Showing results by narrator "Edoardo Ballerini" in All Categories

Andrew Gross delivers a stirring story of a Jewish family brought together in the dawn of the women's garment business and torn apart by the birth of organized crime in New York City in the 1930s. Morris, Sol, and Harry Rabishevsky grew up poor and rough in a tiny flat on the Lower East Side, until the death of their father thrust them into having to fend for themselves. Morris, the youngest, dropped out of school at 12 and apprenticed himself to a garment cutter in a clothing factory; Sol headed to accounting school; but Harry, scarred by a family tragedy, fell in with a gang of thugs as a teenager.

Jean Zimmerman's new novel tells of the dramatic events that transpire when an alluring, blazingly smart eighteen-year-old girl named Bronwyn, reputedly raised by wolves in the wilds of Nevada, is adopted in 1875 by the Delegates, an outlandishly wealthy Manhattan couple, and taken back East to be civilized and introduced into high society. Bronwyn hits the highly mannered world of Edith Wharton - era Manhattan like a bomb. A series of suitors, both young and old, find her irresistible, but the willful girl's illicit lovers begin to turn up murdered.

Joyce always had an uneasy feeling about her son, Michael. Serious baby, then a serious kid, then a serious grown-up. His large, dark eyes. He always kept everything inside. When he misses coming home for his birthday, Joyce believes the worst and takes a drive upstate, desperate to find him. What she finds will strain her sanity. Intimate and unsettling, The Wolfs Mother Speaks is perfect for fans of Jeff VanderMeer, Victor LaValle, and Drew Magary.

Originally published in 1860, Ivan Turgenev’s First Love follows a 16-year-old boy’s infatuation with an older princess, who has moved in next door.

New Pittsburgh, 1898 - a crucible of invention and intrigue. Born from the ashes of devastating fire, flood, and earthquake, the city is ruled by the shadow government of The Oligarchy. Jake Desmet and Rick Brand travel the world to secure treasures and unusual items for the collections of wealthy patrons, accompanied by Jake's cousin, Veronique Le Clerque. But when their latest commission leads to Jake's father's murder, the three friends are drawn into a conspiracy where dark magic, industrial sabotage, and monsters that prey on the night will ultimately threaten not just New Pittsburgh, but the whole world.

Caliban’s my name. Ah, but what’s in a name? You imagine you know me from The Tempest. But God damn that wretch Will Shakespeare to some special circle of hell. He had a nasty habit - recall Richard III - of skewing history to his own purposes. Caliban? He ain’t nothing like the inept villain painted by that upstart crow. I’m here to set the record straight. Bring my mom Sycorax, sorceress of captivating clefts, back from the grave. Relate how I came to triumph over her murderer, the magician Prospero.

The setting is Boston, Fall of 1969. Radical groups plot revolution, runaway kids prowl the streets, cops are at their wits end, and work is hard to get, even for hookers. Hobie McNutt, a 17-year-old runaway from West Virginia drifts into a commune of young revolutionaries. It's a warm, dry place, and the girls are very available. But Hobie becomes involved in an increasingly vicious struggle for power in the group, and in the mounting violence of their political actions.

This friendly, fun biography series focuses on the traits that made our heroes great - the traits that kids can aspire to in order to live heroically themselves. Each book tells the story of an icon in a lively, conversational way that works well for the youngest nonfiction listeners and that always includes the hero's childhood influences. This book features Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance artist and inventor.

Imagine the impact on world history if Robert E. Lee had listened to General Longstreet at Gettysburg and withdrawn to higher ground instead of sending Pickett uphill against the entrenched Union line. Or if Napolon, at Waterloo, had avoided mistakes he'd never made before. The advice that would have changed the outcome of these crucial battles is found in a book on strategy written centuries before Christ was born.

Hal is a mild-mannered IRS bureaucrat who suspects that his wife is cheating with her younger, more virile coworker. At a drunken dinner party, Hal volunteers to fly to Belize in search of Susan's employer, the protagonist of Lydia Millet's much-lauded novel How the Dead Dream, who has vanished in a tropical jungle, initiating a darkly humorous descent into strange and unpredictable terrain.

When Claude meets the legendary actress Sabine Montrose during the last hours of her 40th birthday in her Manhattan hotel room, inspiration strikes, and his fate is sealed. For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films who started out as a concession agent for the Lumiere brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days foraging mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard.

In 1897, Odd Einar Eide returns home from a near-death experience in the Arctic only to discover his own funeral underway. His wife, Inger, stunned to see him alive, is slow to warm back up to him, having spent many sleepless nights convinced she had lost both him and their daughter, Thea, who traveled to America two years earlier but has yet to send even a single letter back to them in Hammerfest, their small Norwegian town at the top of the earth.

Emerging from the dark streets and subterranean caves of Palermo, the Beati Paoli, masked and hooded, mete out their own form of justice to counter the unfettered power and privilege wielded by the aristocracy. For the voiceless, weak, and oppressed, the Beati Paoli are defenders and heroes.

Set against the backdrop of the island’s increasing disillusionment with its new rulers from Savoy and a yearning for the return of the formerly detested Spanish monarchy, book two of Sicilian Avengers continues as the future of the House of Albamonte hangs in the balance and the survival of the Beati Paoli is threatened.

San Francisco, September 1921: Silent-screen comedy star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle is throwing a wild party in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel-girls, jazz, bootleg hooch...and a dead actress named Virginia Rappe. The D.A. says it was Arbuckle who killed her—crushed her under his weight—and brings him up on manslaughter charges. William Randolph Hearst's newspapers stir up the public and demand a guilty verdict.

Far from the untouchable images of heaven-gazing saints, the apostle Paul ruthlessly focused on his earthly duty to build God’s Church. Before his dramatic conversion he had violently tried to stamp out a heretical sect of Jews–the first Christians. But Paul’s encounter with Christ turned his boundless energy to building the young and fragile Church into an established and enduring body.

After losing everything but his life, a young man forges a new identity for himself in the jungles of Vietnam and on the gritty streets of New York in this epic and riveting tale of crime, punishment, and redemption.

On the surface, Cosimo Garibaldi is young, handsome, charming, and somewhat naïve, considering he's a member of a royal family. Given his looks and his pedigree, he is rarely at a loss for admirers. Then he meets Megan Walker, an American humanities professor vacationing in Paris who seems both unaware of his status and immune to his charms. Cosimo finds her aloofness refreshing as well as challenging, so he does his best to win her over.

Dave Cartwright used to be good at a lot of things: good with his hands, good at solving problems, good at staying calm in a crisis. But on the heels of his third tour in Iraq, the fabric of Dave’s life has begun to unravel. Gripped by PTSD, he finds himself losing his home, his wife, his direction. Most days, his love for his seven-year-old daughter, Bella, is the only thing keeping him going. When tragedy strikes, Dave makes a dramatic decision: the two of them will flee their damaged lives, heading off the grid to live in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.

A masterpiece of American individualism, Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience is considered by many to be one of the most important pieces of political and philosophical writings ever produced by an American. Thoreau wrote the essay because of his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War. When the government engages in actions that are unjust, he believed that citizens should completely withdraw their support of the government and stop paying taxes, even if it results in imprisonment or violence.