Showing results by narrator "Chris Kayser" in All Categories

In the wake of the Dreyfus affair, the murder of two Jews in Lorraine reveals the darker side of human natureIn the wake of the Vernet murders in Aix-en-Provence, magistrate Bernard Martin moves to Lorraine, France, along with his pregnant wife, Claire, who is as fervent about Republican ideals as her husband. They are not there long when an infant boy is found dead, his tiny body mutilated. The wet nurse and mother say that this was a case of “ritual sacrifice” by a “wandering tinker,” or Jew.

Pierre Goodman enjoys an idyllic childhood as the son of a widowed dressmaker in post-World War I England. But paradise is ripped from him at age 10 when he and his mother immigrate to a small town in Alabama. Yearning to regain peace within his own mind and aided by his photographic memory, he begins falsely but completely enveloping himself in the lives of others. He yearns to become not merely a listener to the world, but also a singer in its chorus. In doing so, Pierre’s life becomes an extraordinary document of his time and place as he finds himself a part of history over and over again.

The haunted father of a washed-up stuntman. A disgraced surgeon and his son, a broken-down boxer. A father set on permanent self-destruct, and his daughter, a reluctant powerlifter. A fireworks-maker and his daughter. A very peculiar boy and his equally peculiar adopted family. Five houses. Five families. One block. Ask yourself: How well do you know your neighbours? How well do you know your own family? Ultimately, how well do you know yourself? How deeply do the threads of your own life entwine with those around you?

Christopher Columbus needed a sponsor for a dangerous expedition, but the King of Portugal wasn't interested. He repackaged his proposal for the Queen of Spain. She put Columbus on retainer and the rest is history. Columbus may not have been the first to discover America, but he had a great publicist. That's where Jeff Blumenfeld comes in. For many years, using a PR specialty called adventure marketing, Jeff has connected explorers and their projects with corporate sponsors looking to demonstrate product performance in extreme conditions.

Kafka was an attractive, slender, and elegant man - something of a dandy - who captivated his friends and knew how to charm women. He seemed to have had four important love affairs: Felice, Julie, Milena, and Dora. All of them lived far away, in Berlin or Vienna, and perhaps that's one of the reasons that he loved them: he chose long-distance relationships so he could have the pleasure of writing to them, without the burden of having to live with them. He was engaged to all four women, and four times he avoided marriage.

A new mystery featuring Enrico Caruso as an amateur detective during the tense premiere of The Girl of the Golden West, at the Metropolitan Opera, in 1910.

Christmas season at the Metropolitan Opera in 1920 features Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar in a varied schedule of mostly Italian operas. For members of the Metropolitan chorus, however, the season's main feature is danger. An urn falls on the head of a soprano chorister in Samson and Delilah; a tenor from the chorus is found hanged in a dressing room before the evening's performance of Mefistofele; in I Pagliacci, a trapdoor drops open and three singers fall through.

Lord Deveren Larath joined the thieves of Braedon thinking to expose a killer. Seven years later, he is now their leader, known among them as "Fox". No sooner have the elections been held than Deveren's brother, Damir, ambassador and master spy, comes to Braedon with dire news. The young kind of the neighboring country has been imprisoned by his own counselor, and Damir fears war with Byrn is in the wind. While Damir embarks on a desperate attempt to rescue the young king, "Fox" must deal with troubles closer to home.

John F. Kennedy died half a century ago - yet because of his extraordinary promise and untimely death, his star still resonates strongly. On the anniversary of his assassination, celebrated political scientist and analyst Larry J. Sabato - himself a teenager in the early 1960s and inspired by JFK and his presidency - explores the fascinating and powerful influence he has had over five decades on the media, the general public, and especially on each of his nine presidential successors.

Beneath our culture's obsession with wealth and power, status and celebrity, millions of Americans are quietly engaged in a deeply religious struggle to free themselves from petty selfishness and to embrace a life of benevolence and compassion. Drawing on an extensive random survey of 1,200 men and women across the United States, Matthew Lee, Margaret Poloma, and Stephen Post here shed new light on how Americans wake up to the reality of divine love and how that transformative experience expresses itself in concrete acts of benevolence.

Amelia - 1942: The inside of my closet held the last bit of my freedom before I was torn from my home and shoved onto a dark train. Our destination was even darker. "Women and children to the right. Men to the left," they shouted at us. Everything was taken from me, leaving only the smoke-filled air, piercing screams, and soul-burning cries. I was slowly starved and weakened to the bone, but there was a man - a Nazi - who brought me extra food. He called himself a prisoner too, but he scared me, and I wondered if he was the enemy I should fear the most.

In The Barefoot Bingo Caller, Antanas Sileika finds what's funny and touching in the most unlikely places, from the bingo hall to the collapsing Soviet Union. He shares stories that span his attempts to shake off his suburban, ethnic, folk-dancing childhood to his divided allegiance as a Lithuanian-Canadian father. Antanas has a keen eye for social comedy.

Peel back the cheerful façade that parents present, and you'll find that many are worried about their teens. Mood swings, impulsiveness, poor judgment, and other problems peak in these years. Add stressors such as screen addiction, cyberbullying, increasing academic demands, and time-consuming athletic commitments...and it's no surprise that today's teenagers rank as the most anxious in 50 years.

For film aficionados, Walter Murch is legendary - a three-time Academy Award winner, arguably the most admired sound and film editor in the world for his work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather trilogy, The English Patient, and many others. Outside of the studio, his mind is wide-ranging; his passion, pursued for several decades, has been astrophysics, in particular the rehabilitation of Titius-Bode, a long-discredited 18th century theory regarding the patterns by which planets and moons array themselves in gravitational systems across the universe.

Igor the fox owes everything to Frankie Mouse, the scientist who brought him back from the dead. However, as Frankie begins to resurrect more and more animals, apparently with the intent of creating an army, Igor finds himself increasingly excluded from his master's plans. Desperate to win back Frankie's confidence, Igor starts down a path that reveals secrets terrifying to both the living and the dead.

The treefolk have always been an enigma to Elodi and her father - that is, until they have a rare chance to save a fallen fairy. Not far away, Germain is coming to terms with having lost his love, Celeste, to the Undereaves.

In this modern-day Orpheus tale, one man descends into Paris’s hellish underworld to find his missing wife — and learn the dark secrets of her past. Adam Füst thought he knew his wife, Honnie. But when he begins investigating her sudden disappearance, he’s shocked to find so much of her a mystery. In order to find Honnie, Adam must enter the darkest shadows of the City of Lights. Paris’s sex shops, dark streets, and the people who inhabit them simultaneously repel Adam and draw him deeper, giving him a painfully clear look into Honnie’s past — and his own soul. Adam’s grief eventually gives way to his obsession with finding Honnie, taking his very sanity to the breaking point. Will learning the truth about Honnie push him over the edge?

A heinous double murder in a squalid apartment on the wrong side of town pits Inspector Lojacono, Di Nardo and the rest of the motley collection of cops known as the “bastards” of the Pizzofalcone precinct against their superiors, the press, and the local political hierarchy. Only by bringing the killer to justice can they save their reputations and the department.