Showing results by narrator "Malcolm Hillgartner" in All Categories

Pat, a Vietnam vet finished with marriage and booze, gets his dose of society sitting alone and dry at the local bar. One afternoon, watching a pre-season Red Sox game, he ends up next to a group of loudmouth writers gathered around a man in a wheelchair. The writers get under Pat's skin, and he says something lousy to the big-shot who, it turns out, is also a big-shot writer.

From award-winning author James M. Tabor come these two dark tales about the power of loss and the cost of greed. In "Antiques", a father haunted by guilt over his son's suicide is drawn toward another world.

American policing is in crisis. The last decade witnessed a vast increase in police aggression, misconduct, and militarization, along with a corresponding reduction in transparency and accountability. Nowhere is this more noticeable and painful than in African American and other ethnic minority communities. Racism - from raw, individualized versions to insidious systemic examples - appears to be on the rise in our police departments.

Just before Thanksgiving in 1950, five months into the Korean War, General MacArthur flew to American positions in the north and grandly announced an "end-the-war-by-Christmas" offensive despite recent intervention by Mao's Chinese, who would soon trap tens of thousands of US troops poised toward the Yalu River border.

Set in the working-class district of Benfica in Lisbon, The Piano Cemetery tells the story of a family, and especially of the hopes and fears of the fathers who pass the baton of the generations on to their sons. The Lazaro family are cabinet-makers who would rather be piano-makers.

A tense, dangerous thriller of CIA operations in Latin America, guerrilla wars, drug flights, environmental catastrophes and genocides. Shot down over the Guatemalan jungle with a planeload of marijuana, Vietnam veteran Joe Murphy gets caught up in the country's brutal Civil War, and in an attack on a Mayan village by the Guatemalan Army and its CIA "advisors". Badly injured, he escapes on a nightmare trek through the jungle, hunted by the Army, the CIA, and death squads.

Every year for all 30 they have been married, Louis Begley and Anka Muhlstein have escaped to Venice to write. In Venice for Lovers, Begley and Muhlstein fashion their own personal homages to Venice, one with a novella, the other with a personal essay.

Jake Reese is a writing teacher at an American university. He lives in a small brick Tudor close to campus with his art-buyer wife, Diane. His life is quiet - ordinary even. And he likes it that way. But it wasn’t always quiet. Jake’s distant past was a life on the streets, inflicting damage and suffering on more people than he can count. And now someone from his past, it seems, has come looking for him.

Alex Ostermann lives in an apartment block with his family in East Berlin. He hates the regime and his parents are worried that Alex and his sister, Geli, aren't displaying the correct ‘socialist attitude'. After school they are often followed. Friends suddenly break off relations. The final straw comes when Alex is arrested.

By turns a family drama and an action-adventure story, The Age of Daredevils chronicles the lives of the men and women who devoted themselves to the extraordinary sport of jumping over Niagara Falls in a barrel - a death-defying gamble that proved a powerful temptation to a hardy few. Internationally known in the 1920s and '30s for their barrel-jumping exploits, the Hills were a father-son team of daredevils who also rescued dozens of misguided thrill seekers and accident victims who followed them into the river.

This is the true story of an unknown American politician who played a critical role in ending centuries of conflict in Northern Ireland. Without the president's permission, and breaking every conventional rule about how to deal with terrorists, former congressman Bruce Morrison helped end a conflict that most observers thought would continue indefinitely.

Oscar Ogilvie is living with his dad in a house at the end of Lucifer Street, in Cairo, Illinois, when world events change his life forever. The great stock market crash has rippled across the country, and the bank takes over their home - along with all their cherished model trains. Oscar’s dad is forced to head west in search of work, and Oscar must move in with his no-nonsense aunt Carmen. Only a mysterious drifter helps alleviate Oscar’s loneliness.

In 1935, the Spokane police regularly extorted sex, food, and money from the reluctant hobos (many of them displaced farmers who had fled the midwestern dust bowls), robbed dairies, and engaged in all manner of nefarious crimes, including murder. This history was suppressed until 1989, when former logger, Vietnam vet, and Spokane cop Tony Bamonte discovered a strange 1955 deathbed confession while researching a thesis on local law enforcement history.

Late 1930's Germany: Best friends Alex von Hemmerle and Nicolas von Bingen, titled childhood friends with neighboring estates, are witnessing the rise of Nazism when Nick's father reveals the long-buried secret of his son's partial Jewish ancestry. Warned by highly placed friends to flee, the only treasures Nick and his sons can take are two dazzling Lipizzaner horses, gifts from Alex. These powerful and majestic creatures become their ticket to a new life waiting across the ocean.

Can America's public schools, long resistant to change, meet the challenges of globalization and new educational alternatives? Not by doing what they're doing today. So argues Building Engaged Schools, a book that challenges the faulty assumptions that guide American public education.

For Mark Rohr, a decorated Desert Storm vet, the last 10 years have been filled with shady jobs like his current stint as a bouncer at a red-light-district bar in Thailand. When a beautiful and naïve American girl, Robin Antonucci, arrives in Phuket City from the States and hires him to help find her missing brother, Mark sees the chance to make some easy money.

Jonathan Beecher, a middle-aged widower and small-town store owner, has never asked for much. But lately, all too much is being asked of him. The bombing of Pearl Harbor plunges America into World War II and deeply fractures Jonathan's own family. His eldest son, a civilian contractor, is trapped on a Japanese-occupied island in the Pacific. Jonathan's feckless younger son ignores his father's pleas to stay home and joins the army.

Harbor Hill in Roslyn, Long Island, was designed to be a "palace" for a "queen." Commissioned by the beautiful and imperious Katherine Duer Mackay, wife of one of the country's wealthiest men, it was an estate almost without equal in the entire country. This is the saga of that magnificent mansion, an extravagant product of the owners' hubris and desire for social acceptance, and of the ultimate failure of that driving ambition.

For more than a decade, French journalist Nicolas Hénin has reported from the front lines of conflict in the Middle East, much of his time spent in Iraq and Syria. He witnessed the events leading to the rise of Islamic State, and, in June 2013, he was captured by IS and spent 10 months in captivity with James Foley and others who were beheaded soon after Hénin was released.

A big-city tough guy comes to a small Minnesota town to settle a deadly fight between the local crime boss and his chief rival - his son.