Showing results by narrator "L. J Ganser" in All Categories

The Los Angeles Times affectionately referred to Freddy Powers as the "Ol Blue Eyes' of Country Music" and wrote that if you were to "ask country superstars Willie Nelson, George Jones or Merle Haggard (they'll)...tell you that he's one of country music's best-kept secrets". The Texas Country Music Hall of Fame inductee has been to the top of the charts as both a producer for Willie Nelson's Grammy-winning LP Over the Rainbow and a songwriter for many of country music legend Merle Haggard's number one hits.

Somewhere in Chicago, a roomful of people has been taken hostage. The hostages will be killed one by one, the masked gunman says on-screen, unless the police will admit they faked the death of the legendary superhero called the Kingfisher and helped him to give up his defense of the city 30 years ago. Retired reporter Marcus Waters made his name as a journalist covering the enigmatic superhero’s five years of cleaning up Chicago’s streets. Then the Kingfisher died, Chicago resumed its violent turmoil, and Marcus slid back into obscurity. But did the Kingfisher really die?

Fatima, Portugal, 1917: The Virgin Mary appears to three peasant children, sharing with them three secrets, two of which are soon revealed to the world. The third secret is sealed away in the Vatican, read only by popes, and not disclosed until the year 2000. Vatican City, present day: Papal secretary Father Colin Michener is concerned for the Pope. Night after restless night, Pope Clement XV enters the Vatican's Riserva, the special archive open only to popes, where the Church's most controversial documents are stored.

In Ordinarily Well, celebrated psychiatrist and author Peter D. Kramer examines the growing controversy about the popular medications. A practicing doctor who trained as a psychotherapist and worked with pioneers in psychopharmacology, Kramer combines moving accounts of his patients' dilemmas with an eye-opening history of drug research to cast antidepressants in a new light.

The lesson seems so basic. Yet time after time, good companies stumble and lose their stride - just when they were poised for rapid growth. Why? Because their leaders treated hiring as a tedious chore. They posted an ad hoc ad. Took the first person with the right skills. Hired for immediate needs, rather than future flourishing. In Hire Smart from the Start, Dave Carvajal distills lessons gained from 20 years in the trenches, building out and staffing two enormously successful Internet startups and helping firms like Tumblr, and Shutterstock land the talent they need to reach their greatest potential.

On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludo bricks herself into her apartment, where she will remain for the next thirty years. She lives off vegetables and pigeons, burns her furniture and books to stay alive, and keeps herself busy by writing her story on the walls of her home. As the country goes through various political upheavals from colony to socialist republic to civil war to peace and capitalism, the outside world slowly seeps into Ludo’s life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers, and a note attached to a bird’s foot.

Originally published in 1989, this true crime thriller brilliantly reconstructs one of the most extensive murder investigations in recent years: the disappearance of Robin Benedict, a beautiful commercial artist and moonlighting prostitute, and her relationship with the suspect, the eminent Dr. William Douglas.

A compendium of quotes and riffs by P.J. O'Rourke on subjects ranging from government to fishing to apps, to be published on what would have been his seventy-fifth birthday.

One hungry Tuesday afternoon Jimmy Zangwow’s stomach rumbles. He just has to have some milk and a chocolaty Moon Pie. But his mother says, "Of course not" and sends him outside to play. In the backyard, Jimmy climbs aboard the secret project he has been building: a junk jumbilee jalopy.

In The Company Town, Hardy Green, who has covered American business for over a decade, offers a compelling analysis of the emergence of these communities and their role in shaping the American economy, beginning in the country's earliest years....

Every American president since the end of the Cold War has called for better relations with Russia. But each has seen relations get worse by the time he left office. Now, the two countries are facing off in a virtual war being fought without clear goals or boundaries. Why? George Beebe argues that new game-changing technologies, disappearing rules of the game, and distorted perceptions on both sides are combining to lock Washington and Moscow into an escalatory spiral that they do not recognize.

Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, by acclaimed children's-book author Adam Rex, is a collection of uproarious poems about everyone's favorite spooky monsters, including Dracula, Wolfman, Bigfoot, and Godzilla.

Beer is and has always been more than an intoxicating beverage. Its invention 13,000 years ago was one of the fundamental motivations for the domestication of grains around the world. In early states, the control over the technological knowledge and resources to produce beer contributed to social hierarchies. Beer even likely provided the capital to motivate laborers to construct the ancient pyramids and other large-scale public works. Beer is a social lubricant that brings people together.

St. Louis in 1880 is full of ghosts - mangled soldiers, tortured slaves, the innocent victims of war - and Jacob Tracy can see them all. Ever since Antietam, when he lay delirious among the dead and dying, Trace has been haunted by the country's restless spirits. The curse cost him his family, his calling to the church, and damn near his sanity. He stays out of ghost-populated cities as much as possible these days, guiding wagon trains west with his pragmatic and skeptical partner, Boz.

In a sweeping narrative that takes listeners from the production of Stone Age axes, to the invention of chocolate chip cookies, to the experience of Burning Man, Philip Auerswald argues that the key driver of human history is the advance of code. At each major stage in the advance of code over the span of centuries, shifts in the structure of society have challenged human beings to reinvent not only how we work, but who we are. We are at one of those stages now.

The surviving members of the "Apaches" - a team of controversial, adrenaline-junkie former NYPD cops - reunite to continue their battle against crime. Their adventure starts with the machine-gun murder of innocent bystanders in a Manhattan restaurant. This incident ultimately propels our heroes into an investigation of a Colombian drug cartel responsible for the selling and distribution of millions of kilos of cocaine.

Before his untimely death in 1994, John O'Brien penned the brilliant Leaving Las Vegas, which was made into a Golden Globe Award-winning film starring Nicholas Cage. In this manuscript found after his death, five men--all committed drinkers--are caught inside Tony's bar while a race riot rages outside. Against this backdrop, a weird drama plays out as the supply of booze slowly dwindles.

A deathbed confession and a long-hidden conspiracy are at the heart of a riveting historical mystery centered on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In March 1900, as former Congressman John Bingham of Ohio lies dying, he begins to tell a strange tale to his physician, Dr. Jamie Fraser. Bingham famously prosecuted eight members of John Wilkes Booth's plot to kill Lincoln. But during the 1865 trial, conspirator Mary Surratt divulged a secret so explosive it could shatter the republic.

In a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America’s failure to educate its children and points the way to reversing that failure. Brill not only takes us inside their roller-coaster battles, he also concludes with a surprising prescription for what it will take from both sides to put the American dream back in America’s schools.

From Major General Jeffrey Schloesser - former commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division and Regional Command-East - comes a revealing memoir of leadership in the chaos and fog of the Afghanistan War.