Showing results by narrator "Ed Sals" in All Categories

Christmas is coming and everyone around 16-year-old Liz Kitchell is busy with preparations. The big houses in her neighborhood are shimmering inside and out with luxurious decorations. And her parents are trying to impress all their friends with extravagant parties and expensive gifts. But Liz feels empty inside. In her English class, her group has to write a composition: How do you get what you want for Christmas?

In 1916, aging cavalryman Napoleon Childs leads an expedition into Mexico to capture Pancho Villa and bring him to justice. But Childs' troops are wiped out, and he is left to die alone in the Mexican desert.

In the town of San Pedro in the Dominican Republic, baseball is not just a way of life. It's the way of life. By the year 2008, 79 boys and men from San Pedro had gone on to play in the Major Leagues - that means one in six Dominican Republicans who have played in the Majors have come from one tiny, impoverished region. Manny Alexander, Sammy Sosa, Tony Fernandez, and legions of other San Pedro players who came up in the sugar mill teams flocked to the United States.

Legendary writer Zane Grey earned legions of devoted fans with his gritty westerns. In To the Last Man, he dramatizes the events of the Pleasant Valley War of Arizona, a bloody feud that nearly wiped two families off the face of the Earth. Jean Isbel has settled in Oregon and is growing comfortable with his new home when an urgent letter arrives from his father. Trouble is brewing in Arizona between the Isbel cattlemen and the Jorth clan of sheepmen. Rushing to his father’s side, Jean arrives just before the first bullets start flying. But matters are complicated when Jean and Ellen Jorth, daughter of the sheepmen’s leader, fall in love.

The Big Wander is a trip 14-year-old Clay Lancaster and his older brother Mike have planned for years. It’s Clay’s dream to find his ex-rodeo-star uncle, who quit the tour and disappeared somewhere in the vast and colorful Monument Valley. But Mike - heartbroken and unfocused after losing his girlfriend - soon heads for home. Clay, however, will not give up. He finds a job in a remote trading post, and follows a lead on his uncle’s whereabouts that takes him deep into Navajo country.

Winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, O. Henry Award and Edgar Awards, the 19 writers in this 2005 edition are not just considered some of the best Southern writers, but among the best American writers period. With works by such writers as Dennis Lehane, Moira Crone, Robert Olen Butler, Cary Holladay, Tom Franklin, and Rebecca Soppe, this collection provides an electrifying current of deep, dark subjects set in the brutal, but charming south.

If you want your business or organization to run well, this leadership book, adapted from the Official Army Leadership Manual, is the book for you. There are three keys to being a leader: be, know, do. Who a leader is (values such as loyalty and integrity), what a leader knows (about the world, about her or himself ), and what a leader does (action) are all vitally important for successful leaders.

When studying mysterious creatures called cryptids, the line between fact and fable sometimes blurs. Believable finds - like the Piltdown Man and the Cardiff Giant - may turn out to be clever hoaxes. And impossible fictions - like a 44-foot squid and a living "missing link", the coelacanth - may be found swimming today's oceans.

In A Grave for Lassiter, the hero first seen in Riders of the Purple Sage is called into the town of Bluegate to help Josh Falconer save his failing business. But Lassiter arrives too late, and Josh has already made an untimely departure from the land of the living. Now Lassiter will move heaven and earth to punish those responsible.

This thrilling novel from the son of iconic Western author Zane Grey captures the spirit of the elder Grey's most popular and acclaimed book, Riders of the Purple Sage. That book's hero, Lassiter - a softspoken loner with a fierce sense of morality and unsurpassed skill with firearms - helped establish the Western gunman archetype in fiction. Lassiter's tale continues in this action-packed yarn that serves up a hearty helping of frontier justice.

Meet Biff: a weird, wild-haired high school senior with a couple of problems. He’s 18 but looks more like 14, which makes it hard for people - especially girls - to take him seriously. He’s too shy to say anything more than "Hi" to Tommie, the girl he’s had a crush on for two years. The way things are going, it doesn’t look like Biff will ever find a girlfriend or get the chance to kiss a girl. That is, until he meets Heidi. A beautiful, brash cigarette smoker, she’s the kind of dangerous girl Biff usually tries to avoid....

Twenty-six-year-old April Wolff doesn’t fit in with her Pennsylvania neighbors: she would rather teach women and slaves than get married. So when her pacifist father is found murdered in cold blood, and a Confederate general is seen leaving the scene, she vows to find the killer herself. As April’s search leads her through enemy camps, she survives attempts on her own life--and discovers help and love where she least expects them.

Acclaimed Southern author Dennis Covington was a National Book Award finalist. Redneck Riviera is the true story of Covington’s bizarre encounters with a lawless band of gun-toting swamp-dwellers in Central Florida who’ve illegally claimed the two-and-a-half acres of land he inherited from his father.

Grizz Brickbottom is one tough cowboy. But even the toughest cowboys, those who floss their teeth with barbed wire as Grizz does, can use some companionship. So Grizz adopts a dog that will help out with the cattle rustling and the mountain lion chasing. But somehow Grizz ends up with a pretty, pampered poodle, not a fierce, brave canine. John Frank delights in this tale filled with vivid imagery and loveable cowboy characters, who end up getting tamed by a little poodle named Foofy.

Someone is killing the unwanted in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee. As Deputy Sheriff Trent Tyson trails the murderer, his town erupts in a storm of publicity as Clarence Darrow changes the face of American education.

David Robbins continues the proud tradition of Ralph Compton's Western novels with enough hardscrabble heroes, blazing gun fights, and twisted villains to fill a corral. Bluff City is a booming silver mining town full of pigeons to pluck. When two of its wealthiest citizens devise plans to rob their neighbors legally and illegally, only Clay Adams stands in their way.

Young Abe Lincoln is all dressed up in his best suit and on his way to deliver an important speech. As he walks along, he finds a pig stuck in a mudhole. Abe hates to see any animal suffer. If he helps the pig, his clothes will get muddy. What would people think of a mud-covered speaker? Abe doesn’t want to leave the pig stranded, but he has no other nice clothes to wear. So, he continues down the road toward town, feeling guilty. He knows a pig isn’t a person, yet it still seems wrong not to help.

General Sherman's Christmas opens on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, November 24, 1864, one month before Christmas. Sherman was relentlessly pushing his troops across Georgia, reaching Savannah days before Christmas. His methodical encroachment of the city from all sides eventually convinced Confederate general W. J. Hardee to slip away in darkness across an improvised causeway toward South Carolina to the north.

Lassiter and his partner Borling are sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of a killing they had no part in committing. But with some daring ingenuity they manage to escape from behind bars: only to see their efforts thwarted by treachery.

At the age of 17, Thea Auben was raped, beaten, and left for dead. Fourteen years later, she lives under an assumed name in a carefully constructed online world. Her only real relationship is with her son David. She has done everything in her power to protect David from the truth about his conception, but he is no longer satisfied by her vague answers about his father.