Showing results by narrator "Suzanne Toren" in All Categories

A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York’s Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother’s Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler’s deadly path.

In Terror Incorporated, Loretta Napoleoni maps out the arteries of an international economic system that feeds armed groups the world over. Chasing terror money, she takes the reader from CIA headquarters to the smuggling routes of the far East, from the back rooms of Wall Street to hawala exchanges in the Middle East.

John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost is a work of vast brilliance, allegory and philosophy. Its dramatic, sweeping visions of heaven and hell entrance readers. Jessica Martin's brilliant eight-part guide takes the listener through the key theological questions of the poem in a wonderfully engaging style. The How to Believe series of books explores the teachings, philosophies and beliefs of major thinkers and religious texts.

A unique analysis of the moral weight of warfare today through the lenses of philosophy and psychology. Philosopher, ethicist, and psychoanalyst Nancy Sherman explores the psychological and moral burdens borne by soldiers. By illuminating the extent to which wars are fought internally as well as externally, this book expands the national discussion about war and the men and women who fight our nations' battles.

Daniel believed that his parents were enjoying a peaceful retirement on a remote farm in Sweden, the country of his mother's birth. But with a single phone call, everything changes. "Your mother...she's not well," his father tells him. She's been imagining things - terrible, terrible things. In fact, she has been committed to a mental hospital. Before Daniel can board a plane to Sweden, his mother calls: "Everything that man has told you is a lie. I'm not mad...I need the police...Meet me at Heathrow." Daniel is immediately caught between his parents - whom to believe, whom to trust?

My Little Red Book is an anthology of stories about first periods, collected from women of all ages from around the world. The accounts range from light-hearted (the editor got hers while water skiing in a yellow bathing suit) to heart-stopping (a first period discovered just as one girl was about to be strip-searched by the Nazis). The contributors include well-known women writers (Meg Cabot, Erica Jong, Gloria Steinem, Cecily von Ziegesar), alongside today's teens. And while the authors differ in race, faith, or cultural background, their stories share a common bond: they are all accessible, deeply honest, and highly informative.

Polish Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. By using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities, she was the only member of her family to survive World War II.

Oscar-winning writer-director Max, whose star is clearly beginning to dim, wakes up the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards lying next to his lover and feeling understandably groggy from the previous evening's festivities. But this is no time for Max to lounge about and chat his way idly through a hangover. There's a houseful of guests to worry about, and they all need attention.

The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's latest fact-inspired fictions have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters. They cross other borders, too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress. Donoghue describes the brutal plot hatched by a slave in conjunction with his master's wife to set them both free.

Before Amelia Earhart, there was Sophie Blanchard, the first woman to earn her living in the air. While no one knows the fate of Earhart, a terrified crowd of thousands looked on as French aeronaut Sophie Blanchard met her end in a tragic blaze of glory over the streets of Paris in 1819.

Breathing Lessons covers the events of a day in the life of Maggie Moran, nearing fifty, married to Ira and with two children. Her eternal optimism and her inexhaustible passion for sorting out other people's lives and willing them to fall in love is severely tested one hot summer day. Maggie and Ira drive from Baltimore to Deer Lick to attend the funeral of the husband of Serena, Maggie's childhood friend.

In the midst of Sarah and Frank's wedding preparations, Sarah accompanies her mother on a condolence call to the Upper West Side, where the son of family friends has died unexpectedly. The father believes his son was poisoned and would like Sarah and Frank to look into the matter. They soon learn that not everyone wants to know more about Charles' death, and they also discover that they are in the company of a very present danger.

The wife of one of Slovakia's most prominent businessmen is killed in a public assassination, it looks like the bullets were meant for her husband. Could she have actually been the target? Oto Bogan can't comment. Both he and his son have disappeared without a trace. Commander Jana Matinova must push through her own government's secrecy to discover what connects her murder to a man run down in Paris, a dead Turk with an icepick in his eye, an international network of bank accounts, and a mysterious vagabond girl.

She'd been the pampered and protected wife. Now she was a widow with both daughters off at college and she was suddenly desperate to fill her empty nest with something, anything. So when Jill Townsend finds a mysterious key in her late husband's office she sets out to find the door it opens.

Ulli is a young woman, half English and half German, squatting in a dismal, empty Berlin apartment one year after the war has ended. She's scraping together a living as an interpreter between Berlin-based GIs and the wide-eyed local girls eager to meet them. One night Ulli meets two American soldiers: Leo, handsome and ambitious and desperate to escape his small-town upbringing, and intellectual, asthmatic Isaac, whose refugee parents had fled Russia and then Paris for New York. Winter Kept Us Warm follows Ulli, Leo, and Isaac through the next six decades of their lives - from Berlin to postwar Manhattan, 1960s Los Angeles, and Morocco.

Poland, 1943. It was the last refuge of the desperate, a warren of sewers underneath their city. Above, as the Nazis destroyed the ghetto of the city of Lvov, a small band of Jews escaped into a grim network of tunnels, living for fourteen months with the city's waste, the sudden floods, the fumes and the damp, the rats, the darkness, and the despair.

Twenty-eight years ago, Peter and Yvonne honeymooned in the beautiful coastal village of DatÇa, Turkey. Now Yvonne is a widow, her twin children grown. Hoping to immerse herself in memories of a happier time—as well as sand and sea—Yvonne returns to DatÇa. But her plans for a restorative week in Turkey are quickly complicated. Instead of comforting her, her memories begin to trouble her.

Ani Silver is a young American woman whose half-Jewish, half-Armenian heritage seems a mere footnote to her own identity. But when the dark shadows of history insinuate themselves into her otherwise peaceful life, she is propelled into a profound and passionate series of journeys-a quest for a long-dead father, a search for the clues of a nearly forgotten genocide, and a love threatened by a quietly gathering storm of murder and retribution.

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.

According to the author of The Rise of the American Corporate Security State, Beatrice Edwards, our task now is to recognize the real reasons to be afraid in 21st century America, and address them. Our early steps in the right direction may be small ones, but they are important. They are based on the principle that we, as Americans, have a right to know what our government is doing and to speak openly about it.