Showing results by narrator "Bronson Pinchot" in All Categories

Like "Cloak of Anarchy", this story is peopled with fictional versions of several of Niven's friends. A discussion among friends about the theory of "Multiple Edens" suddenly becomes all too real, and the reason Tom Findlay has been asking such interesting questions over the years becomes clear.

Two years have passed since Jed Welch escaped the ruins of New York City. The monsters have begun vanishing from parts of the world, and rebuilding efforts are underway. Isolated communities and their militias are starting over, slowly reclaiming cities and countryside alike. Now a sergeant, Jed leads a squad providing security on Galveston Island, as they await the arrival of the first refugee ships. When a saboteur's bomb threatens everything, Jed and his people find themselves cut off from support and communication.

When Adam Parfrey tracked down Walter Keane - the credited artist of the weepy waifs - for a San Diego Reader cover story in 1992, he discovered some shocking facts. Decades of lawsuits and countersuits revealed the reality that Keane was more of a conman than an artist and that he forced his wife, Margaret, to sign his name to her own paintings. As a result those weepy waifs may not have been as capricious an invention as they seemed.

Vienna, 1939. Professor Speckstein's dog has been brutally killed, and he wants to know why. But these are uncharitable times, and one must be careful where one probes. When an unexpected house call leads Dr. Beer to Speckstein's apartment, he finds himself in the bedroom of Zuzka, the professor's niece. Wide-eyed, flirtatious, and not detectably ill, Zuzka leads the young doctor to her window and opens up a view of their apartment block that Beer has never known. Across the shared courtyard there is nine-year-old Anneliese, the lonely daughter of an alcoholic.

In December 2005, a young robotocist on his way to Google headquarters lost an overnight bag on a flight somewhere between Dallas and Las Vegas. In it was the fully functional head of an android replica of Philip K. Dick, cult science fiction writer and counterculture guru. It has never been recovered. In a story that echoes some of the most paranoid fantasies of a Dick novel, listeners will get a fascinating inside look at the scientists and technology that made this amazing android possible.

Beginning in 1939 prewar Prague, While the Music Played focuses on the story of young Max Mueller, a curious bright romantic - a budding musician, piano tuner, and nascent journalist. Max is on the cusp of adolescence when the Nazi influence invades Prague’s tolerant spirit with alarming speed as he struggles to understand the changing world around him.

Jonathan Blake makes a living stealing antiquities – stealing them back, that is. A field agent for the Argo Foundation, a company that makes it their business to preserve humanity's history by liberating stolen artifacts from thieves and looters, Blake is used to dangerous assignments. But when he is forced by the US government into a deadly mission involving a missing Napoleonic standard, he finds himself in over his head.

Nolan Garrett is at war...with his own ordnance! His cutting-edge combat suit: hacked. His high-tech weaponry: dismantled. His AI: inoperative. All he has left are his wits and the help of the drugged-out Silverguard he rescued from her addiction. His enemy is one he can’t see, can’t stab, can’t shoot. Hidden behind the technology that made Nolan the Nyzarian Empire’s deadliest assassin, the mysterious hacker known only as Ex-Umbra is a threat his elite soldier training could never prepare him for.

The 1849 Gold Rush in California brought to a boiling point the new state's wild and unruly politics. Before long, there was mob rule in the muddy streets of San Francisco. This decline of constitutional authority on the West Coast mirrored the fumbling actions of Congress and the federal government in Washington as a nation deeply divided over the slavery issue struggled to find a way to preserve the Union.

In 1953, Esref Armagan was born completely blind to a poor family in Istanbul, Turkey. He received no formal education, and spent his childhood days in his father's shop where he developed the curiosity to create and draw. He experienced the world through touch, and learned to visually reproduce his surroundings, including color, shadows, and perspective, with his hands. The blind artist's story will be an inspiration to young artists of all abilities.

