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.

Brand-new stories by: Daniel Woodrell, Matthew Eck, Catherine Browder, Nancy Pickard, John Lutz, J. Malcolm Garcia, Kevin Prufer, Linda Rodriguez, Nadia Pflaum, Phong Nguyen, Andres Rodriguez, and others. Kansas City: where East and West collide, where naked ambition meets broken dreams, where blues and the night go together like rye whiskey, vermouth, and bitters. Yes, Kansas City is a surprising place of grit, gore, and betrayal, at least in the imaginations of our diverse lineup of contributors.

Focusing on contemporary practices, The Culinary Imagination traces the social, aesthetic, and political history of food from myth to modernity, from ancient sources to our current wave of food mania. What does it mean to transform raw stuff into cooked dishes, which then become part of our own bodies; to savor festive meals yet resolve to renounce gluttony; to act as predators where in another life we might have become prey?

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.

Sally Hobart Alexander continues the story of her journey into blindness in this uplifting tale of a life rebuilt and love renewed. Suzanne Toren’s perceptive narration perfectly expresses the emotions of Sally’s sometimes fun, often arduous, and always interesting journey. Also available is Taking Hold, My Journey Into Blindness, which tells the first half of Sally’s story.

Sure to enchant fans of the Lemony Snicket series, this wonderful sequel to Peppermints in the Parlor is an exciting tale that follows the adventures of young orphan Emily Luccock. Finally free from a dark and dangerous boarding school, Emily learns that she is to be sent away again. Award-winning author Barbara Brooks Wallace has written many suspenseful books for children, including Sparrows in the Scullery.

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.

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.

Inspired by her in-laws' recollections of working in coal country, Susan Campbell Bartoletti has gathered the voices of men, women, and children who immigrated to and worked in northeastern Pennsylvania at the turn of the century. The story that emerges is not just a story of long hours, little pay, and hazardous working conditions; it is also the uniquely American story of immigrant families working together to make a new life for themselves.

George Stroud is a hard-drinking, tough-talking, none-too-scrupulous writer for a New York media conglomerate in the heyday of Henry Luce. One day, before heading home to his wife in the suburbs, Stroud has a drink with Pauline, the beautiful girlfriend of his boss, Earl Janoth. Things happen. The next day Stroud escorts Pauline home, leaving her off at the corner just as Janoth returns from a trip. The day after that, Pauline is found murdered in her apartment.

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.

What does it mean to be a Jewish woman in America? In a gripping historical narrative, Pamela S. Nadell weaves together the stories of a diverse group of extraordinary people - from the colonial-era matriarch Grace Nathan and her great-granddaughter, poet Emma Lazarus, to labor organizer Bessie Hillman and the great justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to scores of other activists, workers, wives, and mothers who helped carve out a Jewish American identity.

1952. Millers Kill Police Chief Harry McNeil is called to a crime scene where a woman in a party dress has been murdered with no obvious cause of death. 1972. Millers Kill Police Chief Jack Liddle is called to a murder scene of a woman that's very similar to one he worked as a trooper in the '50s. The only difference is this time, they have a suspect. Young Vietnam War veteran Russ van Alstyne found the body while riding his motorcycle and is quickly pegged as the prime focus of the investigation.

From your front door to your final destination - and back - Tips for the Savvy Traveler is the one guide no traveler should be without. You'll learn about the essential items that can't be left behind, as well as last-minute details that ensure a well-planned trip.

Most popular accounts of the Holocaust typically cast Jewish victims as meek and ask, "Why didn't Jews resist?" But we know now that Jews did resist, staging armed uprisings in ghettos and camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. In Hope and Honor, Rachel L. Einwohner illustrates the dangers in attempting resistance under unimaginable conditions and shows how remarkable such resistance was. She draws on oral testimonies, published and unpublished diaries and memoirs, and other written materials produced both by survivors and those who perished.

Ten-year-old Alice is moving for the eleventh time. She’s lived in so many houses, each more broken than the last, that home to Alice is nothing more than a place you fix and then a place you leave. After all, who needs a permanent home when you’re a whiz at fixing things? But when Alice arrives at her new home, she can’t take her eyes off the house next door, the stately dark house that hulked in the dimming light. The once-grand mansion, now dilapidated and condemned, beckons Alice; it's the perfect new repair job!

How does witnessing a crime change a person? This powerful collection of stories by a star-studded roster of contributors examines this very question.

On Halloween eve 1938, people across America gathered around the radio to listen to their favorite Sunday evening program. Expecting to hear the latest drama from Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre, many were alarmed when news bulletins interrupted the show. New Jersey had been rocked by mysterious explosions. The announcements continued, each more frantic than the last. An invading army's strange and powerful weapons had killed thousands. Listeners feared the worst. Was America under attack by the Germans? Could this be the start of another world war?