Showing results by narrator "Scott Sowers" in All Categories

In three straight years he was a paratrooper, an army seaman, and a LRRP - and he lived to tell about it. As an FNG paratrooper in the 173d Airborne, John Leppelman made that unit's only combat jump in Vietnam. Then he spent months in fruitless search of the enemy, watching as his buddies died because of poor leadership and lousy weapons. Often it seemed the only way out of the carnage in the central highlands was in a body bag. But Leppelman did get out.

Joining the Marines in 2002, David Rose signed up to go fight...and to go die. On this grim path, rather than finding a violent death, he would find family, purpose, and a brotherhood amid the misfit world of the war fighter. No Joy sees David recounting madcap tales of Muay Thai bouts in seedy garages, a bizarre stint as a street cop, being on the other side of the badge, becoming a veteran of the psych ward, and more. It's an irreverently told story that doesn't just tell one man's tale, but speaks to the necessary question: What really draws modern young men to war?

Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson, a top level Marine sniper, receives top-secret orders to rescue the General. But upon landing in the Iraqi desert his men come under ferocious attack and Swanson is the only one left alive. How did the enemy know details of a mission known only to a few top government officials? Swanson soon realizes he is fighting a particularly ruthless and dangerous enemy—American mercenaries working with the White House. They're part of a clandestine conspiracy whose agenda is nothing less than total control of the American military.

A nameless sniper is targeting participants in popular Civil War battle reenactments, and Minnesota reenactor Paul Edin is killed at the mock Battle of Kirby Creek near Corinth, Mississippi. His death is ruled an accident, but Paul's widow, Jenny, discovers that the sniper's bullet was meant for the man standing next to Paul, a cop named Kenny Beeman. To penetrate the Mississippi smokescreen, Jenny enlists the aid of her former lover, news photographer John Rane.

After 33 seasons managing in Major League Baseball, Tony La Russa thought he had seen it all - that is, until the 2011 Cardinals. Down ten and a half games with little more than a month to play, the Cardinals had long been ruled out as serious postseason contenders. Yet in the face of those steep odds, this team mounted one of the most dramatic and impressive comebacks in baseball history, making the playoffs on the night of the final game of the season and going on to win the World Series despite being down to their last strike - twice.

Detective Alex Cross is being stalked by a psychotic genius, forced to play the deadliest game of his career. Cross's family - his loving wife Bree, the wise and lively Nana Mama, and his precious children - have been ripped away. Terrified and desperate, Cross must give this mad man what he wants if he has any chance of saving the most important people in his life. The stakes have never been higher: What will Cross sacrifice to save the ones he loves?

It’s a place like hundreds of others, nothing special, really. But for four friends—all born and raised in this small Wisconsin town—it is home. And now they are men, coming into their own, or struggling to do so. One of them never left, still working the family farm that has been tilled for generations. But others felt the need to move on, with varying degrees of success. One trades commodities, another took to the rodeo circuit, and one of them even hit it big as a rock star. And then there’s Beth, a woman who has meant something special in each of their lives.

Long considered a master of the form and an essential voice in American fiction, Michael Knight's stories have been lauded by writers such Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Gilbert, Barry Hannah, and Richard Bausch. Now, with Eveningland he returns to the form that launched his career, delivering an arresting collection of interlinked stories set among the "right kind of Mobile family" in the years preceding a devastating hurricane.

Dangerous sex, family secrets, irresistible power, mega money and two murders equal one reckless week in New York. Lovers and Players takes you on a high-powered trip from Park Avenue to Brooklyn. In Lovers and Players, the Diamond family's power extends from coast to coast. Max—a real estate tycoon; Chris—a Hollywood lawyer; and Jett—a handsome young ex-druggie, now a successful model in Italy, must finally come face to face with their tyrannical father, Red, who has been controlling their world for as long as they can remember.

These interrelated stories are arranged in two sections, one devoted to virtues ("Bravery", "Loyalty", "Chastity", "Charity", and "Forbearance") and the other to vices ("Lust", "Sloth", "Avarice", "Gluttony", and "Vanity"). They are cast with characters who appear and reappear throughout the collection, their actions equally divided between the praiseworthy and the loathsome.

