Showing results by narrator "Sally Martin" in All Categories

In Erotic Exchanges, Nina Kushner reveals the complex world of elite prostitution in 18th-century Paris by focusing on the professional mistresses who dominated it. In this demimonde, these dames entretenues exchanged sex, company, and sometimes even love for being "kept". Most of these women entered the profession unwillingly, either because they were desperate and could find no other means of support or because they were sold by family members to brothels or to particular men.

History, location, and culture continue to link New Orleans to France while distancing it culturally and symbolically from the US. This audiobook explores the traces of French language, history, and artistic expression that have been present there over the last 300 years. This volume focuses on the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods to understand the imprint that French sociocultural dynamic left on the Crescent City. 

Traveling Heavy is a deeply moving, unconventional memoir by master storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar. Through evocative stories she portrays her life as an immigrant child and later as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. With an open heart, she writes about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family as well as the strangers who show her kindness as she makes her way through the world.

Born in 1927, Nicole Braux's earliest recollections occur in the French city of Nancy, where her father owned and operated a hotel and restaurant. Her charming reflections paint a picture of a romantic culture still wounded by the First World War. Nicole was 12 when her father was recalled into the reserves in 1939. Within months, she watched German troops invade. "We peeked above the window sill and saw them...Our imaginations hadn't exaggerated; they looked as evil, it not more so, than we'd expected!"

In 1823, the History of the Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson rattled Philadelphia society and became one of the most scandalous, and popular, memoirs of the age. This tale of a woman who tried to rescue her lover from the gallows and attempted to kidnap the governor of Pennsylvania tantalized its audience with illicit love, betrayal, and murder.

Whether drinking Red Bull, relieving chronic pain with oxycodone, or experimenting with Ecstasy, Americans participate in a culture of self-medication, using psychoactive substances to enhance or manage moods. A "drug-free America" seems to be a fantasyland that most people don't want to inhabit. High: Drugs, Desire, and a Nation of Users asks fundamental questions about US drug policies and social norms.

Contemporary Dickens is a collection of essays that presents some of the most intriguing work being undertaken in Dickens studies today. Through an emphasis on the 19th-century origins of our current critical preoccupations and ways of knowing, these essays reveal Dickens to be our contemporary. The contributors argue that such issues as gender and sexuality, environmentalism, and the construction of national identity were frequently explored and sometimes problematically resolved by Dickens himself. 

Travelers and traders taking the Santa Fe Trail's routes from Missouri to New Mexico wrote vivid eyewitness accounts of the diverse and abundant wildlife encountered as they crossed arid plains, high desert, and rugged mountains. Most astonishing to these observers were the incredible numbers of animals, many they had not seen before - buffalo, antelope (pronghorn), prairie dogs, roadrunners, mustangs, grizzlies, and others. They also wrote about the domesticated animals they brought with them.

With the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Choctaw people began their journey over the Trail of Tears from their homelands in Mississippi to the new lands of the Choctaw Nation. Suffering a death rate of nearly 20 percent due to exposure, disease, mismanagement, and fraud, they limped into Indian Territory, or, as they knew it, the Land of the Dead (the route taken by the souls of Choctaw people after death on their way to the Choctaw afterlife). Their first few years in the new nation affirmed their name for the land.

In 1876, Poland's leading actress, Helena Modrzejewska, accompanied by family and friends, emigrated to Southern California to establish a utopian commune that soon failed. Within a year Modrzejewska made her debut in the title role of Adrienne Lecouvreur at San Francisco's California Theatre. She changed her name to Modjeska and quickly became a leading star on the American stage, where she reigned for the next 30 years.

Here is a guide to the best sights and adventures in the mountainous regions of Alpine Germany. Based on experience gained through more than a decade of living in, traveling around, and writing about the Alps, we spotlight the best gateway cities, the best sightseeing bases, and the best outdoor adventures. Here, we cover the places where you're likely to end up when crossing the European Alps and the places that you shouldn't miss in-between, even if you have only a few days or a week to spend.

Covered in depth are the Mauresque Coast, including St. Tropez, Le Lavandou, Grimaud, Ste Maxime, then on to Fréjus, Saint Raphael, the Massif du Tanneron, and the Esterel. All the places to stay are described, as well as the places to eat, the history, sights to see, plus adventures on foot, on horseback, and on water.

Emma Prescott, determined and selfless, flees from wealth and her murderous father, seeking the love and forgiveness of poor cotton farmer, Kyle Lonnigan. Although Kyle refuses to forgive her for her part in his father's death, Emma stays and works her own farm. Over the next several months, Emma proves to Kyle she is not the spoiled girl he remembers.

Anne-Marie Oomen uses a wealth of vivid language and personal details to bring scenes from her childhood on a family farm to life in House of Fields. Yet the focus of this book shifts away from the daily activities of the farm, which Oomen presented in Pulling Down the Barn, to life outside its boundaries, as she explores the complex meaning of "education" in all of its rural forms. Oomen's description of the farmhouse where she grew up becomes the central image for this collection of essays.

To her fellow vacationers at the Meadow Spring dude ranch, Kate Weaver was just another tourist. Or was she? Ranch foreman Gil Singleton suspected otherwise. But even he had no way of guessing the truth about Kate, just as she had no way of knowing that she would fall hopelessly in love with Gil even as the two of them fought for survival in Colorado's untamed high country!

When Texas beauty Dahlia Montgomery and her best friend journey to Idaho for a change of scenery for the summer, the last thing she expects to encounter is Luke McRae, a lean, rugged cowboy intent on sweeping her off her feet and into his bed. Dahlia can't resist his rugged cowboy swagger and his sky blue eyes, even though she knows he can break her heart.

While Nantucket has long enjoyed an illustrious position in America's whaling history, Cape Cod's contribution to the industry is relatively unknown, yet it was a Cape Codder who taught the Nantucketers how to hunt whales. In Cape Cod Shore Whaling, authors Duncan Oliver and John Braginton-Smith uncover Cape Cod's integral role in shaping whalefishery, which began along the Cape's sandy shores and evolved into the far-flung whaling expeditions that drove Nantucket's economy into the nineteenth century.