Showing results by narrator "Malcolm Hillgartner" in All Categories

A society matron's life is threatened after she engineers the theft of her own priceless jewelry to pay off a gambling debt. Only a debonair connoisseur of crime can save her and recover her gems. For a price.

Private investigator Heredia spends his days reading detective novels; commiserating with his cat, Simenon; and peering out over the Mapocho River from his Santiago apartment. The city he loves may be changing, but Heredia can't stop chasing the ghosts of the past. This time, they've come to him...

In April 1871, a group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono O'odham Indians surrounded an Apache village at dawn and murdered nearly 150 men, women, and children in their sleep. In the past century, the attack, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, contemporary newspaper reports, and the participants' own accounts, prizewinning author Karl Jacoby brings this perplexing incident and tumultuous era to life to paint a sweeping panorama of the American Southwest.

One day Ben Gould slips on the ice, hits his head, and is supposed to die. But he doesn’t. Instead, Gould finds himself in a strange situation where he continues to live as if nothing happened. As a result, a ghost that was originally sent to guide Ben to the Afterlife is stuck on earth while its bosses try to figure out what went wrong. The situation catches the attention of various supernatural entities, besides the ghost.

Frederick Kaufman tackles the complex history of money, beginning with the earliest myths and wrapping up with Wall Street’s byzantine present-day doings. Along the way, he exposes a set of allegorical plots, stock characters, and stereotypical metaphors that have long been linked with money and commercial culture, from Melanesian trading rituals to the dogma of Medieval churchmen faced with global commerce, the rationales of Mercantilism and colonial expansion, and the U.S. dollar’s 1971 unpinning from gold.

By turns a family drama and an action-adventure story, The Age of Daredevils chronicles the lives of the men and women who devoted themselves to the extraordinary sport of jumping over Niagara Falls in a barrel - a death-defying gamble that proved a powerful temptation to a hardy few. Internationally known in the 1920s and '30s for their barrel-jumping exploits, the Hills were a father-son team of daredevils who also rescued dozens of misguided thrill seekers and accident victims who followed them into the river.

At a time when the hottest issue in US immigration law is the proposed action by President Obama to protect from deportation as many as five million illegals in the United States, the John Lennon case takes on special relevance, notwithstanding the passage of 40 years since he was placed in deportation proceedings. This is John and Yoko's incredible story, as told by the lawyer who fought in the front lines.

Marty Kihn was the nicest guy in the world, until he got fed up with being passed over for promotions at work, tired of being suckered into walking his neighbor's dog, and sick of being disrespected by the man who sold him his morning coffee. On the day he turned 40, Kihn set out to transform himself from Mr. Nice Guy into a rule-breaking, power-mongering, Fox News-watching asshole.

Lonely, thanklessly courteous, and without the benefit of status, Gordon Schulmeister is only tolerated in his younger, hip, and gentrified Oakland neighborhood. Now, amid the tensions of a pandemic, the cantankerousness of his landlord, and dog sitting an intimidating pit bull, Gordon has never felt the target on his back so acutely. To keep his neighbors off his heels, with some hope and a sigh, Gordon might have to finally speak up.

Seldom does a book come along that speaks to the core issues of life with such clarity and wisdom. This profound book is deeply informed by the spiritual traditions of the West, the Far East, and the Native Americans, with whom the author has worked. It is a small treasure of wisdom about life’s deepest issues.

Toxic Water, Toxic System exposes the consequences of a seemingly anonymous authoritarian state willing to maintain white supremacy at any cost—including poisoning an entire city and shutting off water to thousands of people. Weaving together narratives of frontline activists along with archival data, Michael Mascarenhas provides a powerful exploration of the political alliances and bureaucratic mechanisms that uphold inequality.

This fascinating collection of personal narratives challenges the view that all Germans knew of the crimes perpetrated by the Third Reich and were complicit. The five accounts recall the lives of individuals born in the 1920s who resisted joining the SS, were horrified by atrocities, or otherwise remained true to their principals.

For much of recorded history, people considered the heart to be the most important organ in the body. In cultures around the world, the heart—not the brain—was believed to be the location of intelligence, memory, emotion, and the soul. Over time, views on the purpose of the heart have transformed. Modern medicine and science dismissed what was once the king of the organs as a mere blood pump subservient to the brain, yet the heart remains a potent symbol of love and health and an important part of our cultural iconography.

In 1940, the last patch of resistance to the Nazi war machine was a little strip of beach whose name would soon be famous around the world: Dunkirk. Over 300,000 Allied soldiers crowded into the little harbor. If Hitler destroyed them, Britain would be left defenseless, and the war would almost be over. The British had other ideas. Over the next ten days, the people of Britain launched an unprecedented rescue effort. Countless little ships steamed forth from every port in England to bring the boys back home.

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.

All his life, Viggo Larssen has been haunted by the same troubling dream, which he calls the Omen - a vision of a woman beckoning to him from the surface of a churning sea. Now, as he broods over his shipwrecked existence in a remote lighthouse off the outermost coast of Denmark, he is about to be borne backward by the current to a past he thought he had escaped forever.

Today, millions of Americans are struggling with alcoholism, but millions are also in long-term recovery. Alcoholics Anonymous and a growing number of recovery organizations are providing support for alcoholics who will face the danger of relapse for the rest of their lives. We have finally come to understand alcoholism as a treatable illness rather than a moral failure. Today's advocates can draw inspiration from the victories of sober drunks throughout American history.

What defines Boston? Its history? Its landmarks? Its sports teams and shrines? Perhaps the question should be, who defines Boston? From Henry David Thoreau to Dennis Lehane, Boston has been beloved by many of America's greatest writers, and there is no better group of men and women to capture the heart and soul of the Hub. In Our Boston, editor Andrew Blauner has collected both original and reprinted essays from Boston-area writers past and present, all celebrating the city they love.

From the bestselling author of The Age of Turbulence and Capitalism in America Like all of us, though few so visibly, Alan Greenspan was forced by the financial crisis of 2008 to question some fundamental assumptions about risk management and economic forecasting. No one with any meaningful role...

The Sun and the Moon tells the delightful and surprisingly true story of how a series of articles in the Sun newspaper in 1835 convinced the citizens of New York that the moon was inhabited. Purporting to reveal discoveries of a famous British astronomer, the series described such moon life as unicorns, beavers that walked upright, and four-foot-tall flying man-bats. It quickly became the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era.