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Audiobooks Narrated by Michael Prichard
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"Don't miss the star-studded mini series adaptation of A Man in Full-coming soon to Netflix.
Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble.
The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife--and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon--the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums--is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight.
Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports--Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist.
Praise for A Man in Full:
'A masterpiece.' --The Wall Street Journal
'The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written--not merely by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist. . . . The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting.' --The New York Times Book Review"
"From the #1 bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat and Facing the Mountain comes an unforgettable epic of family, tragedy, and survival on the American frontier
“An ideal pairing of talent and material.… Engrossing.… A deft and ambitious storyteller.” — Mary Roach, New York Times Book Review
In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of pioneers led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. In early December, starving and desperate, Sarah and fourteen others set out for California on snowshoes, and, over the next thirty-two days, endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors.
In this gripping narrative, New York Times bestselling author Daniel James Brown sheds new light on one of the most legendary events in American history. Following every painful footstep of Sarah’s journey with the Donner Party, Brown produces a tale both spellbinding and richly informative."
"Why Architecture Matters is not a work of architectural history or a guide to styles or an architectural dictionary, though it contains elements of all three. The purpose of Why Architecture Matters is to 'come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually' — with its impact on our lives.
'Architecture begins to matter,' writes Paul Goldberger, 'when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads.' He shows us how that works in examples ranging from a small Cape Cod cottage to the 'vast, flowing' Prairie houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, from the Lincoln Memorial to the highly sculptural Guggenheim Bilbao and the Church of Sant'Ivo in Rome, where 'simple geometries... create a work of architecture that embraces the deepest complexities of human imagination.'
Based on decades of looking at buildings and thinking about how we experience them, the distinguished critic raises our awareness of fundamental things like proportion, scale, space, texture, materials, shapes, light, and memory. Upon completing this remarkable architectural journey, listeners will enjoy a wonderfully rewarding new way of seeing and experiencing every aspect of the built world.
The book is published by Yale University Press."
"Don DeLillo's extraordinary Libra is a brilliant reimagining of the events and people surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Shots ring out. A president dies. And a nation is plunged into psychosis . . .
Concentrating on the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald, some rogue former spooks unhappy with Kennedy's presidency, and Nicholas Branch, a CIA archivist, trying to make sense of or draw inferences from the mass of information after the assassination, Libra presents an apologetically provocative picture of America in the second half of the last century."
"Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, Mao II is the work of an ingenious writer at the height of his powers.
Bill Gray, a famous, reclusive novelist, emerges from his isolation when he becomes the key figure in an event staged to force the release of a poet hostage in Beirut.
As Bill enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms, Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover – and Bill's.
An extraordinary novel from Don DeLillo about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist, Mao II explores a world in which the novelist's power to influence the inner life of a culture now belongs to bomb-makers and gunmen."
"Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. This is the story of his absurd life; a life that is going well enough, until a chemical spill from a rail car releases an 'Airborne Toxic Event' and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear – his own mortality.
White Noise is an effortless combination of social satire and metaphysical dilemma in which Don DeLillo exposes our rampant consumerism, media saturation and novelty intellectualism. It captures the particular strangeness of life lived when the fear of death cannot be denied, repressed or obscured and ponders the role of the family in a time when the very meaning of our existence is under threat.
'America's greatest living writer.' - Observer"
"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times
From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin's Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. Remnick takes us through the tumultuous 75-year period of Communist rule leading up to the collapse and gives us the voices of those who lived through it, from democratic activists to Party members, from anti-Semites to Holocaust survivors, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Sakharov. An extraordinary history of an empire undone, Lenin's Tomb stands as essential reading for our times.
"
"In this disturbing exposé, journalist Paul L. Williams describes a secret alliance forged at the close of World War II by the CIA, the Sicilian and U.S. mafias, and the Vatican to thwart the possibility of a Communist invasion of Europe. Williams presents evidence suggesting the existence, in many European countries, of 'stay-behind' units consisting of five thousand to fifteen thousand military operatives. The initial funding for these guerrilla armies came from bogus British bank notes and the sale of large stocks of SS morphine that had been smuggled out of Germany and Italy. As the Cold War intensified, the units were used not only to ward off possible invaders but also to thwart the rise of left-wing movements in South America and NATO-based countries by terror attacks.
Williams argues that Operation Gladio soon gave rise to the toppling of governments, wholesale genocide, the formation of death squads, financial scandals on a grand scale, the creation of the mujahideen, an international narcotics network, and, most recently, the ascendancy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit cleric with strong ties to Operation Condor (an outgrowth of Gladio in Argentina) as Pope Francis I."
"Dazzling in its originality, Rites of Spring probes the origins, impact, and aftermath of World War I, from the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the death of Hitler in 1945. 'The Great War,' as Modris Eksteins writes, 'was the psychological turning point . . . for modernism as a whole. The urge to create and the urge to destroy had changed places.'
Eksteins goes on to chart the seismic shifts in human consciousness brought about by this great cataclysm through the lives and words of ordinary people, works of literature, and such events as Lindbergh's transatlantic flight and the publication of the first modern bestseller, All Quiet on the Western Front.
Rites of Spring is a remarkable and rare work, a cultural history that redefines the way we look at our past and toward our future."
"The Crimea was one of the crucibles of the war on the Eastern Front, where first a Soviet and then a German army were surrounded, fought desperate battles, and were eventually destroyed. The fighting in the region was unusual for the Eastern Front in many ways, in that naval supply, amphibious landings, and naval evacuation played major roles, while both sides were also conducting ethnic cleansing as part of their strategy—the Germans eliminating the Jews and the Soviets purging the region of Tartars.
From 1941, when the Soviets first created the Sevastopol fortified region, the Crimea was a focal point of the war in the East. German forces under the noted commander Manstein conquered the area in 1941–42, which was followed by two years of brutal colonization and occupation before the Soviet counteroffensive in 1944 destroyed the German 17th Army."
"Authoritative, yet written in a highly readable narrative style, South Pacific Cauldron is the first complete history embracing all land, sea, and air operations in the Pacific War. Unlike most other World War II accounts, this work covers the South Pacific operations in detail. The book includes many now-forgotten operations that deserve to be well remembered. Significantly, the official Australian history of World War II correctly observed that Australia's part in the Pacific war is barely mentioned in American histories. This volume finally brings the major Australian contribution to the fore.
The dramatis personae could hardly be improved upon, including brilliant and imperious General Douglas MacArthur, audacious and profane Admiral William 'Bull' Halsey, and bibulous and indelicate Australian General Thomas Blamey. As for the fighting men, many of their stories are captured in accounts of the actions for which they were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, Victoria Cross, and other decorations for valor.stories are captured in accounts of the actions for which some were awarded the Medal of Honor, Victoria Cross, and other decorations for valor."
"In the early morning hours of April 1, 1970, more than four hundred North Vietnamese soldiers charged out into the open and tried to overrun FSB Illingworth. The battle went on, mostly in the dark, for hours. Exposed ammunition canisters were hit and blew up, causing a thunderous explosion inside the FSB that left dust so thick it jammed the hand-held weapons of the GIs. Much of the combat was hand-to-hand. In all, twenty-four Americans lost their lives and another fifty-four were wounded. Nearly one hundred enemy bodies were recovered. It was one of the most vicious small-unit firefights in the history of U.S. forces in Vietnam.
As in his acclaimed book Blackhorse Riders, a finalist for the prestigious Colby Award, Phil Keith uncovers a harrowing true story of bravery and sacrifice by the men who fought valiantly to hold FSB Illingworth—a tale never-before-told and one that will not be soon forgotten."
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