Brand-new stories by: G. M. Ford, Skye Moody, R. Barri Flowers, Thomas P. Hopp, Patricia Harrington, Bharti Kirchner, Kathleen Alcalá, Simon Wood, Brian Thornton, Lou Kemp, Curt Colbert, Robert Lopresti, Paul S. Piper, and Stephan Magcosta. Early Seattle was a hardscrabble seaport filled with merchant sailors, longshoremen, lumberjacks, rowdy saloons, and a rough-and-tumble police force not immune to corruption and graft.

In Neil deGrasse Tyson's delightful journey through the cosmos, his fictional character Merlin responds to popular questions asked by adults and children alike. Merlin, a timeless visitor from Planet Omniscia in the Andromeda Galaxy, has observed first-hand many of the major scientific events of Earth's history. Merlin's friends include the most important scientific figures and explorers of all time - da Vinci, Magellan, Newton, Einstein and Hubble.

Armed with cutting-edge weapons and an AI-run cybernetic suit that controls his paralyzed legs, he is the fist in the shadows, the dagger to the heart of the Nyzarian Empire's enemies. Then he found Bex on his doorstep.... A junkie, high on the drug he'd fought for years to avoid, and a former elite soldier like him. So he takes her in to help her get clean - Silverguards never leave their own behind. If only he'd known his actions would put him in the crosshairs of the most powerful cartel in New Avalon.

One day in November 1994, Lawrence Levy received a phone call out of the blue from Steve Jobs, whom he'd never met, offering him a job running Pixar, a little-known company that had already lost Jobs $50 million. With Pixar's prospects looking bleak, it was with some trepidation that Levy accepted the position. After a few weeks he discovered that the situation was even worse than he'd imagined.

In Strange New Worlds, renowned astronomer Ray Jayawardhana brings news from the front lines of the epic quest to find planets—and alien life—beyond our solar system. Only in the past two decades, after millennia of speculation, have astronomers begun to discover planets around other stars—thousands in fact. Now they are closer than ever to unraveling distant twins of the Earth. In this book, Jayawardhana vividly recounts the stories of the scientists and the remarkable breakthroughs that have ushered in this extraordinary age of exploration.

Written in the irreverent style that made How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read a critical and commercial success, Pierre Bayard takes listeners on a trip around the world, giving us essential guidance on how to talk about all those fantastic places we've never been. Practical, funny, and thought provoking, How to Talk About Places You've Never Been will delight and inform armchair globetrotters and jet-setters, all while never having to leave the comfort of the living room.

In Making Supper Safe, Ben Hewitt exposes the vulnerabilities inherent to the US food industry, where the majority of our processing facilities are inspected only once every seven years. It turns out that in our increasingly complicated food system, pathogenic bacteria are everywhere. Food recalls have become so ubiquitous we hardly even notice them.

In The Player, the Hollywood classic that was adapted into the celebrated movie by Robert Altman, film executive Griffin Mill got away with murder. Now Mill is back, down to his last $6 million, and broke. His second wife wants to leave him. His first wife still loves him. His children hate him, and, believing that the end of the world is happening, he wants to save them all with one last desperate plan to save his life: quit the studio and convince an almost billionaire that he has the road map and the mettle to make them both achieve savage wealth.

As Carolyn untangled the umbilical cord from around my neck and placed me on Lillian’s stomach, I watched my mother look down with an expression that conveyed both reassurance and unconditional joy at my arrival, albeit eight weeks early. I was too new to know about the capriciousness of a red-haired woman’s soul, how it was governed by its own laws and remained half empty no matter how many blessings were poured into it. Truth be told, maternal instincts were as far away from Lillian’s heart and mind as my father was from Interstate 30.

Two investigations start at the same time in Swann County, North Carolina, one by the FBI, the other by the sheriff. The feds want to know who stole three Stinger missiles during a helicopter crash. The sheriff wants to know who hanged a black ex-con in a well. Seb Creek, a sheriff’s detective, gets involved in both investigations and fights through lies, secrets, and murder to find the killer. The trail involves a long-ago axe murder, the ravages of combat, an outdoor gas chamber, a mystery at the bottom of a well, and finally a last killing and an ancient testament.