Showing results by narrator "Bob Ryan" in All Categories

When Rust in Peace was released in 1990, the future of Megadeth was uncertain. Fresh off their performance at the record-breaking Monsters of Rock festival, and with knockout new albums from Slayer, Anthrax, and Metallica dominating the charts, the pressure to produce a standout statement record was higher than ever.

Esther Diamond's year gets off to a rocky start when NYPD's Detective Connor Lopez, who slept with her and then didn't call, shuts down the Little Italy restaurant where Esther works between acting jobs and gets her arrested. Once she's out of handcuffs, Esther takes a small role in a grad student's film project in Chinatown - where her friend, semi-retired hit man Lucky Battistuzzi, is hiding out in a Chinese-Italian mortuary.

After a two-year drought, the Kerrigan ranch is dry as a bone and as dusty as a honky-tonk bible. On the brink of ruin, Kate Kerrigan hires the rainmaker Professor Somerset Lazarus, who promises salvation — in the form of a deluge. Kate is desperate enough to try anything. But when four angry gunmen show up, ready to lynch the phony rainmaker for swindling them out of their money, the Kerrigans have to choose sides fast — before the bullets start to fly.

Behold the Rolling Stones: run-ins with the law, chart-topping successes, and now the World's Greatest Continually Operating Rock and Roll Band. 50 Licks tells the story of the Stones, right from its very origins. On July 12, 1962, London's Marquee Club debuted a new act, a blues-inflected rock band named after a Muddy Waters song-the Rolling Stones. They were a hard-edged band with a flair for the dramatic, styling themselves as the devil's answer to the sainted Beatles.

Ever since he joined the sports department of the Boston Globe in 1968, sports enthusiasts have been blessed with the writing and reporting of Bob Ryan. Tony Kornheiser calls him the "quintessential American sportswriter". For the past 25 years, he has also been a regular on various ESPN shows, especially The Sports Reporters, spreading his knowledge and enthusiasm for sports of all kinds.

Edward Hudson was a good and kind man. At least, he tried to be. Most of the time. He had gone through life thinking that nothing he did mattered or made any difference to anyone. After two careers and a busted marriage, with tattered relationships left behind him like a snail trail, Edward Hudson didn’t think his life’s story was worth the paper it was written on. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The "Randomness of Life" is never random. It had been the roughest day of Cooper’s life, the first morning of Tet. It was followed by years of broken promises, broken hearts, and eventually a couple of cracked ribs delivered by some boys who didn’t take kindly to his rough demeanor. He was struggling with life. Everyone saw it, but him. Police officer and helicopter pilot Cooper Gardner hadn’t seen the worst - or the best - the world still had to deliver.

Dr. Paul Clarin was an "arrogant bastard". He will tell you himself as you start up the hill with him. Years ago, he just wanted to ask the old Navajo about the meaning of some words, copied onto what looked like deer skin. He didn’t know it would take days to tumble out in haunting images through the old man’s thoughts and words. 

From Africa to America, Sarajevo to Nashville, the road these stories describes is peopled with an oddball cast of cowboys, detectives, office workers, and used tire salesmen. Along the way, they begin new enterprises and end old ones, lose loved ones and find new ones. They annoy one another, elude death, complain about the food, and find a little light. And some of them just might reach their destination. 

Lives are about to be flipped upside down by a demonstration of the power of pure love. Hanna, Bull, and Gwen live in a world where loss is a reality and there are no holidays from pain.

Cullen McPherson, insurance agent, just wanted to get the refund check to his client. He didn’t know his client was a world-class spy in pursuit of a missing flash drive and other cryptic items held in secret by such characters as the Jewish proctologist and the Washer Woman. Cullen was chasing a man but, in fact, Cullen McPherson was chasing his own identity, long since undermined by a domineering mother and a weak father. It was here, on the bridge of one of these ships, he found himself, his value, and the captain who had always been....

From the acclaimed PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize-winning author of A Naked Singularity, a shockingly hilarious novel that tackles, with equal aplomb, both America’s most popular sport and its criminal justice system. From Paterson, New Jersey, to Rikers Island to the streets of New York, Sergio de la Pava’s Lost Empress introduces listeners to a cast of characters unlike any other in modern fiction: dreamers and exiles, immigrants and night-shift workers, a lonely pastor and others on the fringes of society - each with their own impact on the fragile universe they navigate.

Peace was always an elusive thing for Detective Carter Boyce, even before his wife died. Since then, living has become even harder. Now, investigating what looks like a murder suicide, Carter begins piecing back together a life he didn’t even know was broken. He stumbles back into his childhood neighborhood, where Old Man Kopchek is still missing a leg, but none of his acerbic wit. The old man begins teaching him the magic of savoring the mundane and the seemingly unimportant.