Showing results by narrator "Jim Meskimen" in All Categories

Richard Brautigan was an original - brilliant and wickedly funny. His books resonated with the 1960s, making him an overnight counterculture hero. Dark, funny, and exquisitely haunting, his final book-length fiction explores the fragile, mysterious shadowland surrounding death. Told with classic Brautigan wit, poetic style, and mordant irony, An Unfortunate Woman assumes the form of a peripatetic journal chronicling the protagonist's travels and oblique ruminations on the suicide of one woman and the death of a close friend from cancer.

Nicholas “Deke” Deketomis and his law firm take on America’s Big Pharma when Deke’s college pal, Matt Redmond, presents him with a case of possible fraud involving EirePharma, the Redmond family business and a powerful Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM). PBMs serve as the “middlemen” between drug manufacturers and insurance companies, working in cryptic ways to determine not only the cost of drugs but also placing them on insurers’ preferred formularies.

The crew of Moonbase Columbus makes an amazing discovery on the far side of the Moon - a massive alien structure is erecting itself, built up atom by atom by living machines, microscopically small, intelligent, and unstoppable, consuming everything they touch. The mysterious structure begins to expand and take shape, and its creators begin to multiply. Is this the first strike in an alien invasion from the stars? Or has human nanotechnology experimentation gone awry, triggering an unexpected infestation?

For all the near-fanatic attention brought each year to the Academy Awards, the organization that dispenses those awards—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—has yet to be understood. To date, no one has ever produced a thorough account of the Academy’s birth and its awkward adolescence, and the few reports on those periods from outside have always had a glancing, cursory quality. Yet the story of the Academy’s creation and development is a critical piece of Hollywood’s history. Now that story is finally being told.

In Lessons in Hope, George Weigel tells the story of his unique friendship with St. John Paul II. As Weigel learns the pope "from inside", he also offers a firsthand account of the tumult of post-Vatican II Catholicism and the Cold War's endgame, introducing listeners to the heroes who brought down European communism. Later, he shows us the aging pope grappling with the post-9/11 world order and teaching new lessons in dignity through his own suffering.

Johnny D. Boggs turns the battlefield itself into a character in this historical retelling of Custer's Last Stand, when George Custer led most of his command to annihilation at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in southern Montana in 1876. More than 40 first-person narratives are used - Indian and white, military and civilian, men and women - to paint a panorama of the battle itself. Boggs brings the events and personalities of the Battle of the Little Bighorn to life in a series of first-hand accounts.

Deke and his colleagues—co-counsel Michael Carey and investigators Carol Morris and Jake Rutledge—set out to uncover the deceit and bring the white collar criminals to justice. With the help of Michael’s friend and war veteran, Joel Hartbeck—who first blows the whistle against the bank—the Deketomis team quickly discovers that they may have tackled more than they bargained for.

For Nick “Deke” Deketomis, going where angels fear to tread in waging legal battles has long been a way of life. As managing partner for one of the nation’s largest plaintiffs’ law firms, Deke has gone toe to toe with some of the largest corporations in the world. His firm specializes in the tough, even quixotic, cases that few lawyers would dare to take on. Like human trafficking.

As Dylan talked to Gwen, he told her how he felt that some of the more important stories of the first two generations needed to be passed on to the younger Evans.

Orphaned at fourteen, Hector “Heck” Martin heads west, determined to see the far country and make a man of himself. Along the way, he falls in love with bold and beautiful Hope Mullen. But Heck is too young and poor to marry, so he heads west again. During a three-year journey, Heck crosses thousands of miles, becomes a bareknuckle boxer, a mountain man, and an Indian fighter, and meets the likes of Kit Carson and Jim Bridger as he explores the gorgeous and deadly frontier.

Eighteen-year-old Lee Thompson has a chip on his shoulder and a mission in his heart to save his dad, an aging sheriff who’s lost control of his town. Old Diehard’s lost control of his town, and it seems every outcast and outlaw west of the Mississippi is on the prowl in Wolf River, Montana. Now Lee’s come all the way from Texas to stand up for his father, a man who hasn’t seen him since he was a boy and who doesn’t know him from Adam.

The story is based on true events in the life of Stanley William Miller. It inspires the heart on how a young man’s devotion to his family pushes him beyond impossible odds and testifies to the perseverance of the human spirit. A murder mystery. An infamous scandal. A beautiful love story.

In the sequel to his best-selling World Made by Hand, James Howard Kunstler expands on his vision of a post-oil society with a new novel about an America in which the electricity has flickered off, the Internet is a distant memory, and the government is little more than a rumor. In the tiny hamlet of Union Grove, New York, travel is horse-drawn and farming is back at the center of life. But it’s no pastoral haven.

Who is the Child of Night? That’s what small-town reporter Will Barbee must find out. Inexorably drawn into investigating a rash of grisly deaths, he soon finds himself embroiled in something far beyond mortal understanding. Doggedly pursuing his investigations, he meets the mysterious and seductive April Bell and starts having disturbing, tantalizing dreams in which he does terrible things - things that are stranger and wilder than his worst nightmares. Then his friends begin dying one by one, and he slowly realizes that an unspeakable evil has been unleashed.

Examine the ways in which expertise, reason, and manners are continually under attack in our institutions, courts, political arenas, and social venues with this collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist.

For eleven seasons, Marion Ross was head of one of America's favorite television households. Now meet the lovable real-life woman behind the Happy Days mom. In this warm and candid memoir, filled with loving recollections from the award-winning Happy Days team - from break-out star Henry Winkler to Cunningham "wild child" Erin Moran - Ross shares what it was like to be a starry-eyed young girl with dreams in poor, rural Minnesota, and the resilience, sacrifices, and determination it took to make them come true.

Cardboard Gods is the memoir of Josh Wilker, a brilliant writer who has marked the stages of his life through the baseball cards he collected as a child. It also captures the experience of growing up obsessed with baseball cards and explores what it means to be a fan of the game. Along the way, as we get to know Josh, his family, and his friends, we also get Josh’s classic observations about the central artifacts from his life - the baseball cards themselves.

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.

See You At San Diego is the comprehensive chronicle of Comic-Con International and modern geekdom itself as told through countless stories by nearly fifty of the most integral members of the Comic-Con and fandom scene. This full-fledged oral history—bursting with intimate reflections, hilarious observations, and at times, heartbreaking stories—is about how the geek at last inherited the earth and the story of the transformation of mainstream American pop culture into comic book culture over the past century.

It’s not easy living in someone else’s world. But that’s the story of Mike de Wolf’s life...literally. The whole thing started at his friend Horace’s Greenwich Village apartment. Horace is a writer and he’s decided to model one of his villains after Mike. Sounds crazy...until Mike reaches to turn on a light and gets the shock of his life. Knocked unconscious, Mike wakes up to find himself tossing in a violent ocean surf and getting slammed against the rocks.