Chapter One with Greg Grasso

The subject of the Academy Award–winning documentary The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life, Alice Herz-Sommer was the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor when she died on February 23, 2014. A Century of Wisdom is the true story of her life—an inspiring story of resilience and the power of optimism. ------------------- Before her death at 110, the pianist Alice Herz-Sommer was an eyewitness to the entire last century and the first decade of this one. She had seen it all, surviving the Theresienstadt concentration camp, attending the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, and along the way coming into contact with some of the most fascinating historical figures of our time. As a child in Prague, she spent weekends and holidays in the company of Franz Kafka (whom she knew as “Uncle Franz”), and Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud, and Rainer Maria Rilke were friendly with her mother. When Alice moved to Israel after the war, Golda Meir attended her house concerts, as did Arthur Rubinstein, Leonard Bernstein, and Isaac Stern. Until the end of her life Alice, who lived in London, practiced piano for hours every day.

The year 2012 didn’t mark the end of civilization as many had mistakenly predicted. Rather, it marked a turning point in human consciousness, a shift toward a more humanistic, less violent existence.-------------But not if Arnold Wheeler can help it.-------------Arnold is The Grand Light and Keeper of the Code of the Illuminati, which quietly and covertly control every major development on Earth. He is quite aware of the universal shift in consciousness predicted by the Mayans long ago. With this shift, humanity has the opportunity, for the first time, to reach its full potential. Except the Illuminati have other plans.

Right after college graduation, Costa, a lower-middle-class kid from Buffalo, New York, is drafted into the US army and plunged into the Vietnam War. The Foot Solder catapults the reader back to the conflict that changed America.This is a compelling novella of morality—right or wrong in a split second in the hell of the jungle—when it really matters, regardless of rank, military orders, or rule books. It asks how a soldier survives, how he deals with dislocation, and how he reacts when given an order that defies everything he’s ever believed about the human soul.

Red Dragon Rising: Blood of War, an explosive new thriller from New York Times bestselling author Larry Bond and Jim DeFelice.As depression and drought wrack China, the country’s new premier has launched a deadly war with Vietnam. The assault has left the world on the precipice of disaster….U.S. Army Major Zeus Murphy disobeys his commander and plunges headlong into the conflict, leading the Vietnamese in a covert attack against the Chinese army massing on the border. If the gambit fails, China will roll over Vietnam—and Zeus will lose the only woman he has ever loved, kept prisoner in a secret base north of Hanoi.

In1961, Michael Rockefeller, son of then-governor of New York State Nelson A. Rockefeller, mysteriously disappeared off the remote coast of southern New Guinea. Amidst the glare of international public interest, the governor, along with his daughter Mary, Michael’s twin, set off on a futile search, only to return empty handed and empty hearted. What followed were Mary’s 27-year repression of her grief and an unconscious denial of her twin’s death, which haunted her relationships and controlled her life.

America has enemies--ruthless people that the police, the FBI, even the military can't stop. That's when the U.S. government calls on Will Robie, a stone cold hitman who never questions orders and always nails his target. But Will Robie may have just made the first--and last--mistake of his career . . .It begins with a hit gone wrong. Robie is dispatched to eliminate a target unusually close to home in Washington, D.C. But something about this mission doesn't seem right to Robie, and he does the unthinkable. He refuses to kill. Now, Robie becomes a target himself and must escape from his own people.Fleeing the scene, Robie crosses paths with a wayward teenage girl, a fourteen-year-old runaway from a foster home. But she isn't an ordinary runaway-her parents were murdered, and her own life is in danger. Against all of his professional habits, Robie rescues her and finds he can't walk away. He needs to help her.Even worse, the more Robie learns about the girl, the more he's convinced she is at the center of a vast cover-up, one that may explain her parents' deaths and stretch to unimaginable levels of power.Now, Robie may have to step out of the shadows in order to save this girl's life . . . and perhaps his own.

Lisa Gardner, a #1 New York Times crime thriller novelist, began her career in food service, but after catching her hair on fire numerous times, she took the hint and focused on writing instead. A self-described research junkie, her work as a research analyst for an international consulting firm parlayed her interest in police procedure, cutting edge forensics and twisted plots into a streak of internationally bestselling suspense novels, including her most recent release, Touch & Go.With over 22 million books in print, Lisa is published in 30 countries.

In this episode, Hertog discusses her book Ann Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life. An illuminating portrait of Anne Morrow Lindbergh--loyal wife, devoted mother, pioneering aviator, and critically acclaimed author of the bestselling Gift from the Sea. Drawing on five years of exclusive interviews with Anne Morrow Lindbergh as well as countless diaries, letters, and other documents, Susan Hertog now gives us the woman whose triumphs, struggles and elegant perseverance riveted the public for much of the twentieth century.

In the year since the CIA trained and then unleashed him, Mitch Rapp has been steadily working his way through a list of men, bullet by bullet. With each swift and untraceable kill, the tangled network of monsters responsible for the slaughter of 270 civilians in the Pan Am Lockerbie attack become increasingly aware that someone is hunting them. Rapp is given his next target, and finds the man asleep in his bed in Paris. In the split second it takes the bullet to leave Rapp’s silenced pistol, the trap is sprung and he finds himself in the fight of his life.

A family’s secret, a ruthless fanatic, and a covert arm of the American government—all are linked by a single puzzling possibility: What if everything we know about the discovery of America was a lie? What if that lie was designed to hide the secret of why Columbus sailed in 1492? And what if that 500-year-old secret could violently reshape the modern political world?