Showing results by narrator "Gabra Zackman" in All Categories

On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel—the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done before: she charged a gentleman with rape. Her accusation sparked a raw courtroom drama and a relentless struggle for vindication that threatened both Lanah’s and her assailant’s lives.

The galaxy, the multiverse, and the history of astronomy are explored in this engaging compilation of cosmological "tales" by multiple award-winning science writer Marcia Bartusiak. In 32 concise and engrossing essays, the author provides a deeper understanding of the nature of the universe and those who strive to uncover its mysteries. Bartusiak shares the back stories for many momentous astronomical discoveries, including the contributions of such pioneers as Beatrice Tinsley and her groundbreaking research in galactic evolution.

There are only three things that were ever important to Noel Townsend - love, family, and magic. Two out of three aren’t bad. She’s blessed with a large close-knit family and her magic has never been stronger. But love? That ended three years ago when her husband walked out on her and her daughter, and never looked back. These days Noel only has room in her pieced-together heart for her six-year-old daughter. But when Drew Baker shows up on the doorstep of her inn with news of her husband, fate has other plans.

Catherine Edilean Harcourt has no lack of suitors at home in Virginia, waiting to fulfill her dream of marriage and family. But Cay’s adventurous spirit, fostered by growing up with her three brothers, is piqued while visiting her godfather in South Carolina. Bedridden with a broken leg, he asks Cay to fill in for him on an urgent task: on her way to a fancy dress ball, she must deliver a packed horse to an old friend’s son - who also happens to be an escaped convict charged with murdering his wife!

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.

Gemma Ranford wants the job cataloging the documents of the Frazier family so much that she is ready to do battle to get it. Fascinated with history, and desperately trying to finish her dissertation, she's hoping against all hope that the papers will yield new information to invigorate her research. What she didn't expect to find is references to the Heartwishes Stone - believed by most to be pure legend - and said to grant wishes to anyone named Frazier. As Gemma learns more about the family - and even begins falling in love with the eldest son, Colin - it becomes clear that their wishes are actually granted.

Jade Calhoun was never fond of her empath abilities. Now she’s discovered she has another gift she’d rather not unwrap - magic. But when her mentor, Bea, becomes gravely ill and insists Jade’s the only one who can help, she’s forced to embrace her witchy side. It’s too bad she spent a decade shunning the magical community and never learned to harness her powers. Because time’s run out. A trapped spirit has revealed a clue to Jade’s long-lost mother. The resident angel has gone rogue and disappeared with Jade’s boyfriend, Kane.

Ever since being kidnapped from the Illiais Jungle as a child, Yelena Zaltana's life has been fraught with peril. But the recent loss of her Soulfinding abilities has endangered her more than ever before. As she desperately searches for a way to reclaim her magic, her enemies are closing in, and neither Ixia nor Sitia is safe for her anymore. Especially since the growing discord between the two countries and the possibility of a war threaten everything Yelena holds dear.

A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are crucial to the earth’s survival, and in four illuminating parts, Proulx documents their systemic destruction in pursuit of profit. Proulx describes the fens of 16th-century England, Canada’s Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire, and America’s Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.

Peggy and Pam were two desperately disorganized sisters. They started each day with the best of intentions but they never made it because they were "Sidetracked Home Executives" caught in the disorder of misplaced priorities, half-completed chores, and undirected energies - two smart ladies who'd never used their heads when coping with their homes.

Sumner Murray Redstone, once feared as the “mad genius” of media who would dump his CEOs for mere wobbles in his companies’ stock price, had built one of the world’s greatest media empires through a series of audacious takeovers constructed to ensure that he always maintained control. Today he controls 80 percent of the voting shares of both Viacom and CBS, meaning that on a whim he could replace the entire boards of two public companies with a combined value of $40 billion.

State Secrets: Secret Service agent David Goddard never expected to spend his Christmas surveilling the president's cousin. But after weeks of studying her, he finds that Holly Llewellyn's life continues to remain a mystery. Tangled in the controversy swirling around them, David wonders, is it her secrets that fascinate him…or Holly herself? The Five Days of Christmas: Morgan Trayhern's toughest mercenary, Colt Hamlin, is looking to lie low this Christmas, but he may just have a change of heart when his matchmaking boss puts him in the path of Montana's prettiest widow.

An updated third edition of the renowned feminist’s most diverse and timeless collection of essays, with a new foreword written by Emma Watson and new material written and read by Gloria Steinem.

In this six-week foundational program, you will learn how to cleanse your liver, neutralize environmental pollution, revitalize your energy, and return to a balanced state of health using solely nontoxic, inexpensive, and natural protocols. With nourishing recipes, therapeutic baths, and gentle homeopathic and household remedies, Harmonic Healing helps clear the path for your journey back to health and well-being.

We know the universe had a beginning. With the Big Bang, it expanded from a state of unimaginable density to an all-encompassing cosmic fireball to a simmering fluid of matter and energy, laying down the seeds for everything from black holes to one rocky planet orbiting a star near the edge of a spiral galaxy that happened to develop life as we know it. But what happens to the universe at the end of the story? And what does it mean for us now?

#1 New York Times best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Anthony Doerr brings his“stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) to selecting The Best American Short Stories 2019. Doerr and the series editor, Heidi Pitlor, winnow down twenty stories out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

When her earliest childhood friend is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Becker sets off on a quest to immerse herself in what it means to be mortal. Can we live our lives more fully knowing some day we will die? With a keen eye toward that which makes life worth living, interfaith minister, mom, and perpetual seeker Barbara Becker recounts stories where life and death intersect in unexpected ways.

"In this fifth and final (I swear!) audiobook in my saga of secrets, a class trip to the local natural history museum turns dangerous, or perhaps deadly - and I don't mean in the bored-to-death way - when Cass accidentally breaks a finger off a priceless mummy. Forced to atone for this "crime" of vandalization, Cass and her friends Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji go to work for the mummy exhibit's curator, only to be blamed when the mummy disappears."

The lives of the three Emery sisters were changed forever when Alex found their mother drowned in the bathtub of their home. After their mother’s suicide, the girls’ father shut down emotionally, leaving Alex responsible for caring for Colleen and little Riley. Now the girls are grown and navigating different directions. Decades may have passed, but the unresolved trauma of their mother’s death still looms over them, creating distance between the sisters.

When his mentor at Harvard University suddenly leaves for Washington, Paul Cattleman finds himself adrift in the wilds of academia. He's lost his fellowship position for the fall semester, can find work only in what he considers to be intellectual cesspits--schools that would brand the young history professor as forever unsuitable for the Ivy League--and is one thesis short of a PhD. Rather than doom his career, he takes a temporary job in Los Angeles, a city whose superficial charms signal an adventure.