Showing results by narrator "John McLain" in All Categories

George Catlin has been called the "first artist of the West", as none before him lived among and painted the Native American tribes of the Northern Plains. After a false start as a painter of miniatures, Catlin found his calling: to fix the image of a "vanishing race" before their "extermination" - his word - by a government greedy for their lands. In the first six years of the 1830s, he created over 600 portraits - unforgettable likenesses of individual chiefs, warriors, braves, squaws, and children belonging to more than 30 tribes living along the upper Missouri River.

Five hundred years ago Henry VIII had a fearsome temper and bloodthirsty reputation to match; more beast than human, some might say. . .Henry the Eighth was the bloodiest king ever to have sat on the throne of England. This fast-paced, exciting, inventive, and just plain bloody retelling of his reign will bring to light the real man behind the myth. Be dragged back kicking and screaming five hundred years into Tudor England.

In the darkest hours of communist rule, Father Merhum fought to protect the sanctity of the Orthodox Church. Now the Soviet Union is gone, but the bureaucracy survives, and within it lurk men who would do anything to undermine the fragile new Russian democracy. Father Merhum is on his way to Moscow to denounce those traitors when he is struck with an ax and killed.

In 336 B.C., Egypt lies under the yoke of Persia. But a spirit of fire has risen to blaze across the world. His name is Alexander, and he is the destined conqueror of the Persian Empire - and the king foretold of Egypt. Meriamon, daughter of the last Pharaoh, journeys out of the Two Lands to find him and bring him home. From the battlefield of Issus to the siege of Tyre, from the founding of Alexandria to the divine revelations of Siwah, Meriamon both leads and follows her divine charge, who becomes her friend and her chosen king.

Thousands of men desperately struggling through the surf, blood spilling into the sea and mud, bullets whizzing by their ears - this is the Far Shore of Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. Here, we see D-Day through the eyes of an experienced engineer, brought out of a brief retirement to help make this invasion and eventual Allied victory possible: Rear Admiral Edward Ellsberg.

As the morning sunlight crept over the limestone walls of Jerusalem's old city, two young Americans flagged down a bus and got on. It was 6:45 a.m., February 25, 1996, and Sara Duker and Matthew Eisenfeld settled into their seats as the door closed on Jerusalem's Number 18 bus which would take them across the spine of this ancient city. After a few more stops, their bus turned on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road and rolled up a slight hill and stopped again. A young man, who seemed to be a student and was carrying a black duffle bag, got on. No one paid much attention to him, witnesses said later.

You are made for freedom and adventure, friendship and romance. Yet too much of your life is spent unfulfilled at work, restless at home, and bored at church. All the while, you know there is something more. You'll find some of life's best moments waiting for you over a campfire, on a river - even in that coffee shop or brewery you didn't know you'd discover along the way. It's time to begin the search.

When forced to choose between the law and the party line, Police Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov has a disturbing tendency to fight for justice, and that has won him no friends at the Kremlin. Now his enemies in the KGB have arranged a transfer to the lowest rungs of Moscow law enforcement, a backwater department assigned to only the most hopeless cases, one of which is about to take Rostnikov deep into Siberia.

In Not a Day Care, Dr. Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University and author of the viral essay, "This Is Not a Day Care. It's a University!" takes a hard look at what's happening around the country - including the demand for "safe spaces" and trigger warnings at universities like Yale, Brandeis, and Oberlin - and digs in his heels against the sad and dangerous infantilization of the American spirit.

Stephen Mansfield, the acclaimed New York Times best-selling author, has highlighted the growing popularity of Mormonism—a belief system with cultic roots—and the implications of its critical rise. Mormons are moving into the spotlight in pop culture, politics, sports, and entertainment via presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, media personality Glenn Beck, mega-bestselling Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, and The Book of Mormon, the hottest show on Broadway.

It's one of the most brutal unsolved murders in the Elvis Presley universe - the 1981 slaying of his beautiful Blue Hawaii co-star, Jenny Maxwell. It was reported at the time that the murder was part of a botched robbery in Beverly Hills, but that's not at all what happened. Forty years after the murder, thanks to this book, it's finally been solved. For the first time, the truth is revealed in Murder of an Elvis Girl: Solving the Jenny Maxwell Case. And the truth is incredible.

Science is the supreme authority in our culture. Science speaks so authoritatively in our culture that many are tempted to use its clout to back claims that go beyond the available evidence. How can we identify when such ideological sleight of hand has taken place? This wedge of truth does not “wedge out” a necessary foundation of rational thought. But it does “wedge in” the much-needed acknowledgment that reason encompasses more than mere scientific investigation.

Tarzan of the Apes, Jason Gridley, and the crew of the airship O-220 return to Pellucidar, the world at the Earth’s core, on a wartime mission to stop the Nazis from obtaining a powerful superweapon. But when the Lord of the Jungle’s murderous adversaries partner with the Mahars - Pellucidar’s routed reptilian overlords - and his adventurous granddaughter Suzanne goes missing on a reconnaissance mission, can Tarzan prevent the conquest and enslavement of all humanity in both the inner and outer worlds?

From the award-winning author of Occupational Hazards come nine more tales of blue-collar fiction, including The Destroyer (sequel to Jar Baby) and the author's autobiographical Memoir of a Murderer, narrated by an all-star cast of performers. There's horror, there's humor, there's horrific humor. It slices, it dices, it makes julienne fries. Treat yourself. You deserve it.

A deadly virus has broken out in Washington State. The standard procedures of quarantine and prescribed medical therapies have no effect. Victims are dying in only a few days. And 12 cases today will be 30,000 tomorrow - a replicator run that will put the entire United States at risk for destruction. Devin Parks is a reporter on the edge. Since his marriage crashed, chasing news seems pointless...until he realizes the devastating consequence of the outbreak.

Historian Mark Hager builds on hundreds of hours of interviews with Harold Frank, sharing the intimate and heart-pounding account of Frank’s journey as a child of the Great Depression to the bloody shores of the D-Day invasion, into the bowels of Nazi Germany, and back to the U.S. where as a young man Harold would spend years resolutely dealing with the lingering effects of starvation rations while determinedly building a new life—a life always mindful of the legacy of his POW experience and his faithful service in America’s hard-fought war against Nazi aggression.

This sharp commentary on the rise and current decline of Western Civilization touches on historical moments - including the building of early universities in the Middle Ages and the American Revolution - and figures - including Augustine, Acquinas, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith - that exemplify the faith-reason synthesis at the heart of Western Civilization, as well as the modern villains that threaten to destroy it.

Phillip E. Johnson pries the lid off public debate about questions of ultimate concern - questions often suppressed by our society’s intellectual elite. Moving far beyond matters of creation and evolution, Johnson outlines the questions we all ought to be asking about the meaning of human history, the limits of scientific inquiry, religion and education in a pluralistic society, truth, liberty and moral choices, and God and his word, Jesus Christ.

When white supremacist Wade Michael Page murdered six people and wounded four in a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin in 2012, Pardeep Kaleka was devastated. The temple leader, now dead, was his father. His family, who had immigrated to the US from India when Pardeep was young, had done everything right. Why was this happening to him? Arno Michaelis, a former skinhead and founder of one of the largest racist skinhead organizations in the world, knew he had to take action and fight against the very crimes he used to commit.

Sparked by an indigo sun, Nat Turner stormed into history with a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other. Thirty years before the advent of the Civil War - in the predawn hours of August 22, 1831, commanding a small army of slaves, Nat Turner led a bloody fight for freedom that shined a national spotlight on slavery and left more than fifty whites dead.