Showing results by narrator "Richard Powers" in All Categories

Patrick Henry Hughes was born with a rare genetic disorder that left him without eyes and physically disabled. But he was also blessed with exceptional musical talent, able to play the piano at the age of two. Now, at age 19, he is a nationally known pianist, singer, and trumpeter who has performed at the Kennedy Center. But he's best known for playing in the University of Louisville marching band, while his devoted father pushes him in formation in his wheelchair.

Four Americans - a 20-year-old social outcast, a breezily iconoclastic Army officer, a ruthless U.S. senator, and a guilt-ridden heiress - are inexorably drawn together in their struggles to deal with America's chaotic involvement in World War I. Their interwoven destinies lead from poverty-stricken slums through the opulence of 1917 - 1918 Washington, London, and Paris and, climactically, into the Western Front's vicious aerial combat, which establishes the matrix for all air warfare to come.

Alexander the Great is considered one of the most successful commanders of all time and was known to be undefeated in battle. He is mentioned in the Bible as well as the Qur’an, and is on the shortest of short lists whenever the world’s best military leaders are catalogued. When asked to name other great military leaders, Caesar reportedly said Alexander was the only great one.

On January 19, 2000, a fire raged through the freshman dormitory at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, killing three students and injuring 58 others. Among the victims were Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos, roommates from poor neighborhoods who made their families proud by getting into college. They managed to escape the fire, but both were burned terribly.

On the Twin World planets, Plenipotentiary Gregor is determined to serve his government - even if it means executing innocent Huvean hostages, invaders from another planet - and even though Gregor's own granddaughter, Luon, is in love with a Huvean. But now the Berserkers are threatening the Twin Worlds, capturing the planets' president and reprogramming his brain to suit their violent agenda. And only the Huveans, in a desperate reprieve, can save the Twin Worlds' populace from annihilation.

Before George Lucas's Death Star, before Star Trek's Doomsday Machine, came the Berserkers, intelligent, space-faring killing machines whose sole purpose is to destroy all life. The Berserkers have developed a new trick: Berserker units that can pass for human-created androids. They're gambling on the advantage this gives them and massing for an all-out attack on human-held space.

Long, long ago, two alien races fought a war of extinction. All that is left of either of them are the berserkers: vast, thinking, spacefaring, killer machines whose sole purpose is to destroy all living things. For the first time in all of their history, they have met a life-form that has a chance of stopping them. In the cold reaches of space, the berserkers seize a floating laboratory full of human germ-plasm being stored for retrieval and growth in a future colonization project. The ship contains millions of human lives - but why are they not destroying them?

Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds is a rousing, all-original anthology that stands both as a significant achievement in its own right and as a heartfelt tribute to a remarkable writer - and equally remarkable man. A nicely balanced mixture of fiction and reminiscence, Multiverse contains more than a dozen stories and novellas by some of today's finest writers, along with moving reflections by, among others, Anderson's wife, Karen.

Frankenstein - his very name conjures up images of plundered graves, secret laboratories, electrical experiments, and reviving the dead. Within this audio, the maddest doctor of them all and his demented disciples once again delve into the secrets of life, as science fiction meets horror when the world's most famous creature lives again. Collected together for the first time, here are 25 electrifying tales of cursed creation that are guaranteed to spark your interest.

Moses Froben was born in a belfry high in the Swiss Alps, the bastard son of a deaf-mute woman, banished to the church tower to ring the loudest and most beautiful bells ever each day. His life is simple but content, until the day his father recognizes Moses' singular sense of hearing and its power to expose his sins. Cast into the world with only his ears to protect and guide him, Moses finds refuge in the choir of the historic Abbey of St. Gall and becomes its star singer, only to endure the horrifying act of castration....

All Nate and Sara want is a new life in a new town, away from the crime and poverty of their past. So when they are approached at a roadside diner by a shady hitchhiker offering $500 for a ride to Omaha, they wonder if their luck might be changing. At first it seems like so much easy money - but within a few hours the man is dead.

Lyman, a 30 year-old orphan, is sipping coffee on the front steps of the trailer he calls home one morning, when a 90 year-old parrot arrives with a mysterious past and beakful of cryptic sayings - such as "That which hath wings shall tell the matter." Convinced that heeding the bird's wisdom will lead him to answers about himself he so desperately seeks, Lyman combines his night job as a courtesy patrolman, circling the highway that loops around Fort Worth, with days in the library.

Liar [ˈlī(-ə)r] (n): 1. A person who tells lies. 2. A writer. In this gripping new audio collection you’ll find 15 tales of deceit and deception, perjury and prevarication, falsehoods and fibs, spun by some of the finest liars in the business.

Our wars were behind us. Mankind was moving out from the planet of its birth. New worlds were settled, and with the wealth of the galaxy at hand, poverty was eliminated. Then, out of a clear summer sky, came the first berserker attack. This collection of short stories continues the ongoing saga of the berserker wars with “The Machinery of Lies”, “Masque of the Red Shift”, “In the Temple of Mars”, “Brother Berserker”, and “Smasher.”

When the empirical meets the adorable. Babies can be a joy - and hard work. Now they can also be a 50-in-1 science project kit! This fascinating and hands-on guide shows you how to re-create landmark scientific studies on cognitive, motor, language, and behavioral development using your own bundle of joy as the research subject. Simple, engaging, and fun for both baby and parent, each project sheds light on how your baby is acquiring new skills - everything from recognizing faces, voices, and shapes to understanding new words and learning to walk.

Harry Silver has already had a lifetime of trouble from ordinary Berserkers, the automated killing machines programmed an age ago to denude the galaxy of life. And now one of these machines has gone rogue - and kidnapped his own family. What worse devilry will a deviant killing machine attempt? How will he stop it? And even if he can, will he ever see his family alive again?

Fate - is it written in the stars from the moment we are born, or is it a bendable thing that we can shape with our own hands? Jepp of Astraveld needs to know. He left his countryside home on the empty promise of a stranger, only to become a captive in the strange, luxurious prison that is Coudenberg Palace, the royal court of the Spanish infanta. Nobody warned Jepp that, as a court dwarf, daily injustices would become his seemingly unshakeable fate. If the humiliations were his alone, perhaps he could endure them, but it breaks Jepp’s heart to see his friend Lia suffer.

A man tumbles through wild surf, half drowned, to collapse on a moonlit beach. When he regains consciousness, he has no memory of who he is or where he came from. He knows only that the woman who washed ashore with him has disappeared sometime in the night and that he has awakened in a surreal landscape of savage beauty - a mysterious watery world encircled by a thin spine of land.

Martin Seligman, considered the father of positive psychology, has likened resilience to clearing the weeds from a rose garden, which can reach its potential only if the weeds are kept in check. Human beings face "weeds" of their own: layoffs, health issues, stock-market crashes, threats of terrorism, and natural disasters are all too common. Americans are busier, more stressed, and more anxious and depressed than they were during the Great Depression.

When children’s hospital volunteer and high-school student Gene Adamson hears the words of the dying man, the gunman who used him as a shield after murdering a prominent geneticist, Gene thinks the man delirious. But then the bodies of killer and victim disappear from the morgue, and a ten-year-old girl desperately needing a heart transplant is mysteriously bumped from her number-one spot on the organ-recipient list. The list. What is the list?