Showing results by narrator "Dina Pearlman" in All Categories

Rachel has just been hired as undercover security at a dog-training symposium at a posh Manhattan hotel. How can the Greenwich Village PI and her pit bull, Dashiell, turn down the hefty fee, plus free room and biscuits at the Ritz? All Rachel has to do is keep the peace among the competitive diva dog trainers who have come with their prize pooches from all corners of the globe.

When Rivkah Milmanovitch arrives at Ellis Island, her husband is not waiting for her as promised. Alone and pregnant, she makes her way to the Lower East Side tenement of an old friend. Lottie Aarons, whose husband went out for a newspaper and never returned, takes Rivkah in and they work side-by-side in dispiriting sweatshops. Rivkah gives birth to a daughter, Mimi, determined that her child will have a better life in America.

In a topsy-turvy ragtime era of side-shows and bamboozlers, Irish Maupin goes from street urchin to burlesque star. Plucked from the streets as a girl and fattened up for candy-factory advertising, she navigates a sensational career around heart-break and loneliness, gaining and losing hundreds of pounds, manipulated by the men around her even as she defies them.

When Jennifer McGaha's grandmother was in her late eighties, Jennifer asked her what her favorite age so far had been. "Fifty-five," her grandmother answered. So, in her own fifty-fifth year, Jennifer began to take note. She jotted down her impressions of simple, everyday things that struck her as beautiful or humorous or intriguing and kept a list of all the accomplishments, large and small, that actually mattered to her. These observations became Jennifer's Joy Document, a radical act of reclaiming joy and an exercise in paying attention.

What happens when a tradition-bound institution encounters an iconoclastic president intent on changing how the government operates? In Disruption?, Sean M. Theriault has gathered nineteen leading authors from a range of subfields to provide a compelling understanding for if, how, and to what extent Trump disrupted the Senate.

Brokenhearted haberdasher Isaac Markowitz has fled the Lower East Side for Israel, where he now assists a renowned elderly rabbi who tends to the hungry and hopeless in his courtyard. Tamar is an American hipster-turned-observant Jew who has come to Jerusalem to find a devout man to spend her life with. And Mustafa, a devoted Muslim, works as a janitor at the Temple Mount, also known as al-Aqsa, a site holy to both faiths.

When Lisa Pratta started her career as a pharmaceutical sales representative, she had no idea of the industry’s depravity, and the endemic sexual harassment, bribery, and fraud she witnessed only got worse over time. Lisa hoped that might all change when she landed her dream job with a small company called Questcor which sold a drug that, when prescribed correctly, could help patients with multiple sclerosis. Yet Questcor realized they could make more money prescribing the drug incorrectly.

Lillian Byrd has been searching her soul after the gut-wrenching experience of killing someone in self-defense. Scrabbling to make ends meet, she takes a job as a quasi-detective, solving life's little mysteries for a pair of eccentric women in one of Detroit's last prestigious neighborhoods. When she spots a corpse on the next-door lawn, she jumps back into honest work as an investigative journalist.

Once again Lillian Byrd is down on her luck, strumming her mandolin for spare quarters alongside Blind Lonnie, Detroit's resident blues guitarist. But a chance encounter with her childhood friend Duane is about to completely capsize her life. One summer night when Lillian was twelve, flames ripped through the Polka Dot, a bar owned and run by her parents. Three bodies were found in the ashes: those of her mother, her father, and the barmaid, Trix Hawley. Or so Lillian has always thought. But when Lillian and Duane put their stories together, the past erupts into a wild enigma.

Hilarious and surprising, this unapologetically Jewish story delivers a present-day take on a highly creative grandmother trying to find her PhD granddaughter a husband who is a doctor-with a yarmulke, of course.

Using Szold's copious letters, diaries, and essays, along with other archival documents, Francine Klagsbrun traces Szold's life and legacy with an eye to uncovering the person behind the Zionist icon. She reveals Szold as a complex human being who had to cope with controversy and criticism, a workaholic with an outsized sense of duty, and an idealist who fought for her beliefs even as she questioned her own abilities. With deep insight, Klagsbrun introduces listeners to this extraordinary woman, whose impact on women's lives as well as on education and health systems still resonates.