Showing results by narrator "Norman Dietz" in All Categories

One of the most popular and mysterious figures in American literary history, J. D. Salinger eluded fans and journalists for most of his life. Now comes a new biography that Peter Ackroyd in the Times of London calls "energetic and magnificently researched" - a book from which "a true picture of Salinger emerges". Filled with new information and revelations garnered from countless interviews, letters, and public records, J. D. Salinger: A Life presents an extraordinary life that spanned nearly the entire 20th century.

This documentary records the events of the most celebrated mutiny in the annals of the sea: the 1789 revolt against Captain William Bligh in the West Indies. Was Bligh a sadistic disciplinarian who terrorized his crew? Or a superb and misunderstood seaman? Over 200 years later, the controversy surrounding this legendary captain still rages. The truth may lie in this narrative based on the ship’s log, in which Bligh writes of the resentful crew, ravaging storms, and uncharted islands that led to mutiny.

Long relegated to a secondary position behind Gettysburg, Vicksburg has more recently earned consideration by historians as the truly decisive battle of the Civil War. Indeed, Vicksburg is fascinating on many levels. A focal point of both western armies, the Federal campaign of maneuver that finally isolated the Confederates in the city was masterful. The Navy’s contribution to the Federal victory was significant. The science of the fortifications and siege tactics are rich in detail.

Quintessential travel articles and thoughtful essays by the observant, witty and skeptical travel writer and novelist. Part One: 1964-1978 includes: "Winter in Africa"; "Leper Colony"; "V.S. Naipaul"; "Memories of Old Afghanistan"; "The Night Ferry to Paris"; and "A Circuit of Corsica".

Banks explores the complexities of political life in the Caribbean.

Yogi Berra is one of the most popular former athletes in American history and the most quoted American since Abraham Lincoln. Part comedian, part feisty competitor, Berra is also the winningest player in baseball history, with 14 pennants, 10 World Series, and three MVPs.

Two of the greatest heroes in children's literature, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, join forces in this classic tale from master storyteller Mark Twain. Tom and Huck are kidnapped by a mad scientist in a balloon-powered airship who plans to fly around the world then crash in flames - taking the boys with him. But when the madman falls overboard during a storm over the Atlantic Ocean, the youngsters are forced to use all their wits to save themselves from further perils aboard the runaway airship.

Who invented supply-side economics - the idea that cutting tax rates can result in more growth, more prosperity at all income levels, and even more tax revenue flowing into the IRS? Most people would credit the economic team that advised Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But in fact supply-side economics came of age two decades earlier. And the first president who embraced it was one of the biggest icons of the Democratic Party - John F. Kennedy.

Originally published in 1865, "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" began Mark Twain's remarkable career, and immediately demonstrated his masterful storytelling and brilliant sense of humor. This delightful tale introduces Jim Smiley, a man who loved to gamble, whether on horse races, dogfights, catfights, or even how long it took bugs to cross the Mexican border. When a gullible stranger came to town, Smiley boasted that his pet frog, Dan'l Webster, could outjump any frog in the county.

The driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, which marked the completion of the country's first transcontinental railroad, was only the beginning of the race for railroad dominance. In the aftermath of this building feat, dozens of railroads, each with aggressive empire builders at their helms, raced one another for the ultimate prize of a southern transcontinental route that was generally free of snow, shorter in distance, and gentler in gradients. With a meticulous, loving eye, Walter Borneman picks up where most other histories leave off....

Shuttled among orphanages and foster homes since he was 11, Wesley Benfield - newly converted - is trying to turn over a new leaf. But two things are keeping him from a straight-and-narrow kind of existence: lust for Phoebe, and a National Steel Dobro bottleneck guitar. There’s more than one way for an ungainly white boy to find a little soul, and Wesley strikes out on his own path of redemption.

Organizations today face a crisis. The crisis is of long standing and its signs are widespread. Most proposals for improving management address one element of the crisis at the expense of the others. The principles described by award-winning author Stephen Denning simultaneously inspire high productivity, continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight. Denning puts forward a fundamentally different approach to management, with seven inter-locking principles of continuous innovation.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007), known today as the architect of John F. Kennedy's presidential legacy - and the myth of Camelot - blazed an extraordinary path from Harvard University to wartime London to the West Wing. The son of a pioneering historian - and a two-time Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner in his own right - Schlesinger redefined the art of presidential biography. A Thousand Days, his best-selling record of the Kennedy administration, remains immensely influential.

Mosby's Men is John H. Alexander's eyewitness account of his days with Mosby's Confederate Raiders, a small band of about 400 rough riders who chased 40,000 Union soldiers during the height of the Civil War. Riding 50 miles a day with very little rest, Mosby's Men perfected the "skedaddle", a baffling, highly effective guerrilla tactic that enabled them to make sneak attacks, evade capture, and constantly traverse enemy territory.

Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and sea captain, journeys to different islands, where he meets some of the strangest creatures ever to appear in literature. His most famous visits are to Lilliput, where he towers over the six-inch, warlike people, and Brobdingnag, where the natives are gigantic, yet cannot understand abstract concepts. Gulliver also travels to the flying island of Laputa, Lagadu, a land of impractical philosophers, and Glubdubdrib, where sorcerers allow him to speak to great historical figures.

Call If You Need Me includes all of the prose previously collected in No Heroics, Please, four essays from Fires, and those five marvelous stories that range over the period of Carver's mature writing and give his devoted fans a final glimpse of the great writer at work. The pure pleasure of Carver's writing is everywhere in his work, here no less than in those stories that have already entered the canon of modern literature.

"The chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it," wrote Jonathan Swift in a letter to his friend Alexander Pope. Vexing works collected here are "A Modest Proposal," "Directions to Servants," "The Art of Political Lying," "A Digression Concerning the Critics," and "Sweetness and Light."

A riveting new account of Theodore Roosevelt's impassioned crusade for military preparedness as America fitfully stumbles into World War I, spectacularly punctuated by his unique tongue-lashings of the vacillating Woodrow Wilson, his rousing advocacy of a masculine, pro-Allied "Americanism", a death-defying compulsion for personal front-line combat, a gingerly rapprochement with GOP power brokers - and, yes, perhaps, even another presidential campaign.

More than 60 stories, poems, and essays are included in this wide-ranging collection by the extravagantly versatile Raymond Carver. Two of the stories - later revised for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - are particularly notable in that between the first and the final versions, we see clearly the astounding process of Carver's literary development.

“Bluefish,” writes the author, are “animated chopping machines. They will eat anything alive. They have stripped the toes from surfers in Florida. They can’t not eat.” Hersey weaves fact and legend around his subject, engaging the reader with juicy details of ocean life, philosophy, natural history, and the crises into which man has let his environment slide.