Showing results by narrator "Jim Meskimen" in All Categories

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 firsthand many of the major scientific events of Earth’s history.

Hollows Bend, New Hampshire, is a picture-perfect New England town where weekend tourists flock to see fall leaves and eat breakfast at the Stairway Diner. The crime rate—zero—is a point of pride for Sheriff Ellie Pritchett. The day the stranger shows up is when the trouble starts. The sheriff and her deputy investigate the mysterious teenage girl. None of the locals can place her. She can’t—or won’t—answer any questions. She won’t even tell them her name.

An airport killer targeting pilots expands his scope. Alex Cross Must Die. “Drop whatever you’re doing, Detective Cross, and head to Reagan Airport,” DC Metro Police dispatch says. “A jet just crashed and exploded on the runway. The chief and the FBI want you and John Sampson there pronto.” Cross and Sampson race to the crash site. The plane didn’t fail—it was shot down by a stolen Vietnam War–era machine gun.

Serving as a powerful follow-up to Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life, Dr. Gad Saad unpacks what is really happening in progressive safe zones, why we need to be paying more attention to these trends, and what we must do to stop the spread of dangerous thinking. A professor at Concordia University who has witnessed this troubling epidemic firsthand, Dr. Saad dissects a multitude of these concerning forces (corrupt thought patterns, belief systems, attitudes, etc.) that have given rise to a stifling political correctness in our society.

For the first time in history, chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and obesity plague our population on a global scale. From a seasoned physician, this paradigm-shifting book comprehensively explains the linked cause of chronic diseases and exposes the misconceptions prevalent in modern medicine. In Lies I Taught in Medical School, Robert Lufkin, MD, explains that metabolic dysfunction is the common underlying cause of most chronic diseases that has been overlooked for decades, providing the tools needed to prevent and reverse them in ourselves.

For seven seasons, Leslie Knope and the Parks and Recreation gang charmed millions of viewers with their quirky antics and unwavering positivity. The sitcom continues to be a fan-favorite for streaming services today, nearly a decade after its finale. Now for the first time, Jim O’Heir, who played the lovable Jerry (or, well, Garry/Larry/Terry/Barry, depending on the episode), invites listeners back to Pawnee for an exclusive look behind the scenes.

Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.

An ongoing, episodic "prose comic" from which the pictures are summoned by the magic of words, Goon Squad is set in an alternate version of modern-day Manchester. Its biggest divergence from the real city is that it - along with most other large urban centers - has a team of superheroes to protect it against unusual threats with which the conventional forces of law and order would have problems. Goon Squad: Year One offers three action-packed volumes in a single collection.

Gabriel Du Pré’s aunt Pauline has burned through more than her share of husbands, so it’s no surprise when she shows up in Toussaint complaining that the latest one, Badger, has run off. Du Pré, the fiddler and sometimes deputy, agrees to go looking for her man and finds him shot, execution-style, in the wilds of the Montana countryside. A chat with his contacts at the FBI reveals that Badger, a small-time drug smuggler, had been working for them since his last arrest. Pauline’s husband was bait, but the big fish got away.

Masters of language can turn unassuming words into phrases that are beautiful, effective, and memorable. What are the secrets of this alchemy? Part of the answer lies in rhetorical figures: practical ways of applying great aesthetic principles to a simple sentence or paragraph. Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric recovers this knowledge for our times. It amounts to a tutorial on eloquence conducted by Churchill and Lincoln, Dickens and Melville, Burke and Paine, and more than a hundred others.

Boldly go to times where no one has gone before. While transporting a contraband Russian time machine and developmental weaponry, Private Everett Dumphee finds himself cast into new settings when the device suddenly activates. What follows are fantastic high-tech experiences that might be called the ultimate off-road adventure. For the determined Dumphee - narrowly escaping with his life and three beautiful women - it is not necessarily a matter of will he make his destination, but when.

Captain Nemo is the fictional life story of one of Jules Verne's most memorable characters from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. It covers his boyhood friendship with the dreamer Jules Verne, adventures aboard sailing ships, battles with pirates, and survival on a mysterious deserted island. Each time he returns home to his beloved France, Captain Nemo shares the tales of his exploits with the struggling writer Verne.

Something is rotten in the Fort Belknap Reservation. Life has always been tough on this barren stretch just south of the Canadian border, but now the children are dying. While playing his fiddle in a reservation bar, part-time deputy Gabriel Du Pré meets an accordionist who suspects that the children’s health defects and low test scores are connected to the nearby Persephone mine.

Dink, Josh, and Ruth Rose have hidden Easter eggs for the younger kids to find. Bradley, Brian, Nate, and Lucy have no trouble finding the plastic eggs. But some of the golden eggs disappear! Can the four kids track down the thief?

It's St. Patrick's Day in Green Lawn. Bradley, Brian, Nate, and Lucy dress up a leprechaun statue for the town's yearly contest. They leave it out on the porch overnight, but the next morning, it's missing! Who is behind the mischief? It will take four kids and the luck of the Irish to find out. Ron Roy perfectly captures the reading level and interest of the earliest chapter book readers in this exciting spinoff of his popular A to Z Mysteries series.

This is the story of silver's transformation from soft money during the 19th century to hard asset today, and how manipulations of the white metal by American president Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s and by the richest man in the world, Texas oil baron Nelson Bunker Hunt, during the 1970s altered the course of American and world history. FDR pumped up the price of silver to help jump start the US economy during the Great Depression, but this move weakened China, which was then on the silver standard, and facilitated Japan's rise to power before World War II.

For fifteen years, the Wilcoxes have been a family in name only. Though never the picture of happiness, they once seemed like a typical white Jewish clan from the Upper West Side. But in the early 2000s, two events ruptured the relationships between them. First, Naomi revealed to her children that her biological father was actually Black. In the aftermath, college-age daughter Bering left home to become a radical peace activist in Palestine’s West Bank, where she was killed by an Israeli Army sniper.

Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to record this unparalleled time, and maintained by devoted archivists, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before, from the stories of a Nazi sympathizing police officer to a Jewish journalist who documented daily activities at a transport camp.

Merciless in their penetrating analysis, Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail Hall have written the satirical portrait of America’s contemporary military-industrial complex. Drawing inspiration from the 1936 classic How to Run a War, by Bruce W. Knight, this book is a must-listen for anyone who would know the truth about America’s endless wars and the people who run them....

A body burns in the high desert hills. A boy walks into a fire station, pale with the shock of a grisly discovery. A middle school teacher worries when her colleague is late for work. By day's end, when the body is identified as local math teacher Adam Merkel, a small Nevada town will be rocked to its core by a brutal and calculated murder. Adam Merkel left a university professorship in Reno to teach middle school in Lovelock seven months before he died.