On Parrish Island, a restricted island off the coast of Virginia, is a little-known and never-visited psychiatric facility. There, the government stores former intelligence employees whose psychiatric states make them a danger to their own government, people whose ramblings might endanger ongoing operations or prove dangerously inconvenient. One of these employees, agent Hal Ambler, is kept heavily medicated and closely watched. But there's one difference between Hal and the other patients, Hal isn't crazy.

It's time for the annual Recipe Days bake-off in Lubbock, Texas. Soccer moms and grandmothers gather to show off their family recipes, learn new secrets for the perfect shortcake, and perhaps earn a chance to be on the famous cooking show, How Would You Cook It, Then? When the bake-off is crashed by a federation of pro wrestlers - including American Badass, Jersey Devil Jill, Tiny Giant, The Village Person, Jonah the Whale, the Hellbillies, and the fan favorite Xombie - all hell is set to break loose. Your heart beats faster as you anticipate who will come out on top in the ultimate showdown of the century: soccer moms or pro wrestlers.

Always on the verge of something better, Brown’s characters are often hard drinking and fast driving—tending to be both violent and religious. And as they grasp for hope, they sometimes make a leap into a new life.

Beginning with his parents' decision to move away from the corrupting influences of town, and to settle instead in rural Virginia, Metcalf's narrator leads the listener through a gallery of scabrous youths and callous adults driven mad by the stubborn soil of the New World. Eloquently misanthropic, the narrator of Against the Country fully inhabits the style of the old timer's winding yarn even as he sabotages all that the forces of provincialism stand for from within.

Paul Carlson, a brilliant young scientist, is summoned from his laboratory job to the remote Indonesian island of Flores to collect DNA samples from the ancient bones of a strange, new species of tool user unearthed by an archaeological dig. The questions the find raises seem to cast doubt on the very foundations of modern science, which has proven the world to be only 5,800 years old, but before Paul can fully grapple with the implications of his find, the dig is violently shut down by paramilitaries.

Debut novelist Wayne Caldwell's Cataloochee -a rich, vivid, arresting work beginning at the dawn of Reconstruction - sprawls across the succeeding generations like the vast green mountains of its rural North Carolina setting. Best-selling author Charles Frazier calls it "a brilliant portrait of a community and a way of life long gone, a lost America." This enthralling saga evokes the full color spectrum of mountain life, from lights to darks and every shade in between.

Wayne Caldwell won extensive critical praise for his debut novel Cataloochee. Set in the same Appalachian locale, Requiem by Fire strikes chords of humor, strife and human endurance with a 1920s tale populated by vivid Southern characters. When the federal government attempts to force residents of a farming community to sell their land, lives are torn asunder by the prospect of change.

The Uncorker of Ocean Bottles, who lives alone atop a hill, has a job of the utmost importance. It is his task to open any bottles found at sea and make sure that the messages are delivered. He loves his job, though he always wishes that one of the letters would someday be addressed to him. One day he opens a party invitation without a name attached, and as he devotes himself to solving the mystery of the intended recipient, he ends up finding something even more special: the possibility of new friends.

An elderly inventor, burning with manic creativity, tries to reconcile with his estranged gay son. A bereaved boy draws a thuggish classmate into a relationship of escalating guilt and violence. A genteel middle-aged woman, a longtime resident of a psychiatric hospital, becomes the confidante of a lovelorn teenaged volunteer. Told with Chekhovian restraint and compassion, and conveying both the sorrow of life and the courage with which people rise to meet it, You Are Not a Stranger Here is a triumph of storytelling.

Howard Fineman, one of our most trusted political journalists, shows that every debate, from our nation’s founding to the present day, is rooted in one of thirteen arguments that–thankfully–defy resolution. It is the very process of never-ending argument, Fineman explains, that defines us, inspires us, and keeps us free. At a time when most public disagreement seems shrill and meaningless, Fineman makes a cogent case for nurturing the real American dialogue.