Showing results by narrator "Jack Chekijian" in All Categories

Wry, dry, and arch, this production of Lewis Carroll's classic tale of a fall through a rabbit hole to a fantasy world is otherwise just as familiar as ever. After a century and a half, Alice's adventure in Wonderland, one of the finest examples of literary nonsense, continues to attract listeners.

The names of the months and the days of the week come from a time in the ancient past. Collected here are the stories which these names tell. Gods, heroes, and planets come into play with the names of the months and the sunlit countries of Greece and Rome, and the names of the days and the cold and stormy northern lands of the Norsemen.

Though it may never be known if Mother Goose was based on an old French queen, a Boston housewife, or someone else entirely, these nursery rhymes will continue to entertain as they have in varying forms for hundreds of years. Though commonly thought of as children's literature, the alternatingly dry, sarcastic, and histrionically tinged humor with which this production is delivered appeals to a wide audience. Arguably.

Find amusement with the hundreds of classic riddles, jokes, and puzzles in this collection! Gathered from every conceivable source and delivered in a droll fashion, this selection of brain teasers is as sound today as it was 100 years ago.

Gideon Sunday, an ex-semi-professional American Football player, goes to his pantry to retrieve an awful bottle of his (dead) sister's fruit preserves. When he gets there, he discovers a meadow in his pantry. He closes the door, takes a few breaths, and begins to investigate. Upon discovering that A) no one is playing a trick on him, B) there really IS a meadow in his cupboard, and C) there is something three-quarters of ugly coming out of it, he decides to beat a monster to death with a baseball bat.

Published just seven weeks after the killing of Jesse James, this volume gives the full particulars of each and every dark and desperate deed in the career of this most noted outlaw of any time or nation! The facts and incidents contained herein were dictated to the author by the bandit's wife and his mother, to ensure that every secret act, every hitherto unknown incident, every crime, and every motive was truthfully disclosed!

Over the last 2,000 years, ambitious men have dreamed of forging vast empires and attaining eternal glory in battle, but of all the conquerors who took steps toward such dreams, none were ever as successful as antiquity's first great conqueror. Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) managed to stretch an empire from Greece to Asia's Himalayas at just 30 years old. It took less than 15 years for Alexander to conquer much of the known world.

In this innovative and deeply felt work, Bron Taylor examines the evolution of "green religions" in North America and beyond: spiritual practices that hold nature as sacred and have, in many cases, replaced traditional religions. Tracing a wide range of groups - radical environmental activists, lifestyle-focused bioregionalists, surfers, new-agers involved in "ecopsychology", and groups that hold scientific narratives as sacred - Taylor addresses a central theoretical question.

Innocent, his own country had called him a murderer. Now murder was his livelihood. John Seldon hired himself out as an assassin, a sharpshooter, to kill a tyrant named Castro in exchange for cash. He did not flinch from his task until the fatal moment, when he found the girl whose love had made him want to live again.

Book one of a history of the Christian churches in England, of England generally, and of Anglo-Saxon culture. It is the best known work of Venerable Bede, an English monk from northern England, and includes Julius Caesar's invasion in 55 BC, an account of Christianity in Roman Britain, the martyrdom of St. Alban, and the story of Augustine's mission to England in 597 that brought Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons. The work is believed to have been completed in 731.

The New Testament Apocrypha refers to texts written by early Christians that were not included in the Bible used by the main branches of Christianity today. These texts vary in subject matter, with some being accounts of Jesus, others being about the nature of God, and still others being accounts and teachings of Jesus' apostles. What makes them fascinating is not just the history behind why they are considered non-canonical, but what they tell us about the early Church and early Christianity. Moreover, they offer insight into what sources were used to write them, and whether they shared the same sources as the texts that comprise the Bible today. Given their historical and religious importance, there is still a fierce debate over the authenticity of many of these texts.

The need for and demands on leadership have changed radically in the past few years. To be a dynamic and effective leader of a 21st-century organization or corporation requires an entirely different strategy and set of skills than it did just five or ten years ago. In fact, much of the best advice and examples from even the last decade no longer apply.

This famous tale featuring a headless horseman is among the earliest examples of American fiction with enduring popularity, especially during Halloween. It is set in 1790 in the countryside around a Dutch settlement of present-day Tarrytown, New York, in a secluded area called Sleepy Hollow.

This is the classic - and somewhat clichéd - image of the Vikings, and their fearsome reputation was in many respects well deserved, the Norse sagas charting their deeds in all their lurid glory. But over the past century, thanks to a wealth of new archaeological evidence, a much more nuanced picture of the Vikings has emerged, providing profound insights into one of the most astonishing, misunderstood, and adaptable of European civilizations.

Pirates plundered other ships on the high seas while on the brig Crawford a cunning act of piracy was perpetrated by a veteran pirate leader. He slit his own throat to escape justice while three Spaniards he recruited stood trial with the esteemed Chief Justice John Marshall presiding over the federal court in Richmond, Virginia, in 1827, a rare trial. Follow the action in a blow-by blow description of the murder and mayhem right into the courtroom.

This Victorian farcical comedy was Oscar Wilde's final play, published from exile in Paris. Wilde has his characters adopt false identities to escape their social obligations. The witty dialogue throughout this production's dry approach to the material make for entertaining high farce.

This production of the famous 16th-century political treatise by diplomat and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli will appeal to those interested in his political philosophy and not in the many historical and regional allusions that the original work contains. The latter have been excised in this abridgement.

Charles Manson, the Yorkshire Ripper, Aileen Wuornos: take a closer look at some of the world's most prolific serial killers with in-depth profiles of history's most evil men and women. Explore their early lives, their twisted predilections, their horrifying crimes and the chase to bring them to justice, and marvel at how so many of these brutal murderers were, until their crimes came to light, seemingly just another face in the crowd.

This condensed version of the King Arthur narrative was compiled by folklorist Andrew Lang from traditional sources and features all the familiar iconography: the sword in the stone, Excalibur, the Round Table, Camelot, Merlin, knights and chivalry, and the quest for the Holy Grail.

In the early 1870s Henry Clay Frick, bred in the coal-lands of western Pennsylvania, foresaw the importance of coke in the Bessemer or Kelly process of steel-making. Superiors and Inferiors presents his ascendancy in the business of coke and sets forth his heavy wrangle with the union. This historical drama maintains the classical form of tragedy in English with seven scenes of dialogue and seven choral performances.