Showing results by narrator "George Orlando" in All Categories

Mike Sager is to drugs, porn, and crimes of desperate delusion what Dominic Dunne is to the society murder. In addition to his long-classic Rolling Stone story "The Devil and John Holmes" (which helped inspire the Val Kilmer film Wonderland) and his groundbreaking GQ piece about murdered Irish investigative reporter Veronica Guerin (also the subject of a major film starring Cate Blanchett), Scary Monsters and Super Freaks is a wonderful rogue's gallery of up-close pieces about the most public failures of the American dream.

An astonishing transformation over the last 20,000 years has seen our planet changed from a frigid wasteland into the temperate world within which our civilization has grown and thrived. This dynamic episode in our planet's history, right at the close of the Ice Age, saw not only a huge temperature hike but also the Earth's crust bouncing and bending in response to the melting of the great ice sheets and the filling of the ocean basins - dramatic geophysical events that triggered earthquakes, spawned tsunamis, and provoked a series of eruptions from the world's volcanoes.

Without question Spencer Hartley burns hot for his girlfriend, Rory, but his other desires are hidden down deep. He might blow things up for a living and climb mountains for kicks, but the scariest thing in his life is the truth about his sexuality. Jack Rothman works hard and plays dirty and meaningless sex helps him forget that he's suffocating. When a catastrophic accident traps Spencer with Jack, they need each other to survive. But something strong stirs there in the darkness, and it's more than their desperation to live. There's a spark between them that's impossible to ignore.

From the start, it sounds ridiculous: "Go to Tahiti, and find Marlon Brando." But, the worldwide search for the legendary method actor, the star of such classic movies as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, On the Waterfront, and Mutiny on the Bounty, soon becomes an obsession. The story of one man’s coming of age. When we first meet him, Sager is 30 years old, divorce pending, no longer the youngest in the room. Winter is coming. His prospects are dim.

Some say he was a breakthrough academic and visionary shaman. Others say he was a sham. Either way, Carlos Castaneda shaped a generation of mystical thinkers and magic mushroom eaters. In 1968, at the height of the psychedelic age, Castaneda published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, the first of 12 books describing his apprenticeship to an Indian shaman, and his journeys to the “separate reality” of the sorcerers’ worlds.

When I first met Susie, she appeared to be a normal, happily-married woman dealing with tragedy. Then I uncovered her secrets. While I could understand everything that she’d done, I could never approve. But, knowing what she was capable of, it became clear that if I was going to survive her, I had to play by her rules. And, the first and most important rule is...leave no singing bones.

Why do so many Americans reject the modern theory of evolution? Why does creationism, thoroughly refuted by scientists, retain such popularity among the public? A personal memoir of one scientist's attempt to come to grips with this controversy-by immersing himself in the culture of the anti-evolutionists - Among the Creationists is a fair, fresh, and insightful account of the modern American debate over Darwinism.

Peter Shand is the 'safe pair of hands' - a high-flying police administrator seconded to a quiet rural CID team to gain the operational experience he needs for promotion. On his second day he's thrust into a high-profile murder case. A woman's body is discovered in an old stone circle - with another woman buried alive beneath her.

When his son is implicated in a gristly murder, Joseph Soyinka will do whatever it takes to prove his innocence, even if it means endangering the new life they've made together. Forced from Nigeria after investigating one too many corruption cases, former detective Joseph Soyinka and his son Yomi have settled into a quieter life in the Bronx, with Joseph finding a new career as a taxi driver. After a teacher at Yomi's school is found brutally stabbed in his locked classroom, suspicions immediately fall on troubled student Jermaine Letts.

In 1983 Chicago elected Harold Washington as the city's first black mayor. This is the story of Washington's improbable victory over Jane Byrne, heir to the late Richard J. Daley's political empire, and over Daley's eldest son. It's the story of a coalition outside the party's mainstream coming to power and ruling in the country's most political of cities. In Fire on the Prairie, Gary Rivlin reveals the personalities and philosophies of those who were at the center of events, from black separatists such as Lu Palmer to community organizers such as Jesse Jackson....