Showing results by narrator "William Hope" in All Categories

An acclaimed classic detailing the economic history of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and exposing the capitalist giants who changed the world. Frederick Lewis Allen’s insightful financial history of the United States - from the late 1800s through the stock market collapse of 1929 - remains a seminal work on what brought on America’s worst economic disaster: the Great Depression.

In the 2008 US election, many Americans believed Barack Obama was a Muslim. The conspiracy theory book 9/11: The Big Lie has become a best seller. Hearsay has fuelled economic boom and bust - so much so that in many places it's now a crime to circulate false rumours about banks. Why do ordinary people accept rumours, even untrue, bizarre or damaging ones? Does it matter? And, if so, what should we do about it? As Cass Sunstein shows in his brilliant analysis of the phenomenon, there are many different ways in which rumours are dispersed.

Jonathan Craine has left his old life in Hollywood behind him, content to live out his days with his son on a rural farm in California. But when infamous mobster Bugsy Siegel is murdered, Craine is forced to face his past once again. Summoned to Las Vegas to meet mob head Meyer Lansky, Craine is given the impossible task of finding Siegel’s murderers. All he has to help him is an ageing hit man and a female crime reporter with her own agenda. And he knows that if he doesn’t succeed in five days, both he and his son will pay for it with their lives....

For decades, George R. R. Martin - best-selling author of A Song of Ice and Fire - has collaborated with an ever-shifting ensemble of science fiction and fantasy icons to create the amazing Wild Cards universe. In the aftermath of World War II, the Earth’s population was devastated by a terrifying alien virus. Those who survived were changed forever. Some, known as Jokers, were cursed with bizarre mental and physical deformities; others, granted superhuman abilities, are known as Aces.

A global thriller presenting an apocalyptic vision of a world on the brink of despair and destruction. What would you do if the world was brought to a standstill? If you heard deafening static followed by the words 'my children. Do not be afraid'? Would you turn to God? Subscribe to the conspiracy theories? Or put your faith in science and a rational explanation? The lives of all 26 people in this account are affected by the message. Most because they heard it. Some because they didn't.

America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades - celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world’s most resurgent cities.

In 2017, the world watched as President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un traded personal insults and escalating threats of nuclear war amid unprecedented shows of military force. Former Pentagon insider and Korean security expert Van Jackson traces the origins of the first American nuclear crisis in the post-Cold War era and explains the fragile, highly unpredictable way that it ended.

Touchy Subjects is about things that make people wince: taboos, controversies, secrets, and lies. Some of the events that characters crash into are grand, tragic ones: miscarriage, overdose, missing persons. Other topics, like religion and money, are not inherently taboo, but they can cause acute discomfort because people disagree so vehemently. These stories are about the spectrum of feeling that runs from awkwardness through embarrassment to shame.

Vincent Kahn is an astronaut in training, living with his wife in the desert. He will go on to be the first man to walk on the moon. Fay Fern is 19 years old and working in a dive bar, having rejected her parents' wealth and conservatism. She will go on to become a violent activist and one of the FBI's most wanted. The pair's brief but intense love affair will have repercussions that echo through the American century, intersecting with the race to space, the rage against the Vietnam war and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic.

Zane Grey, America's master storyteller of the old West, was a passionate angler. He fished as many as three hundred days of the year. This collection, first published in 1925, describes his fishing adventures in exotic locales throughout the Pacific region. These stories capture the drama and excitement that Grey experienced in being the first person to fish many waters - from the Galapagos Islands to Cabo San Lucas - and in being the first to catch and document many new species of fish. No lover of Zane Grey storytelling will want to miss these real-life adventures.

Grand Master Ursula K. LeGuin has been recognised for almost fifty years as one of the most important writers in the SF field - and is likewise feted beyond the confines of the genre. The Wind's Twelve Quarters was her first collection and it brings together some of finest short fiction, including the Hugo Award-winning 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', the Nebula Award-winning 'The Day Before the Revolution', and the Hugo-nominated 'Winter's King', which gave listeners their first glimpse of the world later made famous in her Hugo- and Nebula-winning masterpiece The Left Hand of Darkness.

As he makes an 11th-hour plea for mercy, lawyer Alex Sedaka is resigned to the fact that his client will be executed. Charged with the rape and murder of 18-year-old Dorothy Haufaman, the case seems cut and dry - until the victim's mother makes an astonishing offer.... Dorothy Haufaman's mother offers clemency in return for the whereabouts of her daughter's body before she herself dies of the terminal disease ravaging her body.

Milly Theale is a young, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy American. When she arrives in London and meets the equally beautiful but impoverished Kate Croy, they form an intimate friendship. But nothing is as it seems; materialism, romance, self-delusion, and ultimately fatal illness, insidiously contaminate the glamorous social whirl.

Beautiful but impoverished Lina Dahlstrom is dying of tuberculosis and it seems that no one can save her. All hope is lost until an eccentric doctor, Carl Dance, becomes enthralled with Lina's charms and vows to do everything in his power to cure her. But when the illness inevitably claims Lina's life, Dance's obsession with her only grows and so begins a mad and criminal scheme to bring her back from beyond the grave and claim her as his own forever.

In 1962, when mild-mannered actuary Walter Cousins sleeps with the sharp-tongued, not-quite-legal British au pair Diane Burroughs, he can have no sense of the magnitude of his error. For the brief affair sets in motion a tragedy of epic proportions. At the centre is Ed King, an infant given up for adoption who becomes one of the richest and most powerful men. But beneath the gripping story of Ed's seemingly inexorable rise to fame and fortune is a dark and unsettling destiny.

Late one night, Robert Danziger receives an unexpected call from a childhood friend, Duval Morgan. Duval has spent more than 20 years in an Illinois state penitentiary for the horrific assault of a young nurse. Now he is finally out.

Ethan Frome is an entrancing but sad story of a poverty-stricken Massachusetts farmer caught in a loveless marriage. An emerging love for his young cousin leads to one day of explosive emotions with tragic consequences.

Selected Shorts: Falling in Love presents a collection of stirring tales of love and longing. Selected Shorts is an award-winning series of classic and contemporary short fiction read by acclaimed actors. The Selected Shorts radio series is a co-production of Symphony Space and WNYC, New York Public Radio, and is heard on public radio stations nationwide.

Two weeks before Kwasi King is due to defend his chess world title, his mother is found brutally murdered at Yale University, a tarot card next to her dismembered body. Soon, more bodies turn up at other Ivy League colleges, all with tarot cards. And lead investigator Special Agent Franco Patrese has received his own tarot card. The Fool. Could he be the next victim of this macabre intellectual battle?

Frank Baltimore is a bit of a loser, struggling by as a carpenter and handyman in rural New England when he gets his big break, building a mansion in the executive suburbs of Hartford. One of his workers is a charismatic 18-year-old kid from Liverpool, Dmitry, in the US in the summer before university. Dmitry is a charming sociopath, who develops a fascination with his autodidactic philosopher boss, perhaps thinking that, if he could figure out what made Frank tick, he could be less of a pig.