Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Art & Literature

Throughout her life, Alexandra Penney's worst fear was becoming a bag lady. Even as she worked several jobs while raising a son as a single mother, wrote a multimillion-dollar best-selling advice book, and became editor in chief of Self magazine, she was haunted by the image of herself alone, bankrupt, and living on the street. And then, one day, that's exactly what happened.

A major, best-selling novelist and former magazine editor, long married to a handsome and successful stockbroker with whom she has a beautiful daughter and son, Benilde Little once had every reason to feel on top of the world. But as illness, the aging of her parents, and other hurdles interrupted her seemingly perfect life, she took a tailspin into a pit of clinical depression. Told in her own fearless and wise voice, Welcome to My Breakdown chronicles a cavern of depression so dark that Benilde didn't know if she'd ever recover.

> Little Women's "Marmee" is one of the most recognizable mothers in American literature. But the real woman behind the fiction - Louisa May Alcott's own mother, Abigail - has for more than a century remained shrouded in mystery. Scholars believed that her papers were burned by her daughter and husband, as they claimed, and that little additional information survived. Until now.

CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier battled back from critical injuries sustained in a Baghdad bombing, a prominent incident that claimed the lives of her two crew members, an Army officer, and his interpreter. In Breathing the Fire, Dozier offers a personal memoir of tenacity as well as dedication and drama.

In this entertaining and intimate memoir, the woman known by fans as "The Notorious P. A. B." reveals why she walked away from her TV news career after three decades. Patti Ann Browne also shares funny and poignant stories of her life off camera—from how she met her husband four years after turning down a blind date with him, to her son's near-death shortly after his premature birth and how it changed her perspective on life. Patti Ann's uplifting story is one of following your heart, owning your mistakes, living with integrity, and leaving the rest to God.

For more than 70 years, Gifford's Ice Cream and Candy Company was associated with nothing but pleasure for native Washingtonians and visitors to the nation's capital. But behind the iconic business's happy facade lay elaborate schemes, a crushing bankruptcy, two million dollars of missing cash, and a tragic suicide. As the last Gifford heir unfolds his story with remarkable immediacy and candor, he reveals the byzantine betrayals and intrigue rooted in the company from its modest beginnings - dark influences that would ultimately destroy the legendary Gifford business.

A veteran of the Washington Post and Miami Herald, Tom Shroder has made a career of investigative journalism and human-interest stories. His most fascinating reporting, however, comes from within his own family: Shroder's grandfather, MacKinlay Kantor, was the world-famous author of Andersonville, the seminal novel of the Civil War. As a child, Shroder was in awe of the larger-than-life character.

The Life of the Author: William Shakespeare delivers a fresh and exciting new take on the life of William Shakespeare, offering listeners a biography that brings to the foreground his working life as a poet, playwright, and actor. It also explores the nature of his relationships with his friends, colleagues, and family and asks important questions about the stories we tell about Shakespeare based on the evidence we actually have about the man himself.

When even his friends refer to him in print as "a balding, bug-eyed opportunist with the looks of a beach ball, the charisma of a glove-puppet, and an ego the size of a Hercules supply plane", the odds of Toby Young scoring, in any sense, appear to be slim. But then How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, his account of the five years he spent trying (and failing) to take Manhattan, improbably catapults Toby to best sellerdom, and his book is translated into 12 languages, including American.

Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new audiobook, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code?

It is hard to overstate the role that John Milton played in the historical, political, and literary controversies of 17th-century England; his writings and very life challenged the status quo. This fascinating new biography is divided into two parts. The first separates the man from the myth, and elucidates the complicated details of Milton's life from his early years as a literary artist uncertain of his destiny, through his work as a propagandist for the Cromwellian republic, to his rewriting of the Old Testament story of the Fall.

The life of Sir Harry Perry Robinson (1859-1930) unfolds like a Boy's Own adventure. Born in India and educated at Oxford, Harry fled to the United States to make his name and fortune. After a stint in the gold mines of the American West, he became a major force in the railroad industry and helped to elect a US president. Returning to England, Harry had a celebrated career as a book publisher and as a journalist for the Times, serving as the oldest correspondent during the First World War and going on to have one of the scoops of the century.

World famous at twenty-four, brilliant and reckless, hard-living and scandalous, Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage before he ever experienced war first-hand.

Mark Twain's lifetime spans America's era of greatest economic growth. And Twain was an active, even giddy, participant in all the great booms and busts of his time, launching himself into one harebrained get-rich-quick scheme after another. But far from striking it rich, the man who coined the term "Gilded Age" failed with comical regularity to join the ranks of plutocrats who made this period in America notorious for its wealth and excess.

Daniel Asa Rose was a successful novelist, memoirist, book critic, and columnist for the New York Times magazine, Esquire, and others, when the top blew off his domestic life. His wife of sixteen years wanted out. Before he could slip into depression, doubt, and self-loathing, Dan's lifelong friend Tony made an irresistible proposition: go back to the place where, forty years earlier, their college road trip had come to a crashing halt, T-boned by a woman in the decidedly oddball little town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

Danielle Flood, a journalist born of the wartime love triangle that inspired the one in Graham Greene's The Quiet American, searches for her father after surviving a bizarre youth of privilege, estrangement, and cruelty. As she yearns for her father's love and presence, Danielle's beautiful French and Vietnamese mother leaves her in burlesque house dressing rooms in the American Midwest, in convent schools in Long Island and Dublin, and with strangers in New York City.

In the decades between the Great Depression and the advent of cable television, when daily newspapers set the conversational agenda in the United States, the best reporter in the business was a rumpled, hard-drinking figure named Homer Bigart. Despite two Pulitzers and a host of other prizes, he quickly faded from public view after retirement. Few today know the extent to which he was esteemed by his peers. Get the Damn Story is the first comprehensive biography to encompass all of Bigart's journalism, including both his war reporting and coverage of domestic events.

In The Inconvenient Journalist, Dusko Doder, writing with his spouse and journalistic partner Louise Branson, describes how one February night crystalized the values and personal risks that shaped his life. The frigid Moscow night in question was in 1984, and Washington Post correspondent Doder reported signs that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov had died.

On an island where finding love can be just as hard as finding a dinner reservation on a Friday night, Amy Thomas never imagined a family would fit into her lifestyle. So when Amy finds herself turning 40, moving to Brooklyn, and making way for a baby with a new man in her life, she realizes that starting over may be her biggest opportunity yet. But how do you balance staying out all night dancing with staying up all night soothing a baby? Can a lifelong city girl trade in spontaneity for domesticity? Set amid the backdrop of Brooklyn and Manhattan's foodie scenes, Amy sets out to make her second act even sweeter than the first.

An Oxford-educated scholar of the Middle East and a former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Hugh Pope lived and worked in two dozen countries throughout the region. Following in the footsteps of Sir Richard Burton and Lawrence of Arabia, Hugh Pope's explorations of the people, politics, religion, and culture of Islamic nations shows there is no such thing as a monolithic "Muslim World".