Showing results by narrator "Donna Postel" in All Categories

Through deep and thoughtful exploration of diaries, letters, and other personal writings penned during the spring and summer of 1865, Martha Hodes, one of our finest historians, captures the full range of reactions to the president's death - far more diverse than public expressions would suggest. She tells a story of shock, glee, sorrow, anger, blame, and fear.

In 1997 New York City hipsters Lee and Ed were at a crossroads. Money was tight, their careers were floundering, their apartment was tiny, and their relationship, frankly, was dysfunctional. Then, on a fateful day in August, they decided on impulse to visit a nearby animal shelter, just to look at dogs. In a split-second decision that would change their lives, they brought home Wallace. They quickly realized that this spaniel mix was more than they could handle.

After decades making progressive documentary films, Maggie MacGowen did not expect to fall in love with a Los Angeles cop. But Mike Trent, whom she met while investigating her sister’s shooting, is no LAPD stereotype. Tall, with salt-and-pepper hair and a craggy Bogart face, he inspires her to uproot herself and her daughter from San Francisco and move down to L.A. It takes only a week for their new life to collapse.

In 1974, Roy Frady was a perfect cop. Now he's perfect fodder for one of Maggie MacGowen's documentaries. Frady worked narcotics in the 77th Street Precinct as part of a unit nicknamed the Four Whoresmen, a bunch of hard-drinking, womanizing cops that included Maggie's current lover, homicide Detective Mike Flint. They were successful at shutting down the drug trade in their district until a series of brutality charges brought about their downfall.

In Los Angeles making a documentary about upscale daycares, Maggie MacGowen visits MacArthur Park to get complementary footage of the pubescent prostitutes that populate its dark corners. There she meets Pisces, a fourteen year-old hooker with manners that don't match her profession. As they bond over a plate of pastrami, Maggie talks her into spending the night in a shelter. But Pisces comes with baggage: A nine year-old hoodlum named Sly.

In the years after World War II, the airline stewardess became one of the most celebrated symbols of American womanhood. Stewardesses appeared on magazine covers, on lecture circuits, and in ad campaigns for everything from milk to cigarettes. Airlines enlisted them to pose for publicity shots, mingle with international dignitaries, and even serve (in sequined minidresses) as the official hostesses at Richard Nixon's inaugural ball. Embodying mainstream America's perfect woman, the stewardess was an ambassador of femininity and the American way both at home and abroad.

When Maggie MacGowen was a girl, her sister, Emily, lived the life of a leftist radical on the run from the FBI. Twenty-two years after the FBI finally caught her, Emily lives in Los Angeles, a doctor at a free clinic that tends to the city’s down and out. When one of her old radical buddies comes out of hiding and surrenders to the police, their long-ago crimes become front-page news. Emily calls Maggie, now a documentary filmmaker, and asks her to come visit. By the time Maggie arrives in Los Angeles, Emily is nearly dead.

Millard Lacouvy is a short, plain, fiercely independent prodigy in the male world of poker. She learns her craft in Depression-era Vancouver and then graduates to high-stakes games on the Canadian Pacific Railway. When the trains fail to satisfy either her ambition or her need for security, she goes to Bugsy Siegel’s Las Vegas. There she is haunted by the handsome conman she has known all her life, and learns that love can also be a game of chance. Along the way, Pasold gives us a rich and convincing historical portrait of Vancouver and Vegas in the ’40s.

Around the world, thousands of people who've found success in their chosen careers are getting the call to do something more with their lives - to give something back to a world in desperate need of their help. And you don't have to be a billionaire to do so. With Moulden's guidance, you can transform how you earn your daily bread and make a real difference.

Many people enter marriage with visions of "wedded bliss" only to find their expectations, hopes, and carefully conceived resolutions shattered when the dream becomes a reality.

A powerful debut from a new literary talent, this novel tells the story of a Jewish family confronting the tumult of the 1960s - and the secrets that bind its members together. Jackson Sassaport is a man who often finds himself in the middle. Whether torn between Stella, his beloved and opinionated Yankee wife, and Katherine Marie, the African American girl who first stole his teenage heart; or between standing up for his beliefs and acquiescing to his prominent Jewish family’s imperative to not stand out in the segregated South, Jackson learns to balance the secrets and deceptions of those around him.

Mary Arlington only feels alive when she is dancing. The rest of her life, dominated by a violent boyfriend and a mother intent on drinking herself to death, isn’t worth being awake for, but when she dances the tango her troubles disappear. She’s gotten so good that her studio is taking her to the national competition in Ohio, where she will prove to the world and to herself that her hobby is more than a pastime. That is, if she can stay alive until the music starts to play.

Would you drink milk from a cloned cow? Should we clone extinct or endangered species? Are we justified in using stem cells to develop cures? When will we clone the first human? Ever since Dolly the sheep, such questions have rarely been far from the public consciousness. Aaron Levine explains the science of cloning and guides listeners around the thorny political and ethical issues that have developed.

Best-selling author Margaret Thackrey, an ex-Government courier, lives in Oregon with her husband. Now her agent wants her to pen an account of her years in the service, and she agrees, in part to ease her memories of the experience. But Ambrose Decker, whom she'd almost caught assassinating the man he'd been ordered to protect, must eliminate her to avoid being revealed. After causing her husband's death, he chases her from Oregon to her original home on an East Texas farm. There she must finally confront her past - and a determined, vicious killer!

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.

Strength is a wise and profound book that helps women deal with both the large and small bumps in the road of life. Here are over 125 meditations, stories, and musings on becoming stronger, happier, healthier, and more bodacious. The goals are to accept, honor, and activate sacred personal strength and to embrace a wisdom that facilitates change within and encourages (or demands, if need be) the world to become a better place.

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.  

The Galápagos archipelago is often viewed as a last foothold of pristine nature. For 60 years, conservationists have worked to restore this evolutionary Eden after centuries of exploitation at the hands of pirates, whalers, and island settlers. This book tells the story of the islands' namesakes - the giant tortoises - as coveted food sources, objects of natural history, and famous icons of conservation and tourism. By doing so, it brings into stark relief the paradoxical, and impossible, goal of conserving species by trying to restore a past state of prehistoric evolution.

After publishing many books, and after many failed TV opportunities, Bette Roseman finally signs a network contract for a TV series based on her novel The Viagra Diaries and dreams of a hit show. But when WC Network changes her protagonist's age from 60 to 20-something, Bette angrily confronts network CEO Joshua Bitterman. She demands that her protagonist maintain her original age, but he insists the public "wants young". After betrayal, intrigue, and bartering with the network, the impassioned Bette finds herself in the middle of a high-stakes Hollywood legal court battle.  

Public defender Julia Geary moves through life in simmering resentment - at her husband, a soldier killed in Iraq, leaving her a single mother; at her low-paying job; and at her overbearing mother-in-law, whose home she shares. She longs for a breakout case, and it arrives when members of the high school soccer team report seeing a teammate - Iraqi refugee Sami Mohammed - assaulting a girl in the locker room.