Showing results by narrator "Suzanne Toren" in All Categories

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.

They were twin brothers, the offspring of Dragon magic, one raised in court, the other in hiding. But, the link that exists between them will not be broken by mere distance, and in the very duality of their origin lies mankind's hope for peace and safety. When two renegade dragons with an army of crazed demi-human/dragons devise a plan to enslave all mankind—an act in direct contravention to all the precepts of the Dragon parliament—it is up to the two brothers (separate and together) and Draconas, the special emissary of the Parliament to ensure mankind's survival.

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.

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".

Jascha and Lilka separately fled from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. Reunited years later, they live in London where Jascha has become a celebrated writer, feted for his dark tales about his war adventures. One day, forty years after the war, Jascha receives a letter inviting him to give a reading in Warsaw. He tells Lilka that nothing remains of the city they knew and that wild horses couldn’t drag him back.

To some, Soren Kierkegaard is primarily a philosopher, to others a Christian thinker or theologian. He was also a perceptive psychologist and incisive cultural critic. But above all, Kierkegaard was a writer. Clare Carlisle’s book tackles eight key questions surrounding Kierkegaard’s multi-faceted thinking, exploring above all his view of the world and how we live in it.

Meet Mother Pig, who is all-knowing and always loving. Then there's Father Pig, who is very clever and very kind. Oliver is the adventurous big brother, and finally there's Oliver's little sister, Amanda, who is just learning how to talk. Join the Pig family and find out how every day can be special and fun!

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.

It swept her from the burning villages of old Russia to the tenements of New York, from the glittering showrooms of Paris to the settlements of war-torn Israel. It brought her marriage to a man who yearned for her sweet, denied love - and passion for a man who yearned only for danger. It gave her a son born of shame, and a daughter born to destiny. It tested her love in the shadow of the Depression and the hell of the Nazi fury...

Movies like American Sniper and The Hurt Locker hint at the inner scars our soldiers incur during service in a war zone. The moral dimensions of their psychological injuries - guilt, shame, feeling responsible for doing wrong or being wronged - elude conventional treatment. Georgetown philosophy professor Nancy Sherman turns her focus to these moral injuries in Afterwar.

In the midst of Sarah and Frank's wedding preparations, Sarah accompanies her mother on a condolence call to the Upper West Side, where the son of family friends has died unexpectedly. The father believes his son was poisoned and would like Sarah and Frank to look into the matter. They soon learn that not everyone wants to know more about Charles' death, and they also discover that they are in the company of a very present danger.

Before performing at a hastily produced Chanukah concert, their star soprano Serena collapses and later dies of heart failure. Undaunted, the choir members press on with their planned trip to Banff and Lake Louise traveling through the Canadian Rockies. It isn't until Serena's best friend Rose reveals shocking secrets about Serena's personal life that Ruby's suspicions of foul play are aroused. And soon she learns the shocking truth - Serena was poisoned!

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.

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.

Robert Prentice has spent all his life attempting to escape his mother's stifling presence. His mother, Alice, for her part, struggles with her own demons as she attempts to realize her dreams of prosperity and success as a sculptor. As Robert goes off to fight in Europe, hoping to become his own man, Richard Yates portrays a soldier in the depths of war striving to live up to his heroic ideals.

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 Romance Reader is her absorbing tale of a headstrong, teenaged girl attempting to live in two worlds: one traditional, one modern. Since Rachel is the rabbi’s oldest child, everyone expects her to set a proper example for other young believers. But at night, after everyone is in bed, she hungrily reads books - forbidden books about romance and contemporary women. She wonders if the life she reads about in those pages actually exists. Do beautiful, daring women really travel alone?

Merle Hoffman's life story is riveting. A former classical pianist, a self-made millionaire, and a feminist who found her life's work providing abortions, she has been a fearless crusader for women's right to choose. Over the years, Hoffman has used her entrepreneurial spirit to build one of the most comprehensive women's medical centers in the country. In 1971 (two years before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion nationally), Hoffman founded Choices, an abortion clinic in New York.

Leading sleep researcher Rosalind Cartwright brings together decades of work on sleep, dreaming, and sleep disorders to propose a new theory of how the mind works continuously. Drawing on her own research and that of others, Cartwright describes how conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings move forward - from waking, into sleep and dreaming, to the next waking day. One main purpose of sleep is to regulate disturbing emotions. Not everyone does this successfully every night.

According to the author of The Rise of the American Corporate Security State, Beatrice Edwards, our task now is to recognize the real reasons to be afraid in 21st century America, and address them. Our early steps in the right direction may be small ones, but they are important. They are based on the principle that we, as Americans, have a right to know what our government is doing and to speak openly about it.