital. But when the president of the Jaycees is murdered in the casket on Halloween, the national press descends upon Gainesboro to cover the bizarre crime.

Poetry can sometimes be elusive, the real meaning layered beneath another. In this volume American poets give voice to their nation, their hopes, and their aspirations. Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson are joined by Poe, Holmes, Dunbar, and others to pleasure our ears and minds with a rambling stroll through their works. It doesn’t define America, but it captures her mood and the flavours of her soul in the early days of the American dream.

Oggie Cooder has a talent. He chews and carves pieces of cheese into any shape he wants them to be. This is called charving. Oggie doesn't think his charving is anything special. In fact, most of the kids in his school think it's a little weird. But then a big TV show comes to town, looking for people who have weird talents. Suddenly, Oggie is Mr. Popular...especially with Donnica Perfecto, the girl across the street who wants to be famous, no matter what.

The armored-car robbery went awry, leaving two people dead, one a member of the gang believed responsible for the crime. Walter Bradshaw, 45, who leads an archconservative, antigovernment group of Mormon polygamists, is captured and charged with capital murder and aggravated robbery.

When Jack and Denny Smith decided to build a vacation dream house in Baja, California, they had no idea they were entering a phase of their lives "that would capture the fancy of readers throughout the United States". Through a series of strange and whimsical adventures, they would find that building a house takes God and Mr. Gomez.

Tack Gentry has been away for a year when he returns to the familiar buildings of his uncle John Gentry's G Bar ranch. To his amazement, the ranch has a new owner, who is unimpressed when Tack explains that his uncle was a Quaker, didn't believe in violence, and never carried a gun. His advice to Tack is to make tracks. But Tack has other plans.

In turbulent markets you need to become an investment predator. Investment predators create a plan for capturing their prey (prime investment opportunities) while risk is fairly low, and spit the bones out (sell the investment) before they become prey themselves.

Pounce describes a system that is neither frantic day trading nor passive buy-and-hold investing.

We have released the genie from the bottle: climate change is coming, and there's no stopping it. The question, according to Matthew Kahn, is not how were going to avoid a hotter future but how were going to adapt to it. In Climatopolis, Kahn, one of the worlds foremost experts on the economics of the environment, argues that cities and regions will adapt to rising temperatures over time, slowly transforming our everyday lives.

When a strange little man comes to the Coven Tree Church Social promising he can give people exactly what they ask for, three young believers-in-magic each make a wish that comes true in the most unexpected way.

Gen. George S. Patton Jr. comes to life in this audiobook as one of the most colorful, enigmatic, and unfairly maligned leaders in US military history. Often caricatured - as in the big-screen biopic, Patton - the general was a complex blend of battle-tested strengths and nearly fatal personal flaws. Without varnishing over his shortcomings, Patton: The Pursuit of Destiny shatters myths and builds a compelling case for a deeper appreciation of the man who inspired unsurpassed loyalty and admiration from the soldiers who served under him.

Traitor. Divider. Defender of slavery. This damning portrayal of Robert E. Lee has persisted through 150 years of history books. And yet it has no basis in fact. Weaving forgotten facts and revelations (Lee considered slavery a moral outrage) with striking personal details (for years he carried his weakened mother to and from her carriage), biographer John Perry crafts a compelling treatment of the virtuous warrior who endured withering opposition and sacrificed all to stand for Constitutional freedoms.

The Harbinger is lost, sunk to the bottom of an otherworldly sea. Every soul that ever died and was protected within its hold has been lost along with it. But at least that precious cargo is out of reach of the demon Urcena and her army of soul-devouring monsters. For now. The soul keepers are broken, scattered, and barely clinging to existence without their ship or any way to collect or protect the souls of the newly dead.

After dying in a terrible car accident, Rhett awakens in the afterlife and is recruited to join the crew of the Harbinger, a colossal seafaring vessel tasked with ferrying the souls of the dead. To where exactly, no one knows. But the crew must get the souls there, and along the way protect them from vicious soul-eating monsters that will stop at nothing to take the ship and all of its occupants.

It is the 21st century. Convicts are sentenced to asteroids that move in ever-widening solar orbits, timed to return when their terms run out. But a few ambitious administrators discover that small "errors" in velocity can rid them of selected groups altogether: the hardcore violent, the mentally defective, and especially the political dissidents.

June 1860. A new locomotive christened A Southern Breeze steams across the Carolina countryside carrying seventeen-year-old Jeb Bennett and his twin sister, Rachel Leigh, to the exhilarating promise of a summer in Charleston. While storm clouds gather over the landscape, fiercer storms rage inside the passenger cars. The tensions between North and South rapidly escalate until one traveler’s journey abruptly and brutally ends. Who is the murderer? Was the victim the real target?

The World Cup, which arrives in June, has ripple effects on all of South Africa’s neighbors. The arrival of soccer fans, team owners, sponsors, and world dignitaries makes southern Africa, particularly Botswana, ripe for all sorts of intrigue and illicit activities. The American Secretary of State will visit the Chobe; the North Koreans, the Okavango; Arabs, French, Chinese, and Russians are scattered among the various lodges and hotels in the country before, during, and after the games.

From a distinguished chronicler of American social history and political culture, An Unfinished Season captures the postwar moment of the 1950s when the modern world lay just over the horizon. In a time of rabid anticommunism, worker unrest, and government corruption, even the small-town family could not escape the nationwide suspicion and dread of "the enemy within".

Mainspring is the story of a young clockmaker's apprentice, who is visited by the Archangel Gabriel. He is told that he must take the Key Perilous and rewind the Mainspring of the Earth. It is running down, and disaster to the planet will ensue if it's not rewound. From innocence and ignorance to power and self-knowledge, the young man will make the long and perilous journey to the South Polar Axis, to fulfill the commandment of his God.

Soon after the new Constitution took effect and George Washington became president, the United States was in serious danger. A bitter political rivalry between two men who had once been allies, and two surging issues that inflamed the nation, led to grim talk of breaking up the Republic. Then, a single great evening, arguably the most important dinner party in American history, achieved the compromises that led to America's mighty expansion.

Creativity is often considered an innate gift, not something that can be learned or optimized. In fact, there is an entire branch of science devoted to dissecting, understanding, and stimulating creativity.