Showing results by narrator "Suzanne Toren" in All Categories

By beginning a conversation that encourages self-examination and compassion, Combined Destinies invites listeners to look at how white Americans have been hurt by the very ideology that their ancestors created. Editors Ann Todd Jealous and Caroline T. Haskell, both experienced psychotherapists skilled at facilitating dialogue about racial issues, are cognizant of the challenges that even the thought of such conversations often presents. Their book is based on the premise that for positive and lasting change to occur, hearts as well as minds must be opened.

Although betrothed to a wealthy Venetian, 17-year-old Serafina falls for her art tutor, Luca. When this infatuation is discovered, she becomes a prisoner in her own home. But as her family sails to America in 1832, she jumps ship in Portsmouth, England. While working as a chambermaid, Serafina meets sea captain John Falconer, a man on a dangerous mission. As their lives intertwine, can genuine faith and selfless love shield them from the menace of evil forces?

A speeding BMW leaves a dead pedestrian in its wake and leads police to the corpse of a young girl in a cellar. Detective Inspector Irene Huss' ensuing investigation draws her into the chilling world of sex trafficking. One of Soho Crime's best-selling series, Swedish Detective Inspector Irene Huss is another example of why the Scandinavian crime fiction trend is so hot.

Revered SF novelist Catherine Asaro has twice won the coveted Nebula Award. In Carnelians, the Eubian empire and Skolian Imperialate have forged a peace treaty. But when an explosive pop anthem sweeps across the civilizations, unrest breaks out, and renewed warfare threatens to shatter the fragile peace.

How to Do Things is a fascinating window into life in early 20th-century America and was the first work to collect centuries of practical information, neighborly wisdom, and generational knowledge and compile it into one comprehensive volume.

On a June night in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, Marit Deym prowls her land, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the van from the Dangerfield Zoo. When it finally comes - hours late - five wolves leap out onto the sprawling wildlife refuge Marit has created. And then one night, the wolves bring a stranger to her door. A poetry instructor at a school for the blind, Gabriel Frankman lives in self-imposed exile after the death of the girl he loved. He visits her grave every weekend. He carries sunflower seeds in his backpack and his friends are the birds.

In Nothing Like a Dame, theater journalist Eddie Shapiro opens a jewelry box full of glittering surprises, through in-depth conversations with twenty leading women of Broadway. He carefully selected Tony Award-winning stars who have spent the majority of their careers in theater, leaving aside those who have moved on or occasionally drop back in. The women he interviewed spent endless hours with him, discussing their careers, offering insights into the iconic shows, changes on Broadway over the last century, and the art (and thrill) of taking the stage night after night.

Ulli is a young woman, half English and half German, squatting in a dismal, empty Berlin apartment one year after the war has ended. She's scraping together a living as an interpreter between Berlin-based GIs and the wide-eyed local girls eager to meet them. One night Ulli meets two American soldiers: Leo, handsome and ambitious and desperate to escape his small-town upbringing, and intellectual, asthmatic Isaac, whose refugee parents had fled Russia and then Paris for New York. Winter Kept Us Warm follows Ulli, Leo, and Isaac through the next six decades of their lives - from Berlin to postwar Manhattan, 1960s Los Angeles, and Morocco.

A unique analysis of the moral weight of warfare today through the lenses of philosophy and psychology. Philosopher, ethicist, and psychoanalyst Nancy Sherman explores the psychological and moral burdens borne by soldiers. By illuminating the extent to which wars are fought internally as well as externally, this book expands the national discussion about war and the men and women who fight our nations' battles.

The United States' role in saving Europe's intellectual elite from the Nazis is often told as a tale of triumph, which in many ways it was. America welcomed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Carnap and Richard Courant, among hundreds of other physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, and linguists who transformed the American academy. Yet for every scholar who survived and thrived, many, many more did not. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed "not worth saving".

Ellen Cassedy's longing to recover the Yiddish she'd lost with her mother's death eventually led her to Lithuania, and its capital, Vilnius, once the "Jerusalem of the North." As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years after he'd left Lithuania in a boxcar, made a shocking disclosure about his wartime experience, and an elderly man from her ancestral town made an unsettling request. Gradually, what had begun as a personal journey broadened into a larger exploration of how the people of this country.

At the same time as the women's rights convention was taking place at Seneca Falls in 1848, First Lady Sarah Childress Polk was wielding influence unprecedented for a woman. Yet, while history remembers the women of the convention, it has all but forgotten Sarah Polk. Now, Amy Greenberg brings her story into vivid focus in this riveting biography and reveals Sarah Polk's complicated but essential part in American feminism.

Surviving Dresden beautifully portrays the poignant and inspiring human struggle between good and evil in the search for peace during the last bloody days of World War II. On the ground, on that horrific night, is a courageous young Jewish woman, Gisela Kauffmann. Having just received orders to be herded off to a concentration camp, Gisela will do anything to save herself and her family. In the air, RAF bomber Captain Wallace Campbell is torn between his sworn military duty to bomb an unarmed city crowded with refugees, and his growing conviction that total war is immoral.

This Very Short Introduction, written with both humor and flair, begins with a sampling of music as human activity and then goes on to consider the slippery phenomenon of how music has become an object of thought. Covering not only Western and classical music, Cook touches on all types from rock to Indonesian music and beyond. Incorporating musical forms from every continent, Music will be enjoyable for beginner and expert alike.

The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's latest fact-inspired fictions have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters. They cross other borders, too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress. Donoghue describes the brutal plot hatched by a slave in conjunction with his master's wife to set them both free.

Oscar-winning writer-director Max, whose star is clearly beginning to dim, wakes up the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards lying next to his lover and feeling understandably groggy from the previous evening's festivities. But this is no time for Max to lounge about and chat his way idly through a hangover. There's a houseful of guests to worry about, and they all need attention.

In spring 2008, inspired by the Vietnam-era Winter Soldier hearings, Iraq Veterans Against the War gathered veterans to expose war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here are the powerful words, images, and documents of this historic gathering, which show the reality of life in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Though she came from a wealthy and privileged family, Eleanor Roosevelt grew up in a cheerless household that left her lonely and shy. Years passed before Eleanor began to discover in herself the qualities of intelligence, compassion, and strength that made her a remarkable woman. In Eleanor, author Barbara Cooney paints a meticulously researched, lushly detailed picture of Eleanor's childhood world - but most importantly, she captures the essence of the little girl whose indomitable spirit would make her one of the greatest and most beloved first ladies of all time.

At 24, Sally Hobart was a schoolteacher who was living a happy life in Southern California. Waking up one morning, she discovered that a gray cloud had descended upon everything around her. A trip to the ophthamologist’s office revealed that she was suffering from a retinal hemorrhage. Several treatments later, Sally began to understand that soon she would be completely blind. With courage and conviction, Sally has struggled to overcome her visual impairment, and her story is one of great inspiration.

Focusing on contemporary practices, The Culinary Imagination traces the social, aesthetic, and political history of food from myth to modernity, from ancient sources to our current wave of food mania. What does it mean to transform raw stuff into cooked dishes, which then become part of our own bodies; to savor festive meals yet resolve to renounce gluttony; to act as predators where in another life we might have become prey?