Showing results by narrator "Mark F. Smith" in All Categories

Set during the Napoleonic Wars, this story features two French Hussar officers, D'Hubert and Feraud. Their quarrel over an initially minor incident turns into a bitter, long-drawn out struggle over the following fifteen years, interwoven with the larger conflict that provides its backdrop. At the beginning, Feraud is the one who jealously guards his honor and repeatedly demands satisfaction anew when a duelling encounter ends inconclusively; he aggressively pursues every opportunity to locate and duel his foe.

He swore to take a bullet for the President and left it all behind to take a bullet for the American people. Why would a successful, twelve-year Secret Service agent resign his position in the prime of his career to run for political office against all the odds? New York Times bestseller, Life Inside the Bubble is an intimate look at life inside the presidential "bubble," a haze of staffers, consultants, cronies, acolytes, bureaucrats and lobbyists that creates the "alternate reality" in which monumental policy decisions are made.

The novel tells the story of a journey to the moon undertaken by the two protagonists: a businessman narrator named Mr. Bedford and Mr. Cavor, an eccentric scientist. Bedford and Cavor discover that the moon is inhabited by a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilization of insect-like creatures they call "Selenites".

An errant encounter with a passing star has flung Earth away from its old Solar System into the dark and cold of deep space. With the entire atmosphere frozen as chemical snow dozens of feet deep, one last family struggles to survive. But what are they to think when they see figures moving in the city ruins? Are Earth's dead coming back to life?

Time agents Ross Murdock and Eveleen Riorden are recalled from their honeymoon to take part in a dangerous assignment: find a team of Russian scientists who have vanished without a trace from a research mission in the past of a far-off planet. Along with a team of Russian time agents with their own mysterious agenda and Saba, a new agent teamed with Gordon Ashe, they leap into the alien world's distant history.

For many years, Murdock, Ashe, and other members of the Time Patrol have contended with threats to our time continuum, none more deadly than the alien Baldies, who hate other high-tech civilizations and want to destroy Earth. Evidence of time travel has been found in ruins dating to the ancient world...in the legendary realm of Atlantis. So Murdock, Ashe, Eveleen Riordan, and other Time Patrollers deck themselves out as foreign traders to discover whether something is amiss in Atlantis.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about 20 years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.

When the first Martian capsule lands, Alex Smith is drawn to the scene out of curiosity and wonder. But soon he must flee, when the great alien striders begin devastating the countryside and harvesting the living bodies of men and women to drain their blood. Smith wanders south, being drafted into the Army, witnessing major battles between the Martians and the American troops, and following the trail of destruction all the way to San Francisco. There he finds a city deserted of human life. Mankind seems doomed, unless... A grand science-fiction adventure, inspired by H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

"Kidnapped" is a historical fiction adventure novel by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. Written as a "boys' novel" and first published in the magazine Young Folks from May to July 1886, the novel has attracted the praise and admiration of writers as diverse as Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and Seamus Heaney. A sequel, "Catriona", was published in 1893.

Three years after the events that took place in "The Lost World", Professor Challenger urgently summons his fellow explorers to a meeting. Oddly, he requires each to bring an oxygen cylinder with him. What he soon informs them is that from astronomical data and just received telegraphs of strange accidents on the other side of the world, he has deduced that the Earth is starting to move through a region of space containing something poisonous to humankind.

The Western Conference discovers the Reds have stolen their alien-source data on a colonizable planet...and so must rush their plans for an expedition. When their spaceship crashes on Topaz, Travis Fox and his party of modern Apache Indians, reverted to their tribal ancestral memories, find they have already been beaten there. And they must deal with more than Reds - for the Reds have brought along reverted members of Ghenghis Khan's Mongol Horde!

"The Wind in the Willows" is a classic of children's literature by Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow moving and fast paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animal characters in a pastoral version of England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie and celebrated for its evocation of the nature of the Thames valley. The classic story of how Rat, Mole, and the other river bankers saved Toad from his excesses.

"Captains Courageous" is an 1897 novel by Rudyard Kipling that follows the adventures of fifteen year old Harvey Cheyne Jr., the arrogant and spoiled son of a railroad tycoon. The novel originally appeared as a serialization in McClure's, beginning with the November 1896 edition.

It's a good thing that Time Agents are intensively trained. When Ross Murdock and Gordon Ashe set up a time gate on the alien world of Hawaika for an exploration into its troubling past, they didn't anticipate that a storm would sweep them and their helper Karara Trehern and her two dolphins through it unprepared...and then collapse the gate. Trapped in a time of sword-and-spear technology, they rapidly discover that each of the world's cultures appear to be trying to wipe one another out.

"The Mysterious Island" (French: "L'île mystérieuse") is a novel by Jules Verne, published in 1874. The novel is a crossover sequel to Verne's famous "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea" and "In Search of the Castaways", though thematically it is vastly different from those books. An early draft of the novel, initially rejected by Verne's publisher and wholly reconceived before publication, was titled "Shipwrecked Family: Marooned With Uncle Robinson".

"Tarzan of the Apes" is a novel written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first in a series of books about the title character Tarzan. It was first published in the pulp magazine All Story Magazine in October, 1912; the first book edition was published in 1914. The character was so popular that Burroughs continued the series into the 1940s with two dozen sequels. The novel tells the story of John Clayton, born in the Western coastal jungles of equatorial Africa to a marooned couple from England.

Princess Ozma is missing! When Dorothy awakens one morning to discover that the beloved ruler of the Land of Oz has disappeared, all of the Emerald City's most celebrated citizens join in the search for the lost princess. But Ozma isn't all that's gone missing. The magical treasures of Oz have disappeared, too, including the Magic Picture, the Wizard's black bag, and even Glinda's Great Book of Records. With no clues to guide them, Ozma's friends separate into four search parties and spread out across their vast country in a desperate quest for their absent ruler.

A British newspaper editor in India does some favors for a memorable pair of strangers who confide in him their plan to become kings in Afghanistan. Then, two years later, he has a bizarre return visit - kings they have become, sure enough, but they've found the price of kingly mistakes was very high!

Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen made his name as the highest-scoring ace fighter pilot of WWI. His popular name, the Red Baron, owed to being of minor nobility (Freiherr = "free lord") and to choosing to fly a brightly-painted red aeroplane when camouflage colors were the norm. This advertisement to the enemy brought him frequent combats, so that he liked to claim that he shot down Englishmen before breakfast. When it seemed that he was being particularly sought by crack enemy pilots, the men of his command, Jasta 11, also painted their planes red.

This is an indispensable guide to physics that offers readers an overview of the most popular physics topics written in an accessible, irreverent, and engaging manner while still maintaining a tone of wry skepticism. Even the novice will be able to follow along, as the topics are addressed using plain English and (almost) no equations. Veterans of popular physics will also find their nagging questions addressed, like whether the universe can expand faster than light.