Showing results by narrator "John Lescault" in All Categories

In February 1865, the end was clearly in sight for the Confederate government. Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg had dashed the hopes of the Confederate army, and Grant’s victory at Vicksburg had cut the South in two. An Honorable Defeat is the story of the four months that saw the surrender of the South and the assassination of Lincoln by Southern partisans.

What are the traits, tactics, and strategies of the business world's most transformative leaders...and what can the rest of us learn from them? In What the Best CEOs Know, leadership authority Jeffrey Krames examines the careers of seven of history's most accomplished CEOs - including in-depth interviews with Michael Dell, Lou Gerstner, and Herb Kelleher - to get candid answers to many of today's most compelling business questions.

In his perilous journey home after the Trojan War, Odysseus must pass through the land of the Cyclopes, encounter Circe the Enchantress, and face the terrible Charybdis and the six-headed serpent Scylla.

Written by the officer who became General Longstreet’s most trusted associate, this collection of firsthand accounts, memoirs, and diaries grants the listener an inside view into the workings of the Confederate army staff - the unknown soldiers, the well-known commanders, politicians, nurses, and civilians - relating the events of the Civil War as Lt. Colonel Gilbert Moxley Sorrel experienced it.

Laura Dearborn, a young woman is courted and pursued by three men: Curtis Jadwin, Sheldon Corthell, and Landry Court. She marries Jadwin, who over time loses interest in her as he gets more involved in wheat speculation at the Chicago Board of Trade. As his risky investments start to lead him to ruin, Laura reunites with Corthell, but she eventually rebuffs him. Jadwin’s fortunes turn as he is able to corner the market and ruin even good friends, but in time his luck runs out, and he is ruined.

Like the tentacles of an octopus, the railroad in California reached out across the state, grasping everything of value in the state. Based on the bloody Mussel Slough Tragedy - a conflict between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad - The Octopus is a stunning novel chronicling the twilight of the frontier West. A depiction of the tensions between the railroad, the ranchers, and the ranchers’ League. The book emphasizes the control of “forces” - such as the power of railroad monopolies - over individuals.

The Cotton Kingdom recounts his daily observations of the curse of slavery: the poverty it brought to both black and white people, the inadequacies of the plantation system, and the economic consequences and problems associated with America’s most “peculiar institution.” Disproving the opinion that “cotton is king”, Olmsted examined the huge differences between the economies of the northern and southern states, contrasting the more successful, wealthy, and progressive North with the South, which was stubbornly convinced of the necessity of slavery.

Washington, DC, gleams with stately columns and neoclassical temples, a pulsing hub of political power and prowess. But for decades it was one of the worst excuses for a capital city the world had ever seen. Empire of Mud unearths and untangles the roots of our capital’s story and explores how the city was tainted from the outset, nearly stifled from becoming the proud citadel of the republic that George Washington and Pierre L’Enfant envisioned more than two centuries ago.

In 1834, Osborne Russell joined an expedition from Boston, which proceeded to the Rocky Mountains to capitalize on the lucrative salmon and fur trade. Beginning at the age of 20, he detailed the life of a trapper in his journal and recorded his adventures through treacherous terrain, encounters with dangerous wildlife, and confrontations with the Rockies natives of the Rockies. Osbourne would remain there for the next nine years. Journal of a Trapper is his remarkable account as he developed into an experienced trapper and a seasoned mountain man of the Rockies.

For 24 winters, the blond child had been held captive by the Indians. Now rangy, raw-boned Ben Allison set out to heat up a stone-cold trail and bring Amy Johnston home. He was armed with only an old mountain man's map, a cheap gold locket, an ornery pack mule, and his army Colt. It was an impossible mission leading straight into hostile Indian country. Ben was keenly aware that the search for Amy could very well be his own death hunt.

Yellowstone Kelly is an Indian fighter and scout like no other. The devil-may-care Irishman can pick off hostiles and quote the classics with equal ease and accuracy. Even the mighty Sioux fear him - or most of them fear him. Sitting Bull's main war chief, the dreaded Gall, fears no man, and Kelly has something of his that the warrior would gladly kill to get back - his woman.

Kirby Randolph was a tough mountain man. He had promised himself he would get the wagon train to Santa Fe because Aurelie St. Clair was in one of the wagons. She was half Indian, the most beautiful and the toughest girl he had ever seen.

After the Soviet Union proved to the United States that it possessed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the world watched anxiously as the two superpowers engaged in a game of nuclear one-upmanship. Amid this rising tension, eccentric physicist Nicholas Christofilos brought forth an outlandish, albeit ingenious, idea to defend the US from a Soviet attack: detonating nuclear warheads in space to create an artificial radiation belt that would fry incoming ICBMs. Known as Operation Argus, this plan is the most secret and riskiest experiment in history, and classified details of these nuclear tests have been long obscured.

A young woman in the hair salon raises her a in a furtive gesture, frank and tantalizingly brief, to show a friend the work in progress: a riot of stunning tattoos. From his accidental vantage point in the barber’s chair, Fred Taylor knows that those images—weird insects, beasts, and naked human figures—could only come from something nice, a painting that, if he could only see the original in person, might prove to be rare and of significant value. And the girls don’t have a clue.

Stillton Academy, a small art college on the New England coast, is in financial trouble, and its days are numbered unless someone provides extraordinary help. The final straw may be the disappearance of an instructor with a female student - the daughter of the Academy’s only significant donor. Art critic Fred Taylor, called in to troubleshoot, goes undercover as a member of the faculty and shortly finds himself enmeshed in the conflicting motives and designs of faculty and students....

From Pulitzer Prize - winning book critic Michael Dirda comes a collection of his most personal and engaging essays on the literary life - the perfect companion for any lover of books. Dirda's latest volume collects fifty of his witty and wide-ranging reflections on literary journalism, book collecting, and the writers he loves. Reaching from the classics to the postmoderns, his allusions dance from Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and M. F. K. Fisher to Marilynne Robinson, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace.

Murder in the 11th House is the first novel in the mystery series that introduces a unique character in the annals of detective fiction. Astrological detective David Lowell gets involved in a new case thanks to his daughter, a young defense attorney who believes that a murder suspect is innocent. A judge has been murdered in a New York City parking garage, and Joanna “Johnny” Colbert, a tough and mouthy bartender, is accused of the crime. Lowell’s daughter, Melinda, believes that her client has been wrongly accused.

With commanding skill, Thomas R. Martin tells the remarkable and dramatic story of how a tiny, poor, and threatened settlement grew to become, during its height, the dominant power in the Mediterranean world for 500 years. Encompassing the period from Rome's founding in the eighth century BC through Justinian's rule in the sixth century AD, he offers a distinctive perspective on the Romans and their civilization by employing fundamental Roman values as a lens through which to view both their rise and spectacular fall.

Although American author Bret Harte is most readily associated with stories about the West, it is his skill with characterization that distinguishes him from the hundreds of others who set fictional tales in the region. The miners, soldiers, gamblers, entrepreneurs, and lost souls who populate these pages are limned with Harte's unique combination of dry wit and tender pathos. This charming collection of Harte's short stories focuses on life in old California.

When impoverished American sculptor Roderick Hudson creates what is described as a work of genius, he is sent to Rome, where he becomes the talk of the city. But Roderick soon loses his inspiration and falls in love with a woman he'll never be with. Now on a path to self-destruction, can he be saved from himself?