Showing results by narrator "Mark F. Smith" in All Categories

Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen made his name as the highest-scoring ace fighter pilot of WWI. His popular name, the Red Baron, owed to being of minor nobility (Freiherr = "free lord") and to choosing to fly a brightly-painted red aeroplane when camouflage colors were the norm. This advertisement to the enemy brought him frequent combats, so that he liked to claim that he shot down Englishmen before breakfast. When it seemed that he was being particularly sought by crack enemy pilots, the men of his command, Jasta 11, also painted their planes red.

He swore to take a bullet for the President and left it all behind to take a bullet for the American people. Why would a successful, twelve-year Secret Service agent resign his position in the prime of his career to run for political office against all the odds? New York Times bestseller, Life Inside the Bubble is an intimate look at life inside the presidential "bubble," a haze of staffers, consultants, cronies, acolytes, bureaucrats and lobbyists that creates the "alternate reality" in which monumental policy decisions are made.

A breathtaking piece of luck, coupled with an unlikely coincidence, secured by a piercing intellect and curious nature, lead three friends to believe they might possibly uncover pirate gold! With all the insight and reasoning of a Sherlock Holmes, Poe's William Legrand plucks faint clues seemingly from mid-air and carefully arrives at a conclusion of exactly where in the world to dig.Has he reasoned - and guessed - correctly? Or, will the only gold he sees be the color of his eponymous beetle?

White Fang is a novel by American author Jack London (1876-1916) - and the name of the story's eponymous character, a wild wolfdog. The story takes place in Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories, Canada, during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush and details White Fang's journey to domestication. It is a companion novel (and a thematic mirror) to London's best-known work, The Call of the Wild, which is about a kidnapped, domesticated dog embracing his wild ancestry to survive and thrive in the wild.  

Abner Doubleday began the Civil War as a Union officer and aimed the first cannon shot in response to the bombardment opened on Ft. Sumter in 1861. Two years later, after a series of battles (including Antietam, where he was wounded), Doubleday took over a division in the Army of the Potomac's First Corps. These are his memoirs of service in two of the War's great campaigns.  

This is an indispensable guide to physics that offers readers an overview of the most popular physics topics written in an accessible, irreverent, and engaging manner while still maintaining a tone of wry skepticism. Even the novice will be able to follow along, as the topics are addressed using plain English and (almost) no equations. Veterans of popular physics will also find their nagging questions addressed, like whether the universe can expand faster than light.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about 20 years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.

"Tarzan of the Apes" is a novel written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first in a series of books about the title character Tarzan. It was first published in the pulp magazine All Story Magazine in October, 1912; the first book edition was published in 1914. The character was so popular that Burroughs continued the series into the 1940s with two dozen sequels. The novel tells the story of John Clayton, born in the Western coastal jungles of equatorial Africa to a marooned couple from England.

"The Mysterious Island" (French: "L'île mystérieuse") is a novel by Jules Verne, published in 1874. The novel is a crossover sequel to Verne's famous "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea" and "In Search of the Castaways", though thematically it is vastly different from those books. An early draft of the novel, initially rejected by Verne's publisher and wholly reconceived before publication, was titled "Shipwrecked Family: Marooned With Uncle Robinson".

"The Wind in the Willows" is a classic of children's literature by Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow moving and fast paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animal characters in a pastoral version of England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie and celebrated for its evocation of the nature of the Thames valley. The classic story of how Rat, Mole, and the other river bankers saved Toad from his excesses.

The novel tells the story of a journey to the moon undertaken by the two protagonists: a businessman narrator named Mr. Bedford and Mr. Cavor, an eccentric scientist. Bedford and Cavor discover that the moon is inhabited by a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilization of insect-like creatures they call "Selenites". 

When the first Martian capsule lands, Alex Smith is drawn to the scene out of curiosity and wonder. But soon he must flee, when the great alien striders begin devastating the countryside and harvesting the living bodies of men and women to drain their blood. Smith wanders south, being drafted into the Army, witnessing major battles between the Martians and the American troops, and following the trail of destruction all the way to San Francisco. There he finds a city deserted of human life. Mankind seems doomed, unless... A grand science-fiction adventure, inspired by H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

"Captains Courageous" is an 1897 novel by Rudyard Kipling that follows the adventures of fifteen year old Harvey Cheyne Jr., the arrogant and spoiled son of a railroad tycoon. The novel originally appeared as a serialization in McClure's, beginning with the November 1896 edition.

Dr. Watson chronicles here some of the more interesting detective cases that he and his good friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, have encountered during their association. We see the cases unfold as he does, scratch our heads as does he while the evidence is collected, and then marvel at the impeccable observations, remarkable insight, and doggedness which Holmes displays as he teases apart the tangled clues.

Three years after the events that took place in "The Lost World", Professor Challenger urgently summons his fellow explorers to a meeting. Oddly, he requires each to bring an oxygen cylinder with him. What he soon informs them is that from astronomical data and just received telegraphs of strange accidents on the other side of the world, he has deduced that the Earth is starting to move through a region of space containing something poisonous to humankind.

Time agents Ross Murdock and Eveleen Riorden are recalled from their honeymoon to take part in a dangerous assignment: find a team of Russian scientists who have vanished without a trace from a research mission in the past of a far-off planet. Along with a team of Russian time agents with their own mysterious agenda and Saba, a new agent teamed with Gordon Ashe, they leap into the alien world's distant history.

At fifty degrees below zero, your spit freezes instantly upon hitting the ground. At seventy-five below zero, it freezes in mid-air. If you get wet at that temperature you need to know one thing, and know it very well - how to build a fire.

It's a good thing that Time Agents are intensively trained. When Ross Murdock and Gordon Ashe set up a time gate on the alien world of Hawaika for an exploration into its troubling past, they didn't anticipate that a storm would sweep them and their helper Karara Trehern and her two dolphins through it unprepared...and then collapse the gate. Trapped in a time of sword-and-spear technology, they rapidly discover that each of the world's cultures appear to be trying to wipe one another out.

The Western Conference discovers the Reds have stolen their alien-source data on a colonizable planet...and so must rush their plans for an expedition. When their spaceship crashes on Topaz, Travis Fox and his party of modern Apache Indians, reverted to their tribal ancestral memories, find they have already been beaten there. And they must deal with more than Reds - for the Reds have brought along reverted members of Ghenghis Khan's Mongol Horde!

The Communist Manifesto (originally Manifesto of the Communist Party) is an 1848 political pamphlet by the German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London (in German as "Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei") just as the revolutions of 1848 began to erupt, the Manifesto was later recognized as one of the world's most influential political documents. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and then-present) and the conflicts of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms.