Showing results by narrator "David de Vries" in All Categories

This is not your typical afternoon at the library. It's Family Fun Day, and a magical man with a big hat has suddenly appeared. A crowd gathers to see what kinds of tricks this surprise visitor will perform. That's when the Magician pulls off his favorite trick of all. He invites kids to reach into his hat to pull out whatever they find when they dig down deep. Soon - poof! - each child comes away with something better than they could've imagined - a book that helps them become whatever they want to be, and makes their dreams come true through words and the adventures that follow.

The story of an Olympic wrestler allegedly murdered by the wealthy heir to the Du Pont fortune, Blood Money takes listeners inside the bizarre world of a multi-millionaire, and lays bare the brutal shooting and tense police siege that riveted the nation. 

Five years ago, bioengineer Peter Bernhardt spearheaded an innovation in nanotechnology that changed the course of evolution. Until everything was taken from him - his research, the people he loved, and finally his life. Uploaded as an artificial intelligence, Peter is alive again thanks to a critical reactivation by fellow AI Carter Potsdam. But a third sentient computer program, Major Tom, is tearing the United States apart, destroying its leaders and its cities. Major Tom’s mission: rebuild a new America from the ruins and reign as uncontested monarch.

The dramatic and tragic story of the only successful Native American uprising against the Spanish, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. 

When former computer-crimes prosecutor Chris Bruen and retired hacktivist Zoey Doucet open their San Francisco law firm, it's the best day of their professional lives. That is, until their first client walks through the door. Ian Ayres is an "ethical hacker" who was hired by a company to test the security of its online systems. On the job, he uncovered some highly classified information: the existence of a top-secret government surveillance agency and its Skeleton Key, a program that can break any form of encryption.

When a ten-year-old girl's mutilated body is found in a public park in Paris, chief of police Nico Sirsky takes action. But his elite team of homicide detectives isn't on the case for even twenty-four hours before a second child is found murdered and left to rot inside a middle-school classroom. With the City of Light on edge awaiting another gruesome discovery, the clock starts ticking for Sirsky to catch the elusive killer who calls himself the gamemaster.

Dr. Felix Hoffmann is about to head home after a grueling night shift when he hears the words, “This gun is loaded!” Hoffmann, long accustomed to helping others on the verge of death, suddenly finds himself - along with several colleagues and patients - at the mercy of a deranged, blind kidnapper in the ICU.

It's been 101 days since Felix Hoffmann's girlfriend, Celine, left Berlin in a humanitarian convoy carrying aid to Kurdish northern Iraq. Now her coffin returns home. With the Iraq War all but begun, the story coming from Baghdad is that the young woman orchestrated the very bomb attack that killed her. But a devastated Felix, doctor at South Berlin Hospital, cannot believe that Celine would willingly participate in such an act, and certain clues - as well as questioning from German, Iraqi, and American agencies - raise the good doctor's suspicions.

From television shows to the manosphere, and from alt-right communities to fatherhood forums, debates about masculinity have come to dominate the media landscape. This growing cultural tension around masculinities has been discussed and analyzed both for general audiences and in burgeoning academic scholarship. What has been typically overlooked, however, is the role that language plays in these mediated performances of masculinity. In Language and Mediated Masculinities, Robert Lawson draws on data to explore language and masculinities across a range of media contexts.

From the war-shattered jungles of Vietnam to America’s burning cities, near-death in Tibet, peace marches, the battle of Hué and the battle of the Pentagon, wild drugs, rock concerts, free love, CIA coups in Indonesia and Greece, the Six Days’ War, and Bobby Kennedy’s last campaign, Freedom puts you in the Sixties as if it were now. Mick leaves for the Himalayas while Troy heads to Vietnam with the Marines. Daisy starts her PhD in brain research, and Tara battles heroin as her rock band reaches stardom.

Useful for academic and recreational archaeologists alike, this book identifies and describes more than 200 projectile points and stone tools used by prehistoric Native American Indians in Texas. The authors also demonstrate how factors such as environment, locale, and type of artifact combine to produce a portrait of theses ancient cultures.

Coming of age is never easy. Coming of age in the 1960s was extraordinary. It was a decade that transformed America. After the post-World War II dreams of a healing nation, the '60s shook America to its foundation - the assassination of an idealistic young president, a tragic and unpopular war, a battle for civil rights, a cosmic clash of riots and burning cities, and an explosion of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

On September 1, 2004, three middle-aged buddies set out on one of the last geographic challenges never before attempted in North America: to hike the Comb Ridge in one continuous push. The Comb is an upthrust ridge of sandstone-virtually a mini-mountain range-that stretches almost unbroken for a hundred miles from just east of Kayenta, Arizona, to some ten miles west of Blanding, Utah. To hike the Comb is to run a gauntlet of up-and-down severities, with the precipice lurking on one hand, the fiendishly convoluted bedrock slab on the other-always at a sideways, ankle-wrenching pitch.

The incredible, untold story of the WWII vets who overthrew their corrupt hometown government - the only successful armed rebellion on US soil since the War of Independence.

This book examines the complexities of life for African Americans in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Although the Valley was a site of fierce conflicts during the Civil War and its military activity has been extensively studied, scholars have largely ignored the Black experience in the region until now.

By the early 1970s, practically everyone under a certain age liked rock music, but not everyone liked it for the same reasons. We typically associate the sounds of classic rock 'n' roll with youthful rebellion by juvenile delinquents, student demonstrators, idealistic hippies, or irreverent punks. But in this insightful and timely book, author George Case shows how an important strain of rock music from the late 1960s onward spoke to and represented an idealized self-portrait of a very different audience.

After the performance of a lifetime at the sold-out Stade de France, comic Édouard Bresson decides to vanish. Très drôle. His estranged son Arthur isn’t laughing. Édouard has sent him a letter and instructions to a puzzle - a treasure hunt for the son he ignored and misses and loves. If Arthur is willing to find out everything there is to know about his father and to understand the choices he made, all he has to do is put the pieces together. As the trail of clues winds its way through the past, what unfolds is a surprising journey of forgiveness, family, and self-discovery.

On the storm-swollen Aisne in northeastern France, an alcoholic actor combats both his demons and nature’s tempests. Along the Main and Rhine in Germany, a kindhearted logger has but one wish: to travel with the lumber from his small Franconian hometown to the end of the river in the Netherlands, where it feeds into the majestic North Sea. In a bucolic vale in the French region of Brittany, two families, divided by religion and an unnamed stream, sustain a centuries-old feud, their resolve no match for the constantly shifting flow of water.

David Portland works security for America’s British Embassy in London. His life is upended when his son Trevor dies mysteriously in Nigeria, while employed by a suspicious security/mercenary company known as SureSafe. One night, Portland sees a man in a bar wearing a bracelet - a family heirloom, which he had given his son - and attacks the man. 

Here, a girl is not supposed to be a woodcutter. Or be brave enough to walk alone. Here, a wolf is not supposed to love to read. Or be curious enough to meet a human. And here, a story is nothing like the ones you read in books, for the witch can make the most startling tales come alive. All she needs is a girl from the village, a wolf from the forest, and a woodcutter with a nice, sharp axe. So take care, little lambs, if you step into these woods. For in the Puszcza, it is always as dark as the hour between night and dawn - the time old folk call the Wolf Hour.