Showing results by narrator "Andrea Gallo" in All Categories

Best-selling author Jeffrey Zaslow is a Will Rogers Humanitarian Award winner and was the replacement advice columnist for Ann Landers in the Chicago Sun-Times. Here he turns his eye to a group of 11 friends who grew up in Ames, Iowa, during the 1960s, a period of unprecedented opportunity for women. What emerges is an inspiring look at the power of friendship to overcome challenges.

If we face America’s racial history squarely, will it mean that the American project is a failure? Conversely, if we think the American project is a worthy endeavor, do we have to lie, downplay, or equivocate about our past? In this book, we use the classical liberal lens to ask Americans on the political right to seriously reckon with America’s deep racial pain—much of which arises from violations of rights that conservatives say they deeply value.

Author of the award-winning novel Finn, Jon Clinch has drawn favorable comparisons to William Faulkner. With Kings of the Earth, he takes listeners to an upstate New York farm where the three Procter brothers live in stasis. When one dies in his sleep, the other two are soon suspected of murder.

In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times reporter and best-selling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an upstanding family in small-town South Carolina. Many of them were doctors, but still, they are struck down by an inscrutable illness. Finally they discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of providential events. Meanwhile science, progressing for 50 years along a parallel track, handed the Baxleys a question - not a cure but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease.

Award-winning author Helen Frost takes us into the breathtaking Alaskan winter landscape in this thrilling adventure with a touch of fantasy. Twelve-year-old Willow - whose heritage is both Athabascan Indian and European - wants nothing more than to mush the sled dogs to her grandparents’ home. After pressing her parents for some time, she is finally allowed to go alone. But when she commits a critical mistake, Willow wonders how she’ll ever make things right again.

Kelly Carlisle was three weeks old when her mother was strangled in downtown Los Angeles, leaving Kelly in the care of her grandfather, an eccentric Englishman who owned a porn store and lived on a boat in the harbor. It is here that Kelly finds a home among friendly alcoholics and the city's forgotten residents. But she can't help but wonder if she is destined to become a part of the dysfunction that surrounds her.

Ranging effortlessly from Christian theology and world history to psychology and pop culture, Oakes takes us on a whirlwind tour of the many abuses of the concept of forgiveness, including the abuse scandals of the Catholic church, the outing of high-profile abusers like Larry Nassar, and white America's obsession with false narratives of marginalized peoples granting forgiveness to oppressors.

In Get It Done, psychologist and behavioural scientist Ayelet Fishbach presents a new theoretical framework for self-motivated action, explaining how to identify the right goals, attack the ‘middle problem’, battle temptations, use the help of others around you and so much more.

In The Four Threats, Lieberman and Mettler explore five historical episodes when democracy in the United States was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound, even fatal, damage to the American democratic experiment, and on occasion antidemocratic forces have prevailed. From this history, four distinct characteristics of democratic disruption emerge. Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power...have threatened the survival of the republic.

Best known for her debut novel, How to Be an American Housewife, Margaret Dilloway is a John Gardner Fiction Book Award finalist. In The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns, 36-year-old Gal Garner lives according to a strict plan. Only happy when caring for her roses, she dreams of one day bringing her own variety to market. But when her teenage niece arrives for an unexpected visit, the organization of Gal’s life evaporates.

Reputation touches almost everything, guiding our behavior and choices in countless ways. But it is also shrouded in mystery. Why is it so powerful when the criteria by which people and things are defined as good or bad often appear to be arbitrary? Why do we care so much about how others see us that we may even do irrational and harmful things to try to influence their opinion? In this engaging book, Gloria Origgi draws on philosophy, social psychology, sociology, economics, and more to offer an illuminating account of an important yet oddly neglected subject.

After Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor, over 100,000 Japanese Americans were ordered to leave their homes. The government was afraid that because they looked like “the enemy,” they might be spies. One American, librarian Clara Breed, was heartbroken and outraged. As the San Diego Public Library’s Children’s Librarian, Miss Breed was close to many of the children who were evacuated. She went to the train station the day they left, handing out postcards and telling them to send her letters.

As the FDA medical officer charged with reviewing Merrell Pharmaceutical’s application for approval in 1960–1961, Kelsey was unconvinced that there was sufficient evidence of the drug’s efficacy and safety. Despite substantial pressure, she held her ground for nineteen months while the extent of the drug’s worldwide damage became known—thousands of stillborn babies, as well as at least 10,000 children across forty-six countries born with severe deformities such as missing limbs, arms, and legs that resembled flippers, and improperly developed eyes, ears, and other organs.

The Blue Communities Project is dedicated to three primary things: that access to clean, drinkable water is a basic human right; that municipal and community water will be held in public hands; and that single-use plastic water bottles will not be available in public spaces. The movement has been growing around the world for a decade. In Whose Water Is It, Anyway?, renowned water justice activist Maude Barlow recounts her own education in water issues as she and her fellow grassroots water warriors woke up to the immense pressures facing water in a warming world.

Drawing on deeply revealing conversations with powerful and dynamic women, input from researchers and relationship experts, and her own wealth of experience, Mika helps women pinpoint their individual definition of success. She advises her listeners to define the "professional value" that encompasses their worth in the workplace, and the "inner value" made up of their core beliefs and goals.

Rosa Guerrero beat the odds as she rose to the top of the corporate world. An attractive woman of a certain age, the longtime chief of human resources at Ellery Consumer Research is still a formidable presence, even if her most vital days are behind her. A leader who wields power with grace and discretion, she has earned the devotion and loyalty of her staff. No one admires Rosa more than her doting lieutenant Leo Smalls, a benefits vice president whose whole world is Ellery.

This book spotlights female scientist Temple Grandin, whose experience being on the autism spectrum has informed her advocacy and her work as an animal behaviorist. Temple Grandin's pride in being different and how it shaped her world is celebrated in this biography.

In a world engineered for the verbal thinker, those of us with a visual brain can often be overlooked and underestimated. In this landmark book, international bestselling author and activist Temple Grandin transforms our understanding of how our brains are wired differently. Bringing together cutting-edge research and her own experience as a visual thinker, Grandin reveals a ground-breaking new approach to revolutionizing modern structures such as education, health and media so that they equally serve people with all kinds of minds.

The inspiring true story of the first female pilots taking their rightful place in the exciting world of aviation. In 1929, 19 gutsy women blazed out of the darkness by setting out from California in propeller-driven planes, each competing to be the winner of the first female cross-country air race. The hazards were many, from disastrous weather to possible sabotage, but by facing the dangers with skill and determination, the racers thrilled the nation and pioneered a new future for female pilots and women's rights.

The author of the "dazzling epic" (Lev Grossman, Time) Brilliant delivers an indelible view of the ways silence affects those who seek it and those who have it imposed upon them. Through her original, intertwined histories of the penitentiary and the monastery, Jane Brox illuminates the many ways silence is far more complex than any absolute; how it has influenced ideas of the self, soul, and society.