Showing results by narrator "Laurel Lefkow" in All Categories

After two decades of covering riots, assassinations, and urban decay, Kate Osborn comes to Venice, Illinois, to profile Steve Higgins, an old-school Chicago-style politician. Although Higgins hews to tradition, the problems in Venice are thoroughly modern. Student unrest roils beneath the quiet surface of the university, kept in check only by the well-armed campus police, and in town, the white merchants and black coal miners are preparing to go to war.

The island has a way of calling you home.... Ten years ago, Emily Watson was on top of the world: a best-selling novel, a husband plucked from the pages of a magazine, and a one-way ticket to happily ever after. Now her perfect life has crumbled, and Emily is left to pick up the pieces. So when her great-Aunt Bee invites her to spend the month of March on her beloved Bainbridge Island, Emily accepts, longing to be healed by the sea.

In this collection of short stories some of our most popular and well-known authors are grouped together with an unfortunate tag: dead at 44. These authors are not run-of-the-mill or ten a penny; they are literary leviathans who left enduring works of literature and sadly may have left us many more had they lived. We will never know.

What does it mean to be a “woman” in America? Award-winning gender and sexuality scholar Lillian Faderman traces the evolution of the meaning from Puritan ideas of God’s plan for women to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its reversals to the impact of such recent events as #metoo, the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, and the transgender movement.

In 1955 New York City is full of post-war euphoria and glamour, and the Barbizon Hotel - the place where Grace Kelly lived when she first came to the big city - is where young women from good families stay while they launch their careers and wait for Mr Right to come calling with a dozen roses and a date night at El Morocco.

Katie Wells shares the secret behind how she manages five kids and a company without sacrificing her desire to embody a natural lifestyle. With her simple 5-step plan, she'll teach you how to transform your diet, get rid of the chemicals in your everyday life, and organize your time in order to achieve confidence and productivity.

Set in modern-day America and France, Renaissance Italy and Boxer Rebellion China, these stories embrace whole lifetimes, much in the manner of Alice Munro and William Trevor. Joan Silber skilfully and subtly ties one story to the next, as a minor element in one becomes a major element in the next, until the last is tied convincingly to the first. Intense in subject yet restrained in tone, they are about longings—often held for years—and the ways in which sex and religion can become parallel forms of dedication and comfort.

Mikira Rusel’s family has long been famous for breeding enchanted horses, but their prestige is no match for their rising debts. To save her ranch, Mikira has only one option: she must win the Illinir, a treacherous horserace whose riders either finish maimed or murdered. Yet each year, competitors return, tempted by its alluring prize money and unparalleled prestige. Mikira’s mission soon unites her with Arielle Kadar, an impressive yet illicit enchanter just beginning to come into her true power, and Damien Adair, a dashing young lord in the midst of a fierce succession battle.

People don't need to know you're a murderer. They just have to think you could be.... June 1980. Seventeen-year-old Kelly Lund is jailed for killing Hollywood film director John McFadden. Thirty years later Kelly is a free woman. Yet speculation still swirls over what really happened that night. And when her father-in-law and close friend of McFadden is found dead - shot through the head at point-blank range - there can be only one suspect.

Art and life. Each the mirror of the other. This then is the classic definition of what ‘Realism’ as a writing form really is. Some might call it a fancy term for the mundane day to day pursuits but in the hands of an author it comes alive. We are drawn into characters and landscapes that we can empathize with, we can, metaphorically speaking, help shoulder their burden, be on the long trail with them whatever the landscapes, the hurdles, incidents and other people may place in their literary way.

1941. She is a celebrated writer stranded in Paris. He is an enigmatic foreigner with a dangerous secret. Together they must find a way to outwit the Nazis in order to survive. Armed with a precious first edition of Finnegans Wake and an even more precious stash of cigarettes to barter with, Eleanor Gorton Clarke joins the sea of refugees escaping Paris for the Spanish frontier. But when a stranger kills two German soldiers to save her life, Eleanor is forced on the run with her rescuer, pursued by a detective from the Wehrmacht.

Animals make for terrible technology. The technological use of animals - making food, drugs, clothing, and cosmetics out of animal material - will cease. After Meat explains the fundamental limits of animal technology in terms of physics and biology. Replacement technology such as microbial fermentation will surpass those limits. Eventually, we’ll have food that is better in every way - in terms of taste, cost, nutrition, resource consumption, and ethics - because we won't use animals to produce it.

Angel, not fond of people at the best of times and having an identity crisis, is about to meet Zola – a talkative young American girl who makes herself at home in Angel’s tower in a tiny village high in the Swiss Alps. ‘This Zola is a lot bossy,’ Angel thinks. But out of their bickering an unexpected friendship forms, and their teamwork is about to benefit the entire village...

Classic characters are brought to life in these fun retellings. Even the very youngest children want to return to this audio collection again and again. Fairy tales are a vital introduction to the basics of story-telling like setting, characters and plot. They boost a child's imagination and also teach valuable life lessons about good overcoming evil, the difference between right and wrong and the importance of rising to a challenge.

Will Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language. In this brilliantly conceived new novel Self turns his forensic eye and technicolor imagination to the troubled life of his mother, Elaine. Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her husband and child inside her house and wonders: is this . . . it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that places her marriage to an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member in peril.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Fighter for Justice shows young listeners how the former First Lady evolved from a poor little rich girl to a protector and advocate for those without a voice. Although now seen as a cultural icon, she was a woman deeply insecure about her looks and her role in the world. But by recognizing her fears and constantly striving to overcome her prejudices, she used her proximity to presidents and her own power to aid in the fight for Civil Rights and other important causes. This biography gives listeners a fresh perspective on her extraordinary life.

Workplaces have traditionally been viewed as “straight spaces” in which queer people passed. As a result, historians have directed limited attention to the experiences of queer people on the job. Queer Career rectifies this, offering an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce. Arguing that queer workers were more visible than hidden and, against the backdrop of state aggression, vulnerable to employer exploitation, Margot Canaday positions employment and fear of job loss as central to gay life in postwar America.

Whilst Europe endured the Dark Ages in the 6th & 7th Centuries, devotees of Shiva and Vishnu in Southern India were creating the Bhakti Movement. Some of these exponents, as in our volume, were bestowed with the title of saint but some had the additional title of sant, swami or goswami. Broadly speaking, Bhakti poetry, as in Hinduism itself, is divided into ‘Nirguna’, the idea that the divine is formless as exampled by Kabir and ‘Saguna’, which interprets the divine as having physical form as captured by Mirabai.

Heather Shumaker has sparked much discussion with her "renegade rules for raising competent and compassionate kids". In this follow-up book, she takes on new hot-button issues like banning homework, technology use, and skipping kindergarten. Shumaker offers broader guidance on how parents can control their own anger and move from an overscheduled life to one of more free play.

The Italian folklore tradition is one of the most ancient unbroken chains of wisdom on Earth. Discover the previously unwritten secrets of an Italian American family’s magical tradition passed down from generation to generation. This spellbook provides easy, step-by-step introductions to the basics of authentic Italian American magical practice.