Showing results by narrator "Malcolm Hillgartner" in All Categories

General George Joulwan played a role in many pivotal world events during his long and exceptional career. Present at both the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, he served multiple tours in Germany during the Cold War and two tours in Vietnam. By chance, he was recruited as Nixon's White House deputy chief of staff and witnessed the last acts of the Watergate drama first-hand.

When Dr. Leo Liebenstein's wife disappears, she leaves behind a single, confounding clue - a woman who looks, talks, and behaves almost exactly like her and who audaciously claims to be her. While everyone else is fooled by this imposter, Leo knows better. Certain that his real wife is alive and in hiding, Leo embarks on a quixotic journey to reclaim his lost love.

With the same profound attention to detail that is a hallmark of his previous acclaimed works of fiction National Book Award winner Ha Jin gives us a collection of stories that delves into the experience of Chinese immigrants in America. Ha Jin depicts here the full spectrum of immigrant life and the daily struggles - some minute, some grand - faced by these men, women, and children.

Thanks to the machinations of the right, there is no dirtier word in American politics today than "liberal". Yet public-opinion polls consistently show that the majority of Americans hold liberal views on everything from health care to foreign policy.

With Straits, celebrated historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto subjects the surviving sources to the most meticulous scrutiny ever, providing a timely and engrossing biography of the real Ferdinand Magellan. The truth that Fernández-Armesto uncovers about Magellan's life, his character, and the events of his ill-fated voyage offers up a stranger, darker, and even more compelling narrative than the fictional version that has been celebrated for half a millennium.

Frederick Kaufman tackles the complex history of money, beginning with the earliest myths and wrapping up with Wall Street’s byzantine present-day doings. Along the way, he exposes a set of allegorical plots, stock characters, and stereotypical metaphors that have long been linked with money and commercial culture, from Melanesian trading rituals to the dogma of Medieval churchmen faced with global commerce, the rationales of Mercantilism and colonial expansion, and the U.S. dollar’s 1971 unpinning from gold.

Delving into the last gasps of the First Indochina War, which saw the communist Viet Minh take control of North Vietnam, Éric Vuillard vividly illustrates the attitudes that both enabled French colonialist abuses and ultimately led to their defeat and withdrawal. From the Michelin rubber plantation, where horrific working conditions sparked an epidemic of suicides, to the battlefield, a sense of superiority over the "yellow men" pervaded European and American forces.

One of the most significant literary events of the century, the discovery of manuscript pages containing early drafts of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time put an end to a decades-long search for the Proustian grail. The Paris publisher Bernard de Fallois claimed to have viewed the folios, but doubts about their existence emerged when none appeared in the Proust manuscripts bequeathed to the Bibliotheque Nationale in 1962. The texts had in fact been hidden among Fallois's private papers, found upon his death in 2018.

The Vietnam War is largely recalled as a mistake, either in the decision to engage there or in the nature of the engagement. Or both. Veterans of the war remain largely anonymous figures, accomplices in the mistake. Critically recounting the steps that led to the war, this book does not excuse the mistakes, but it brings those who served out of the shadows. Enduring Vietnam recounts the experiences of the young Americans who fought in Vietnam and of families who grieved those who did not return.

From the moment one of his sources takes a dive off a downtown skyscraper, a newspaper columnist is plunged into a harrowing maze of murder, intrigue, and secrets that powerful forces intend to keep hidden at all costs. The columnist joins with an aggressive young reporter to see if one explosive story can save his dying newspaper—and much more.

In The Invisible Promise, Harry Beckwith, New York Times bestselling author of the iconic marketing classic, Selling the Invisible, applies his forty-plus years of advising businesses on every continent and his research in the last ten years to impart the proven guidance that businesses of all sizes desperately need. In this new age in marketing, he details how to build digital and nondigital messages that enhance your reputation for integrity; that stand out from the clutter; and that can produce exponential growth while saving you both time and money.

The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power and geopolitics that led to America's disastrous war with Iraq and, for the first time, details America's fundamental miscalculations during its ruinous, decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein. Beginning with Saddam's rise to power in 1979 and the birth of Iraq's secret nuclear weapons programme, Steve Coll traces Saddam's motives through understanding his inner circle. He brings to life the diplomats, scientists, family members and generals who had no choice but to defer to their leader.

In the 1970s, Frank Lucas was the king of the Harlem drug trade, bringing in over a million dollars a day. He lived a glamorous life, hobnobbing with athletes, musicians, and politicians, but Lucas was a ruthless gangster. He was notorious for using the coffins of dead GIs to smuggle heroin into the United States, and, before being sentenced to 70 years in prison, he played a major role in the near death of New York City.

Our One Common Country explores the most critical meeting of the Civil War. Given short shrift or overlooked by many historians, the Hampton Roads Conference of 1865 was a crucial turning point in the War between the States. In this well written and highly documented book, James B. Conroy describes in fascinating detail what happened when leaders from both sides came together to try to end the hostilities. The meeting was meant to end the fighting on peaceful terms.

In Young Mr. Roosevelt Stanley Weintraub evokes Franklin Delano Roosevelt's political and wartime beginnings. An unpromising patrician playboy appointed assistant secretary of the Navy in 1913, Roosevelt learned quickly and rose to national visibility during World War I. Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1920, he lost the election but not his ambitions. While his stature was rising, his testy marriage to his cousin Eleanor was fraying amid scandal quietly covered up. Even polio a year later would not suppress the ever indomitable Roosevelt and his inevitable ascent.

On a train in 1876, Henry James is returning home from his journalistic tour under a cloud of psychosomatic symptoms. Across the aisle sits the beguiling Elena Hite, the daughter of a railroad baron, who will soon know all of the James boys' secrets. But their conversation comes to a halt when the train is stopped and boarded by the notorious James Gang, led by Frank and Jesse, who stride into the coach with guns ablaze.

The race to win an electrical competition incites Professor Benjamin Bradshaw’s obsession for invention in this sequel to A Spark of Death. The contest winner’s telephonic system will deliver music of the Seattle Grand Theater to homes throughout the city, and Bradshaw is confident he can win. But he is diverted by a peddler and a child gone missing, while the assassination of President McKinley drops Bradshaw and the entire nation into shock. When Bradshaw discovers that the peddler’s child may have witnessed a murder, he follows her trail....

Late 1930's Germany: Best friends Alex von Hemmerle and Nicolas von Bingen, titled childhood friends with neighboring estates, are witnessing the rise of Nazism when Nick's father reveals the long-buried secret of his son's partial Jewish ancestry. Warned by highly placed friends to flee, the only treasures Nick and his sons can take are two dazzling Lipizzaner horses, gifts from Alex. These powerful and majestic creatures become their ticket to a new life waiting across the ocean.

A starlet's plot to blackmail a film-studio executive results in her murder. Only the "trouble chaser" can clear her volatile lover and solve the crime.

Federal judge Edward Lamport is no stranger to controversy and danger. Nine months into his tenure, he's received two death threats and is under the protection of US Marshals. But when he receives a plea for help from a woman with whom he had a brief romance twenty-five years earlier, he must face a peril of a different sort, one that involves his long-lost son, Carlos.