Showing results by narrator "Ray Chase" in All Categories

David Toland, a decorated Korean War veteran, has done all he can to leave a life of combat behind. Now director of preservation for the Library of Congress's National Film Archive, Toland has made it his mission to preserve what he loves most: the Golden Age of American cinema, moving pictures full of romance, adventure, and American dream. That is, until CIA Agent Lana Welles drops in unannounced with a film canister, smuggled over the Berlin Wall at great cost, that may prove WWII never really ended - it just went underground.

Before he was Old-timer, he was Craig Emilson, a young doctor, sucked into military service at the outbreak of World War III. Enlisting to become a Special Forces suborbital paratrooper, Craig is selected to take part in the most important mission in American military history - a sortie into enemy territory to eliminate the world's first strong Artificial Intelligence. The mission is only the beginning of Craig's story, and for the story of humanity as well, as they accelerate towards a world that is post-human.

In upstate Idaho, Ness Hook is run out of his mom's house by his bullying brother Shawn. In Redding, California, Tristan Carter is graduating college, but with no job and no prospects, she'll have to move back in with her parents. Then the world ends. After Ness discovers his best friend dead of disease, Shawn takes their family to the mountains to wait out the plague.

Nearly two years after the harrowing events of The Straits of Galahesh, Atiana and Nikandr continue their long search for Nasim. The clues they find lead them to the desert wastes of the Gaji, where the fabled valley of Shadam Khoreh lies. But all is not well. War has moved from the islands to the mainland, and the Grand Duchy knows its time may be limited if Yrstanla rallies its forces. Worse, the wasting disease and the rifts grow ever wider, threatening places that once thought themselves safe.

In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad - mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees on every corner for his beloved boy.

Historian Isaac Campos combines wide-ranging archival research with the latest scholarship on the social and cultural dimensions of drug-related behavior in this telling of marijuana's remarkable history in Mexico. Introduced in the sixteenth century by the Spanish, cannabis came to Mexico as an industrial fiber and symbol of European empire. But, Campos demonstrates, as it gradually spread to indigenous pharmacopoeias, then prisons and soldiers' barracks, it took on both a Mexican name -marijuana - and identity as a quintessentially "Mexican" drug.

When his teenage daughter goes missing on a summer wilderness canoe trip to the Nahanni River, Inspector Michael Green is forced into unfamiliar territory. Unable to mobilize the local RCMP, he enlists the help of his long-time friend, Staff Sergeant Brian Sullivan, to accompany him to the Northwest Territories to look for themselves. Green is terrified. The park has 30,000 square kilometers of wilderness and 600 grizzlies. Even worse, Green soon discovers his daughter lied to him. The trip was organized not by a reputable tour company but by her new boyfriend, Scott, a graduate geology student.

The Art of the Infinite takes infinity, in its countless guises, as a touchstone for understanding mathematical thinking. Robert and Ellen Kaplan guide us through the “Republic of Numbers,” where we meet both its upstanding citizens and its more shadowy dwellers; and transport us across the plane of geometry into the unlikely realm where parallel lines meet.

West of the Grand Duchy of Anuskaya lies the Empire of Yrstanla, the Motherland. The Empire has lived at peace with Anuskaya for generations, but with political turmoil brewing and the wasting disease still rampant, opportunists from the mainland have begun to set their sights on the Grand Duchy, seeking to expand their empire.

In The Empire of Night, it is 1915, and President Woodrow Wilson is still assessing the war's threat to the United States. After proving himself during the Lusitania mission, Kit is now a full-blown spy, working undercover in a castle on the Kentish coast owned by a suspected British government mole named Sir Albert Stockman. And Kit is again thrown together with a female spy - his own mother, the beautiful and mercurial Isabel Cobb, who also happens to be a world-famous stage actress.

In a theocratic world far into the future, cities control their own movements and organization. Constantly moving, growing and decaying, taking care of every need their inhabitants might think of, the cities have decided that humans are no longer a necessary part of their architecture, casting them out to wander in the wilderness and eke out a meager subsistence.

Kami Khazud is a member of an acrobatic troupe led by his famous father. While Kami is a fine acrobat, he knows this is not his "kazuh", his spirit force, special talent or destiny. In this elegant feudal society, where nobles have absolute rights over the peasant class and intrigue is a way of life, Kami and his troupe must walk more than one kind of tightrope to survive… When a noble known to have abused Kami is murdered, Kami must first prove his innocence and find the murderer.

A group finds itself taking refuge at The Sanctuary, a religious compound with an enigmatic leader called The Prophet. A serial killer finds himself leading an unlikely group of survivors. A young man searches to prove himself to his group, and avoid being bullied ever again. A young child is called to perform another miracle at great personal cost. Every decision. Every action. Every dream. Every alliance. Every secret. Every betrayal.

The story of how former cavalry officer Lawrence Oates came to deliver his brave last words, before walking bootless into a Antarctic blizzard so that Robert Falcon Scott and the other members of the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition might have a better chance of survival, is brilliantly reimagined in this epic novel based on fact. A hero of the Boer Wars, Oates joined Scott’s second journey to Antarctica with dreams of winning the race to the South Pole for England.

In this sequel to Post-Human, humanity will be forced to face a future more advanced than it could have imagined if it wants to survive. Nineteen months have passed since the A.I. turned against humanity and was subsequently destroyed. In the meantime, James Keats has turned over the A.I.'s powers to a non-intelligent, easily controlled operating system. He and Thel have left the planet and spent six months vacationing on Venus, which has been newly terraformed without the consent or knowledge of the Governing Council.

When Scott Dawson's wife, Holly, disappears, leaving her family at the brink of bankruptcy, the last thing Scott expects is a helping hand from nowhere, a rich and never before mentioned Uncle Alastair. Uncle Alastair is dead, but his will promises to save them all - if the Dawsons follow its stipulations.

The first World War is underway; Germany has allied with the Ottoman Empire, and the Turkish caliphs have declared jihad on the British Empire. Meanwhile, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson hesitates to enter the fray. Aboard the passenger liner Lusitania, war correspondent and American spy Kit Cobb has been assigned to shadow a German intellectual and possible covert agent who is believed to have information vital to the war effort. During the voyage Cobb is smitten with famed actress Selene Bourgani, who inexplicably seems to be working for the Germans.

In the year 2010, an alien virus nearly wiped out the human race. A thousand years later, mankind has recovered and ventured into space. There has been no sign of the aliens since. Humanity remains confined to the Solar System. All that is about to change. Mazzy Webber is a lowly janitor on a third-rate cargo ship. Deeply in debt, when his captain decides to turn pirate, he leaps at the chance.

The winter of 1799 is falling fast on the small Ohio Territory settlement of Hugh's Lick. Food is scarce, and relations with the Delaware tribe are strained; but things are about to get much worse. In the midst of a storm, frontiersman Cole Seavey is attacked by a creature that is neither man nor beast but something burst forth from the bowels of hell and reeking of the grave. Badly injured, he is rescued by Pakim, a young Delaware brave, and is taken to safety at the home of John Chapman.

Through the screen of his computer a man watches a squirrel running about in a forest. For the better half of his life he has been drifting from job to job, diligently designing work-automating systems, and being rendered redundant by those systems. As he observes the squirrel, we observe him; and as he imagines the squirrel's world, we imagine his. The Squirrel Awakes is a quiet meditation on 21st century life and a compelling look at the direction society is heading.