Showing results by narrator "Suzanne Toren" in All Categories

Fred and Lorraine Stone met at the famous Woodstock music festival in upstate New York. And as all couples must, they grew up - just not in the same direction. Now in their 40s, Fred has become Frederick, a sell-out accountant whose last vestige of his free-wheeling years is a vegetarian diet. Meanwhile, Lorraine, who now goes by the name Chandra (Sanskrit for changeable), has morphed into a psychology teacher and animal rights activist.

In Ordinary Love, Smiley focuses on a woman's infidelity and the lasting, indelible effects it leaves on her children long after her departure. Good Will describes a father who realizes how his son has been affected by his decision to lead a counterculture life and move his family to a farm. As both stories unfold, Smiley gracefully raises the questions that confront all families with the characteristic style and insight that has marked all of her work.

John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost is a work of vast brilliance, allegory and philosophy. Its dramatic, sweeping visions of heaven and hell entrance readers. Jessica Martin's brilliant eight-part guide takes the listener through the key theological questions of the poem in a wonderfully engaging style. The How to Believe series of books explores the teachings, philosophies and beliefs of major thinkers and religious texts.

The Book of Genesis sets out the power of God, the creator, and in doing so opens to door on an endless controversy over its interpretation. Jane Williams' insightful ebook explores how Genesis still has much profound use behind the noise and why it remains one of the most powerful texts ever written.

“Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein’s erudite and witty audiobook about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honore de Balzac’s The Human Comedy.

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.

Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother's twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen.

In her critically acclaimed debut story collection, Elisa Albert boldly illuminates an original cross section of disaffected young Jews. With wit, compassion, and a decidedly iconoclastic 21st-century attitude, in prose that is by turns hilarious and harrowing, Albert has created characters searching for acceptance, a happier view of the past, and above all the possibility of a future.

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.

Thirteen-year-old Natalie Gallagher is trying to escape: from her parents' ugly divorce, and from the vicious cyber-bullying of her former best friend. Adrift, confused, she is a girl trying to find her way in a world that seems to either neglect or despise her. Her salvation arrives in an unlikely form: Bridget O'Connell, an Irish maid working for a wealthy Boston family. The catch? Bridget lives only in the pages of a dusty old 1920s diary Natalie unearthed in her mother's basement.

In a world where unemployment is obliterated by putting all jobless people in the military to maintain the endless ongoing warfare, Warrant Officer Viveka Vanachek finds herself in a weirder place yet. Captured, raped, and interrogated she is finally exiled to a remote snow-bound prison camp where she is placed in solitary confinement. It seems like the end of the world when she also becomes too sick to eat, and starts seeing ghosts and hearing mysterious chanting within the noises of the camp.

Acclaimed author Kate Wheeler collected numerous awards for her short stories before making a splash with this atmospheric first novel. It tells the parallel tales of two women who, suffocating in oppressive marriages, travel to faraway lands and are drawn to the intensity of forbidden love. Maggie Goodwin and her husband travel deep into the heart of Peru to establish a health clinic. They enlist the help of political revolutionary Vicente Cruz after determining that the owners of a gold mine are poisoning the local water supply.

On the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards, Max, an Oscar-winning writer/director whose fame has waned, and his lover, Elena, are in bed, still groggy from last night's red-carpet festivities. They are talking about movies, talking about love, talking about the just-begun war in Iraq. But their house is full of guests demanding attention.

If you've ever sat on an examination table and wondered what is really going on in your doctor's head, then this book is for you. New York Times contributor and beloved author Perri Klass addresses the primary issues in the life of any doctor and, by extension, the lives of those for whom they care. She explores the moral judgments of doctors, questions of death and physician-assisted suicide, the daily life of a doctor, doctors as patients, and more.

Three cousins, Lily, Tess, and Rosie, live with their Aunt Lucy in a pretty blue house on Cobble Street. After school, the girls play in the attic while they wait for Aunt Lucy to come home from her colorful flower shop. One afternoon, the cousins decide to build a dollhouse that looks exactly like Aunt Lucy's shop. They make a trip to The Olde Craft Shoppe, where they find wonderful things for their dollhouse: tiny furniture and teapots. Won't Aunt Lucy be surprised when she sees what they have made!

While her 77-year-old husband lies upstairs, dying, Anna Robison spends her depleting energy defending their home. Their three middle-aged daughters and 23-year-old granddaughter have invaded, radiating vigor and good intentions. But the younger women temper their help with squabbling, ill-considered advice, and an abundant supply of their own problems.

Consider for a moment 55 words. It's an absurdly tiny number. It's what O. Henry might have conjured up if he'd only had the back of a business card to write upon. You'll find murder and suspense, horror and intrigue, love and betrayal, plus distant worlds and inner demons. All in a measly 55 words.

In this fascinating account, cultural historian Kathy Peiss reveals how book and document collecting became part of the new apparatus of intelligence and national security, military planning, and postwar reconstruction. Focusing on the ordinary Americans who carried out these missions, she shows how they made decisions on the ground to acquire sources that would be useful in the war zone as well as on the home front.

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.

When Bess Myerson, the Bronx-born daughter of Jewish immigrants, was crowned Miss America in 1945, she was determined to break down gender barriers and be more than a beauty queen. Then, after more than two decades as a glamorous television personality, Myerson took on corporate America, applying her celebrity as a consumer advocate to become an influential New York City political figure credited with helping elect Mayor Edward I. Koch. Then, in her early sixties, she found love with a much younger married man. The romance put her at the center of a political corruption scandal.