Mostrando resultados por narrador "Donna Postel" en Todas las categorías

Heavenly peace? No, thank you. Dorothy Parker would rather wander the famous halls of the Algonquin Hotel, drink in hand, searching for someone, anyone, who will keep her company on this side of eternity. After 40 years she thinks she’s found the perfect candidate in Ted Shriver, a brilliant literary voice of the 1970s, silenced early in a promising career by a devastating plagiarism scandal. Now a prickly recluse, he hides away in the old hotel slowly dying of cancer, which he refuses to treat.

Violet Baumgartner has opened her annual holiday letter the same way for the past three decades. And this year, she's going to throw her husband, Ed, a truly perfect retirement party, one worthy of memorializing in her upcoming letter. But the event becomes a disaster when, in front of 200 guests, Violet learns her daughter, Cerise, has been keeping a shocking secret from her, shattering Violet’s carefully constructed world.

Meredith Maran lived a daughter's nightmare: she accused her father of sexual abuse, then realized, nearly too late, that he was innocent. During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans became convinced that they had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy. Journalist, mother, and daughter Meredith Maran was one of them.

In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-20th century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups.

While investigating financial crimes for CNN Money, Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken were intrigued by reports that elderly Americans were giving away thousands of dollars to mail-in schemes. With a little digging, they soon discovered a shocking true story. Victims received personalized letters from a woman who, claiming amazing psychic powers, convinced them to send money in return for riches, good health, and good fortune. The predatory scam has continued unabated for decades, raking in more than $200 million in the United States and Canada alone - with investigators from all over the world unable to stop it.

As a child, Julie Sedivy left Czechoslovakia for Canada, and English soon took over her life. By early adulthood she spoke Czech rarely and badly, and when her father died unexpectedly, she lost not only a beloved parent but also her firmest point of connection to her native language. Memory Speaks combines a rich body of psychological research with a moving story at once personal and universally resonant. As citizens debate the merits of bilingual education, as the world's less dominant languages are driven to extinction, this is badly needed wisdom.

We are out of touch. Many people fear that we are trapped inside our screens, becoming less in tune with our bodies and losing our connection to the physical world. But the sense of touch has been undervalued since long before the days of digital isolation. How to Feel explores the scientific, physical, emotional, and cultural aspects of touch, reconnecting us to what is arguably our most important sense. Sushma Subramanian introduces listeners to the scientists whose groundbreaking research is underscoring the role of touch in our lives.

In the tradition of Peter Matthiessen's Wildlife in America or Aldo Leopold, Brenda Peterson tells the 300-year history of wild wolves in America. It is also our own history, seen through our relationship with wolves. The earliest Americans revered them. Settlers zealously exterminated them. Now, scientists, writers, and ordinary citizens are fighting to bring them back to the wild. Peterson, an eloquent voice in the battle for 20 years, makes the powerful case that without wolves, not only will our whole ecology unravel, but we'll lose much of our national soul.

Stephanie D. Preston explores how and why we developed a surprisingly powerful drive to help the vulnerable. She argues that the neural and psychological mechanisms that evolved to safeguard offspring also motivate people to save strangers in need of immediate aid. Merging extensive interdisciplinary research that spans psychology, neuroscience, neurobiology, and evolutionary biology, Preston develops a groundbreaking model of altruistic responses.

Two very different women with this in common: Each harbors her own secret, her own reason why she can't just let this go. Neither can yield, not before they've dredged up all that's hidden, even if it has the power to shatter all they've built.

Lillian Hellman was a giant of 20th-century letters and a groundbreaking figure as one of the most successful female playwrights on Broadway. Yet the author of The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic is today remembered more as a toxic, bitter survivor and literary fabulist, the woman of whom Mary McCarthy said, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" In A Difficult Woman, renowned historian Alice Kessler-Harris undertakes a feat few would dare to attempt: a reclamation of a combative, controversial woman who straddled so many political and cultural fault lines of her time.

In the title story, a white aspiring professor is convinced she is being followed. No need to panic - she has a handgun stowed away in her purse, just in case. But when she turns to confront her black male shadow, the situation isn't what she expects. In "The Rescuer" a promising graduate student detours to inner-city Trenton, New Jersey, to save her brother from a downward spiral. But she soon finds out there may be more to his world than to hers.

America loves narcissism, and America loves to hate narcissists. Narcissism is part of the assumed “national character” of Americans, according to a 2015 survey of views from home and abroad. While those meeting the criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the United States are actually quite few, those exploitive few have a way of gaining center stage in our culture.

Anxiety looms large in historical works of philosophy and psychology. It is an affect, philosopher Bettina Bergo argues, subtler and more persistent than our emotions, and points toward the intersection of embodiment and cognition. While scholars who focus on the work of luminaries as Freud, Levinas, or Kant often study this theme in individual works, they seldom draw out the deep and significant connections between various approaches to anxiety.

There are disorders that defy treatment with prescribed pharmaceuticals: a man's hands shake so hard that he cannot hold anything; a woman is mired in severe inescapable depression. For these patients and others, an alternative is emerging: deep brain stimulation. In this fascinating and timely investigation, well-known science writer Jamie Talan explains a cutting-edge medical development that is surprising and impressing researchers around the world.

Ned Wallis knows he's forbidden to touch the rifle in the attic. But he can't resist sneaking it out of the house just once. Before he realizes it, Ned takes a shot at a dark shadow. When Ned returns home, he's sure he sees a face looking down at him from the attic window. Who has seen and heard him? Ned's feelings of guilt and fear only get worse when one day, while helping an elderly neighbor, he spots a wild cat with one eye missing. Could this be the thing Ned shot at that night?

In Colorado, a pop star and her entourage are brutally murdered. At first the lead assassin, ex-Navy SEAL Cyril Landry, has no qualms about the killings - it’s just another job for The Shop, a shadowy organization that has hired him to execute people across the country. But Landry begins to wonder why these people had to die, transforming from mercenary to hunter as he delves into the depths of The Shop.Thousands of miles away, in a seedy motel in Florida, a local police chief is found shot to death....

Tell is the riveting story of Major Margaret Witt’s dedicated and decorated military career as a frontline flight nurse, and of her love and devotion to her partner - now wife - Laurie Johnson. Tell captures the tension and drama of the politically charged legal battle that led to the congressional repeal of the controversial law and helped pave the way for a suite of landmark political and legal victories for gay rights.

Nina Godiwalla offers a behind-the-scenes look at the recklessness that ruled Wall Street during the dot-com boom days. But Suits is also a story of the family that Nina left behind: a story of fathers and daughters, the pursuit of honor, swapping your grandmother's shrimp curry for takeout sushi and cocktails. A vibrant snapshot of an immigrant family with big dreams, Suits reveals how much we've been conditioned to trade for success.

Diana Jean Schemo covered the Air Force Academy's sexual assault scandal in 2003, one of a series of academy embarrassments that have included drug use, rape complaints, and charges of evangelical officers pushing Christianity on cadets of all faiths. Today, the institution is in flux - a fascinating time to look at the changes being made and the experience of today's cadets. Schemo followed a handful of academy cadets through the school year. From the admissions process and basic training to graduation.