Showing results by narrator "David Colacci" in All Categories

It's 1992. Colonna is offered a fee he can’t refuse to ghostwrite a memoir. His subject, Braggadocio, is convinced that Mussolini’s corpse was a body double and part of a wider Fascist plot. When a body is found stabbed to death in a back alley, even Colonna is jolted out of his complacency. Fuelled by conspiracy theories, Mafiosi, love, corruption and murder, Número Zero reverberates with the clash of forces that have shaped Italy since the Second World War.

Drawing on twelve years of research in dozens of archives in Austria, Germany, Israel, and the United States, this book tells the story of five Jewish people—a merchant, a homemaker, a real estate broker, and two teenagers—who bravely resisted persecution and defended themselves in Nazi Germany.

The twelve entries in The Golden Age of Piracy discuss why pirates thrived in the seas of the New World, how pirates operated their plundering ventures, how governments battled piracy, and when and why piracy declined. Separating Hollywood myth from historical fact, these essays bring the real pirates of the Caribbean to life with a level of rigor and insight rarely applied to the subject.

Widely known as the "poor man's lawyer" in antebellum Boston, John Albion Andrew (1818-1867) was involved in nearly every cause and case that advanced social and racial justice in Boston in the years preceding the Civil War. Inspired by the legacies of John Quincy Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and mentored by Charles Sumner, Andrew devoted himself to the battle for equality. In this revealing and accessible biography, Stephen D. Engle traces Andrew's life and legacy, giving this important, but largely forgotten, figure his due.

Mr. Phileas Fogg, master of precision, enters into the strangest wager ever made over the whist table--that he will circle the globe in 80 days. The news astounds Jean Passepartout, sometime wandering minstrel, bareback rider, funambulist, gymnast, and fireman, now turned valet to Mr. Fogg in the expectancy of a quiet and well-regulated life. For the next 80 days, their lives are anything but quiet or well regulated.

During 20 years of almost total darkness in a rat-infested cell, Keith Johnson has had time to plan. So, like a ghost, he has returned to even the score. He has no intention of killing his betrayers; he wants to ruin their lives like they ruined his. Johnson's elaborate plan is meant to cause the three to self-destruct, and given their characters, it ought to be easy. But his scheme goes haywire with consequences he neither foresees nor wants.

In July 1942, the French police in Paris, acting for the German military government, arrested Victor Ripp's three-year-old cousin, Alexandre. Two months later, the boy was killed in Auschwitz. In Hell's Traces, Ripp examines this act through the prism of family history. In addition to Alexandre, 10 members of Ripp's family on his father's side died in the Holocaust. His mother's side of the family, numbering 30 people, was in Berlin when Hitler came to power.

One frigid, January morning in Manhattan, a new father, racked by sleep deprivation, decides to let his wife sleep in - then spontaneously flees lower Manhattan with the baby for a weekend in the Caribbean. It wasn’t a kidnapping, he wasn’t leaving his wife; he just wanted to spend a little time with the baby and give his wife a break. When the wife awakes, truly rested for the first time in nearly a year, she feels great - and embarks on a city adventure as misguided in its own way as her husband’s impulsive escape. Told from the couple’s alternating points of view, the story unfolds across one life-changing long weekend.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy Charlie Hood is attached to the ATF, working undercover on the Iron River that flows across the U.S.-Mexican border. The diamond fillings he wears in his left canine glimmer, distracting the men who sell the illegal firearms that enable the unspeakable violence on both sides of the map. Spotting the sparkle when “Charlie Diamonds” opens his mouth is often their first step toward life behind bars. Meanwhile, Bradley Jones, sheriff’s deputy and employee of the Baja Cartel and son of the love of Charlie’s life, the deceased L.A. outlaw Suzanne Jones, is expecting a son of his own.

