Showing results by narrator "Ray Montecalvo" in All Categories

When rookie teacher Todd Hunter greets his first class of ninth graders, he sees in half their faces bedtime stories and good-night kisses, piano lessons and 4-H clubs. In the other half, he sees ducking and dodging, last picked and first kicked. At that moment, Todd decides to make the bruised and beaten half of his class as successful as the cheerful, confident half. Somehow, some way, he’s going to help the pelicans soar with the eagles.

The White Cockade is the story of the early days of the American Revolution and of the men and women caught up in it: Josiah, who doesn’t want war but can’t escape it. Hugo, once Josiah’s best friend but now his bitter enemy. Mercy, who dreams of marrying Josiah. Walter, eager to fight the British. Alice, whose desperate love for Josiah knows no limits. Tarleton, the roguish, womanizing British officer. Patrick, who can solve the most complex mathematical equations while living in his own world.

James Abijah Brooks (1855-1944) was one of the four Great Captains in Texas Ranger history, others including Bill McDonald, John Hughes, and John Rogers. Over the years historians have referred to the captain as “John” Brooks, because he tended to sign with his initials, but also because W. W. Sterling’s classic Trails and Trials of a Texas Ranger mistakenly named him as Captain John Brooks.

The intriguing story of three famous pirates in history - Scarlet Jack, Red Martin, and Blackbeard - as they terrorized a ship, and took the captain and a young family prisoner. How their lives intertwined throughout this story of swashbuckling buccaneers with romance, savagery, and the heroics of a slave makes this story originally told in the 1800s one of the best historical fiction accounts ever written.

Join this bloodthirsty crew of pirates on ships, including their dying declarations of the most brutal and vicious deeds ever set upon innocent civilians and merchant-ship crews. The Demon Rum is cited as the chief cause by one pirate for his awful and murderous acts. Their day of reckoning came when they faced their final day of judgement when captured in Spain.

Bellosio is where destiny and divinity collide on a terrestrial planet where life was seeded by an ancient, ethereal being. This creator, known as the “Cog,” has nurtured three distinct primate species, each with their own path and purpose. Yet, as the unseen Cog is revered by many, skepticism brews among the human-like species, threatening to unravel the fabric of their shared existence.

Walker Monroe, Yale professor, librarian, and expert in ancient languages, gets an unexpected visit from two U.S. Geological Service members. They show him a piece of unknown metal engraved with a mysterious, coded text, and seek his help in translating it.

When Air Force sergeant Christopher Adams finds himself the lone survivor after his forward observation post is overrun by enemy forces in Vietnam, he realizes he only wants to go somewhere he might quietly and peacefully mend his young, torn body and shattered mind. Instead, the fateful-as-they-are-ironic hands of the military drop him onto the world stage of continents facing off in Cold War.

The Revolutionary War is often celebrated as marking the birth of American republicanism, liberty, and representative democracy. Yet for the tens of thousands of British and Hessian troops sent 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean to wage war under alien skies, such a progressive picture, as Vaughn Scribner reveals, could not have been further from the truth. In Under Alien Skies, Scribner illustrates how foreign soldiers' negative perceptions of the American environment merged with harsh wartime realities to elicit considerable physical, mental, and emotional anguish.

Louis "Pete" Rogers Browning was one of the greatest baseball players of the nineteenth century. His skills with the bat made the difficult art of hitting a baseball appear easy. Over his thirteen-year career, he won three batting titles, finished in the top three nine times, and was one of the premodern era's greatest hitters. Browning is recognized as not only the namesake but also the genesis for the famed Louisville Slugger, as the Hillerich & Bradsby Company shaped the first ever custom-made bat based on his instructions.

In the heart of the Amazon, the river runs red with greed. When Caleb Saunders—known only as Corsair—agrees to protect a remote village under siege by a brutal guerrilla faction, he expects a simple rescue. What he finds is something far more dangerous: a hidden deposit of gold that ruthless men are willing to kill for—and innocent lives trapped in the crossfire.

Caleb Saunders, the elusive ex-government assassin known as Corsair, is navigating the shadows, juggling the responsibilities of protecting not only his daughter but also Khloe—a young woman he rescued from the clutches of the mafia and drug cartels. As he strives to secure new identities for Khloe, Corsair is drawn to Cartagena, Colombia, on an assignment for a skilled counterfeiter. However, in this vibrant city, he unexpectedly crosses paths with an old adversary, Minuit, a former DGSE agent with a personal vendetta against Corsair, further fueled by the bounty on Caleb's head.

In 2032, interconnect, an advanced artificial intelligence supercomputer, emerges as a beacon of hope for humanity, promising a utopian future guided by flawless algorithms and 24/7 connectivity to citizens. Jared Rohde, a disillusioned academic seeking meaning, witnesses the disturbing rise of algorithmic control over human behavior. Torn between two realities, Jared experiences psychic turmoil as he's drawn into a machine-curated world fostering narratives of hate and division.

After the tragedies befalling their parents… siblings Grant Wolfe and Charlotte Greene prepare to return to their broken lives, a continent apart. But when a persuasive associate of their late father asks them to track down a precious gem stolen from his estate, the pair are thrust back together in their first paying job as a private investigation team. As they unravel the convoluted secrets behind the infamous jewel, their research leads them to Tanzania and the mysterious East African Island of Zanzibar.

In Richard III’s Bodies from Medieval England to Modernity, Jeffrey Wilson tracks disability over 500 years, from Richard’s own manuscripts, early Tudor propaganda, and x-rays of sixteenth-century paintings through Shakespeare’s soliloquies, into Samuel Johnson’s editorial notes, the first play produced by an African American Theater company, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the rise of disability theater.