Cart
  • Sign In
Narrator

Barrett Whitener

Barrett Whitener

  • Travel to other planets is now a reality, and with overpopulation stretching the resources of Earth, the necessity of finding habitable worlds is growing ever more urgent. There’s a problem though—because the spaceships are slower than light, any communication between the exploring ships and Earth would take years.

    Tom and Pat are identical twin teenagers. As twins they’ve always been close, so close that it seemed like they could read each other’s minds. When they are recruited by the Long Range Foundation, the twins find out that they can, indeed, peer into each other’s thoughts. Along with other telepathic duos, they are enlisted to be the human transmitters and receivers that will keep the ships in contact with Earth. But there’s a catch: one of the twins has to stay behind—and that one will grow old—while the other explores the depths of space and returns still a young man.

  • Welcome to a world like no other.

    The Ringworld is a landmark engineering achievement, a flat band three million times the surface of the Earth, encircling a distant star. Home to trillions of inhabitants, not all of whom are human, and host to amazing technological wonders, the Ringworld is unique in all of the universe.

    Explorer Louis Wu, an Earth-born human who was part of the first expedition to Ringworld, becomes enmeshed in interplanetary and interspecies intrigue as war and a powerful new weapon threaten to tear the Ringworld apart forever. Now the future of Ringworld lies in the actions of its children:Tunesmith, the Ghould protector; Acolyte, the exiled son of Speaker-to-Animals, and Wembleth, a strange Ringworld native with a mysterious past. All must play a dangerous game in order to save Ringworld's population—and the stability of Ringworld itself.

    Blending awe-inspiring science with non-stop action and fun, Ringworld's Children is the perfect introduction for readers new to this New York Times bestselling series, and long-time fans won't want to miss it.

  • It all begins when Cosmo Topper, a law-abiding, mild-mannered bank manager, decides to buy a secondhand car, only to find it haunted by the ghosts of its previous owners: the reckless, feckless, frivolous couple who met their untimely demise when the car careened into an oak tree. The capricious ghosts make it their mission to rescue the inhibited banker from the staid “summer of suburban Sundays” that is his life. With their ectoplasmic reappearances and whimsically insane actions, they leave Topper, and anyone else who crosses their path, in a whirlwind of discomfiture and delight. Smith’s hilarious ribald comedy was the basis for a Cary Grant movie and hit television show.

  • Free Air takes one by automobile in search of America, heading toward a West brimming with possibilities for suddenly mobile Americans at the end of a world war. Clair Boltwood and her father drive their Gomez-Dep roadster from Minnesota to Seattle, braving all the perils of early motoring. But the greatest distance to be overcome is the social one between the upper-crust Claire and a traveling mechanic named Milt.

    First published in 1919, with fame just around the corner for Sinclair Lewis, Free Air foreshadowed a genre that includes John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and Josh Greenfield and Paul Mazursky’s Harry and Tonto. The character of Claire, blazing her own trail across the West, looks back to the nineteenth-century pioneer woman and ahead to the independent-minded movie heroines played by Katherine Hepburn.

  • Infinitely absorbing, Bruce Catton’s The Civil War is one of the most widely read general histories of the war available in a single volume.

    “America needed its great war of brothers,” wrote Bruce Catton, “to weld in a terrible fire what had been and what might be. The story of the war needs retelling because it helped to change the future of the human race.”

    The Civil War is America’s great Iliad, and few would dispute that its outcome is evident in most social and political issues today. For a person seeking a single volume to serve as a captivating introduction and a dependable guide through all the maze of battles and issues of the Civil War, this is a book without parallel. Catton understood the Civil War, its participants and battles, and he unfolds it with skill and simplicity, from the early division of the North and South to the final surrender of the Confederate troops. Of all historians past and present, Bruce Catton ranks among the best.