Showing results by narrator "Al Bernstein" in All Categories

Seventeenth century Russia, New Jerusalem Monastery. The recently deposed Patriarch Nikon, whose reforms lead to a schism in the Orthodox church, employs a French dramatist to stage the New Testament and hasten the Second Coming of Christ. Jacques de Sertan’s troupe consists of untrained and illiterate peasants. The actors are divided into roles, whole families play different social or ethnic groups that lived in Jerusalem around the time of Christ. No one, however, is allowed to play the Messiah.

For just over 30 years Al Bernstein has been one of the most recognizable and respected sportscasters in America. In those three decades, the “voice of boxing” reported the funny, poignant, and bizarre events that helped shape sports television, ESPN, boxing, Las Vegas, and Showtime. With an eclectic cast of characters that includes every big name in boxing, including Marvin Hagler, Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather, and Manny Pacquiao, as well as such names in the entertainment world as Rodney Dangerfield, Sylvester Stallone, Russell Crowe, Jerry Lewis, and Jack Nicholson, Bernstein's memoir will have you in stitches.

No other book about Leonard Cohen gets so close to the man, his city, his poems and songs, his friends, his background, and the many original influences that forged this world-famous poet, songwriter and performer as the Song of Leonard Cohen. Based on the documentary film Rasky made centred on Leonard Cohen in 1979, this book includes texts taken from the film with numerous notes and personal reminiscences from this long-standing friendship with Leonard Cohen.

The second book in Kilpatrick's Power of the Blood World, NEAR DEATH is the story of the vampire David Lyle Hardwick - a poet who for over a century has lived in the unholy world of the undead, resisting his thirst for blood. Zero, a beautiful, wounded mortal, is sent to destroy him but falls for his seductive power and together they set out in search of his enemies. As their torrid love affair grows, so too does David's unspeakable tormented desire. He is becoming Nosferatu, and when his fury is unleashed there is no one who can be safe, not even his own kind.

Inspired by Ivan the Terrible’s “Memorial Book of the Disgraced” and his own spiritual crisis, Alyosha has been trying to record the memories of people in his life who "died before their time, leaving nothing behind except in my memory". In hospital, however, he changes tack and decides to dedicate his Memorial Book to the memories of the elderly patients in his ward, described to him as alumni of the early-Soviet Institute for Natural Genius. This plan, however, is hijacked by one patient who tells him a story that reaches even further back into the past of the Russian Revolution.

In the chaos of early-1990s Russia, the wife and stepdaughter of a paralyzed veteran conceal the Soviet Union’s collapse from him in order to keep him - and his pension - alive until it turns out the tough old man has other plans. Olga Slavnikova’s The Man Who Couldn’t Die tells the story of how two women try to prolong a life - and the means and meaning of their own lives - by creating a world that doesn’t change, a Soviet Union that never crumbled.