While gangster films are one of America's most popular genres, gangster movies appear in every film industry across the world. With contributions from an international panel of experts, A Companion to the Gangster Film explores the popularity of gangster films across three major continents: the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

The future of the relationship between Israel and America is deeply uncertain: The current political leadership of each country is hostile to the other, there is no longer a sense of shared strategic focus, and demographic changes are forcing the countries further apart with every passing year. Undermining the relationship between Israel and the US is the fact that it was never clearly defined. The ambiguity has been politically helpful but now threatens the future: There is no treaty, no agreed set of obligations, no mutual dependence.

Before there was the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, Los Angeles was a rough place, building its way out to the global city of today. In the late 19th century it was a rapidly growing city filled with pimps and prostitutes, Chinese railwaymen, robbers, smugglers, and corrupt politicians. It was a city where losers and dreamers from all over the world could came to make their fortune.

Echo Among Warriors is a story of close combat between two opposing, equally committed adversaries. The powerful narrative immerses the listener in both sides of the battle, playing and replaying the same battle sequence from alternating viewpoints—through the eyes of the Marines and through the eyes of the North Vietnamese. The bullet fired from a Marine's M-16 at a silhouetted enemy solider will in the next chapter tear into the flesh of that crouched NVA trooper. The story represents just one of perhaps thousands of deadly encounters that reflect the reality of battle.

After settlement negotiations between humanity and the alien Tarsalans go horribly wrong, the Earth is engulfed in a mysterious green sphere - blocking all sunlight from reaching the surface. Only two scientists - one isolated on the Moon's lunar colony, the other trapped on a dying Earth - possess the minds and the means to destroy the sphere before it renders the world completely barren...

"For Christ sake don’t become a fluffmeister," are the last words Barnaby Griswold gets from his father. But despite trying to turn out otherwise, Barnaby knows himself a fool and already makes his living as a fluffmeister, as a puffer-up of investments. Well-bred, more or less educated, friendly to everyone, Barnaby is in fact foolishly successful. Until he blows it all. At 46, disgraced and broke and lonely, Barnaby must repair his life. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll find out that doing the foolish thing can lead to redemption.

The Euganean Hills golf community in northern Italy is a golfer's paradise. With a perpetual smell of freshly cut grass, rolling green plains, and bright blue skies, it seems nothing could go wrong for the tight-knit group that lives there. But the normally laid-back residents are shaken to their cores when one of their own turns up at the club brutally murdered. After discovering his friend's body, investigative journalist Riccardo Ranieri makes it his mission to track down the perpetrator of the heinous crime.

An Ancient Treasure: While visiting the scenic country of Malta, Jonathon Payne and David Jones bump into an old friend who has come to the islands to search for a long-lost treasure of the Knights Hospitallers, an organisation that dates back to the First Crusade in AD 1099. A Vengeful Criminal: When Ivan Volkov - the ruthless leader of a Russian crime syndicate - is betrayed, he is willing to do anything to get retribution. Protected by a team of hackers and henchmen, he travels to the Mediterranean, where he leaves a trail of bodies in his wake.

A Swedish army lieutenant drops dead on a shooting range in the African desert. Tragic accident? Or murder? Agent Ernst Grip is sent to uncover the truth. At the same time, Somali pirates kidnap a wealthy Swedish family. Why is no one back home willing to pay the ransom to save these innocent lives? As Grip investigates, he is drawn deep into a web of intrigue, greed and double dealings. And soon he is forced to wonder - in a world where friends become enemies in the blink of an eye, how is it possible for anyone to survive?

The Soviet Union is in turmoil. With the election of Gorbachev have come new ideas about freedom, compassion, and openness - ideas that leave no place for the dark machinations of the KGB. Reform is coming to the Soviet intelligence service, unless Victor Ivanovich Kazin can stop it. Kazin is one of the Old Guard, and an agent doesn’t survive three decades in the KGB without being relentless. He is a liar, a cheat, a backstabber - and he is proud of it.

Sex is everywhere in modern society, yet it remains taboo. We all have questions about sex that are too uncomfortable to ask—how do we get reliable answers? In this go-to guide Drs Grant and Chamberlain use their clinical expertise to answer the questions you wish you could ask about sex.