Showing results by narrator "Richard Joel" in All Categories

A classic tale that features all the beloved subjects and icons - stagecoaches, gold rush towns, and whiskey bars - that represent the romance and excitement of America's frontier.

In search of a missing treasure, Da Silva returns to an old case. Off the island of Barbados, the crew of a Brazilian ocean liner strains to hear the sounds of Carnival coming from shore. A small boat pulls alongside, and a band of steel drummers offer to play for them. As they make their rounds on the ship, the bandleader slips away. He pistol whips one of the crew, forcing him to open the ship's safe, and escapes before the song has ended, taking half a million dollars in gems with him.

Just after 4 pm on September 6, 1901, 28-year-old anarchist Leon Czolgosz pumped two shots into the chest and abdomen of President William McKinley. Czolgosz had been on a receiving line waiting to shake the president’s hand, his revolver concealed in an oversized bandage covering his right hand and wrist. McKinley had two Secret Service agents by his side, but neither made a move to stop the assailant. After he was apprehended, Czolgosz said simply, “I done my duty.”

As Europe slides toward war, the faculty of a midwestern university fight a crusade of their own - the campaign against Communism. The local publishing magnate has accused economics professor Jonathan Hogan of being a Red, and the scholar is forced to defend himself in front of the university's elders. They spare him, for Hogan is no Communist - merely a free thinker, open and honest in an age when conformity is the norm.

In the heart of South America lies the Pantanal, the largest freshwater wetland system in the world. An area the size of France, most of the wetlands lie in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. Often overshadowed by its more glamorous cousin The Amazon, the Pantanal actually has the greatest concentration of wildlife in the Americas. And environmentalists say it is in just as much ecological danger as any of the world’s rainforests.

A fraud case leads Da Silva on a wild search across Brazil. It's snowing in New York, and Jimmy Martin is pleading for his life. He owes a loan shark $100,000, but he knows he will make his fortune if he can just hop a plane to Brazil. The lender gives him a 30-day extension, and Jimmy is on his way. But he will find Brazil a better place in which to end a life than to save one.

When he isn’t playing softball or coaching Little League, Jim Barry is quizzing his five-year-old on batting averages. He is a persuasive ambassador for America’s pastime, so much so that a foreign neighbor asks him to teach his son how to play. One tragic swing of the bat later, the boy is dead and Jim’s whole world is reduced to an impossible choice: Hand over his own son as a replacement, or die alongside the rest of his family.

For generations, the Sandcrane men have served their tribe as the keepers of the Sacred Arrows. When the time comes for Seth Sandcrane to pass the responsibility on to his son Tom, he waits with pride for his son to assume his place among the elders of the tribe. But Tom wants nothing to do with Sacred Arrows, ancient traditions, and the mystical heritage of the Cheyenne. It is 1896; the nation is growing, and Tom wants a place in the white man’s world.

Collin War wakes up in a bed that is not his own, in a body that feels changed. He is the first of his kind, the first to recover from a mysterious fever that has ravaged the world. Collin awakens in the small town of Goshen, Montana, a community struggling to survive while maintaining a faithful existence. He yearns for his lost family but finds himself drawn to the people of Goshen.

While he worked to expand the Peoples Temple, Jim Jones took a pilgrimage to Pennsylvania to meet God in Heaven.

"...measured first person narrative is packed with interesting details about investigative work and about his home life with Sherry and their young daughters: a refreshing rarity in the genre." ( Kirkus Reviews)

Unlike her brother, Saracasi Ocaitchi has always known that her loyalties belong to the ideals of freedom and democracy, not the government of the Alliance, and that protecting those ideals would require a fight. But now that the rebellion she has dreamed about has finally begun, she must come to terms with what that truly means: for herself, for her brother, and for all of the people who will die in the coming war.

Original story published in Lariat story magazine - July 1947.

A traveler is murdered in Rio for the sake of a stuffed snake. The man in white has money to fly, but he boards a bus instead. It takes hours for the rickety old bus to snake down the Brazilian coast, and the man arrives in Rio de Janeiro well after midnight. He is on his way to make his fortune when he spots the killers following him and knows is life is through. A few hours after dawn, the man in white is brought to the city morgue.

Two creatures found in the woods are taken in by a troubled couple. McSweeney's is a literary journal based in San Francisco.

Hilarious and heartbreaking, profane and profound, It Takes a Worried Man is the true story of a young husband and father whose life is changed forever by his wife’s breast cancer diagnosis. Following Brendan Halpin’s cranky, irreverent, and lustful thoughts through the diagnosis and treatment of his wife, Kirsten, It Takes a Worried Man is an unflinching and raw look at how cancer transforms a family. It’s also the funniest book about cancer you’ll ever read.

Freud, Dora (no, not that Dora), and surfing’s secret Austro-Hungarian roots.

Why do politicians engage in nasty politics? Why do they use insult, accusations, intimidation, and in rare cases violence against their domestic political opponents? In Nasty Politics, Thomas Zeitzoff answers these questions by examining this global political trend in the US, Ukraine, and Israel and looking at how key leaders such as Trump, Zelensky, and Netanyahu use it. Nasty Politics highlights how it influences the kinds of politicians who run for office and deepens our understanding for why so many politicians now rely on outsized anger and withering insults for political gain.

A gang of assassins draw Da Silva into Brazil's rugged interior. George Chaney may have been raised in the roughest neighborhoods of the United States, but he's never been anywhere quite as dangerous as Paraíso. Although booming with petrodollars, this rugged city in the Brazilian wastelands is still a frontier town at heart. On the run from the mob, Chaney comes here in search of sanctuary. He will find that though the city's name means paradise, its reality is much closer to hell.

A quartet of kidnappers make the mistake of hiring Da Silva as their driver. Chico Xavier needs cash. His father has cut off his allowance, and for a university student with expensive taste - and an even more expensive girlfriend - this is a death sentence. And so he and his friends arrange to kidnap one of their school chums: a fellow dilettante who lets himself be taken in exchange for a cut of the ransom. Two days of criminal behavior, Chico thinks, and they'll all live happily ever after - or die in the Rio sand.