Showing results by narrator "Suzanne Toren" in All Categories

It is 1666, the year of the beast, seen by many as the moment the devil will appear on Earth. Science is in ascendance, crowding out other systems of thought. The ancient art of alchemy is in retreat.

Struggling American writer Tim Nolinger pursues his journalism career in Paris while proper Frenchwoman Anne Sophie plans their wedding. When Tim covers the theft of a valuable manuscript, the story leads the couple to the local home of a reclusive American film director and his actress wife. Once there, Tim and Anne Sophie find themselves in the midst of a murder investigation, a French-American feud, and a reckless love affair that threatens to destroy their marriage even before it begins.

Marjan is a poor, crippled orphan girl, but she is happy living with her aunt and uncle in the sultan's city. Her hero is the beautiful Shahrazad, who has bewitched the sultan with her nightly tales and thus keeps him from killing other wives. Marjan wonders what Shahrazad's life is like in the silken rooms of the palace. She will soon find out. Taken to the palace to help Shahrazad find new tales, Marjan realizes that the lovely woman is a prisoner of the cycle of stories.

This Very Short Introduction, written with both humor and flair, begins with a sampling of music as human activity and then goes on to consider the slippery phenomenon of how music has become an object of thought. Covering not only Western and classical music, Cook touches on all types from rock to Indonesian music and beyond. Incorporating musical forms from every continent, Music will be enjoyable for beginner and expert alike.

Beilock examines how attention and working memory guide human performance, how experience and practice and brain development interact to create our abilities, and how stress affects all these factors.

This collection of 11 stories spans virtually the whole of Tolstoy's creative life. While each is unique in form, as a group they are representative of his style, and touch on the central themes that surface in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Stories as different as "The Snowstorm", "Lucerne", "The Diary of a Madman", and "The Devil" are grounded in autobiographical experience. They deal with journeys of self-discovery and the moral and religious thought that characterizes Tolstoy's works of criticism and philosophy.

In Nothing Like a Dame, theater journalist Eddie Shapiro opens a jewelry box full of glittering surprises, through in-depth conversations with twenty leading women of Broadway. He carefully selected Tony Award-winning stars who have spent the majority of their careers in theater, leaving aside those who have moved on or occasionally drop back in. The women he interviewed spent endless hours with him, discussing their careers, offering insights into the iconic shows, changes on Broadway over the last century, and the art (and thrill) of taking the stage night after night.

It seems like every time a new mother turns on her computer, radio, or television she is greeted with news of yet another scientific study about infancy. Ignoring good information isn't the right course, but just how does one tell the difference between solid studies, preliminary results, and snake oil? In this friendly guide through the science of infancy, Science of Mom blogger and PhD scientist Alice Callahan explains how nonscientist mothers can learn the difference between hype and evidence.

The renowned radio host and one of the most trusted voices in the nation candidly and compassionately addresses the hotly contested right-to-die movement, of which she is one of our most inspiring champions. The basis for the acclaimed PBS series.

In this fascinating account, cultural historian Kathy Peiss reveals how book and document collecting became part of the new apparatus of intelligence and national security, military planning, and postwar reconstruction. Focusing on the ordinary Americans who carried out these missions, she shows how they made decisions on the ground to acquire sources that would be useful in the war zone as well as on the home front.

A speeding BMW leaves a dead pedestrian in its wake and leads police to the corpse of a young girl in a cellar. Detective Inspector Irene Huss' ensuing investigation draws her into the chilling world of sex trafficking. One of Soho Crime's best-selling series, Swedish Detective Inspector Irene Huss is another example of why the Scandinavian crime fiction trend is so hot.

Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia. From ideal new cities to a scenic superhighway stretching from Berlin to northern Norway, plans to remake the country into a model “Aryan” society fired the imaginations of Hitler, his architect Albert Speer, and other Nazi leaders.

Recent research suggests there are only six basic emotions. But if that makes you feel uneasy, suspicious, and maybe even a little bereft, The Book of Human Emotions is for you. In this unique book, you'll get to travel across the world and through time, learning how different cultures have articulated the human experience and picking up some fascinating new knowledge about yourself along the way.

Fantasy icon Jane Yolen is adored by generations of readers and listeners of all ages. Now she triumphantly returns with this inspired gathering of fractured fairy tales and legends. Yolen breaks open the classics to reveal their crystalline secrets: a philosophical bridge that misses its troll, a spinner of straw as a falsely accused moneylender, the villainous wolf adjusting poorly to retirement. Each of these offerings features a new author note and original poem, illuminating tales that are old, new, and brilliantly refined.

Based on the acclaimed multi-volume series, City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, Jewish New York reveals the multifaceted world of one of the city's most important ethnic and religious groups. Spanning three centuries, Jewish New York traces the earliest arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam to the recent immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union.

A heartbreaking novel that offers no easy answers, Give a Boy a Gun addresses the growing problem of school violence. Although it is a work of fiction, it could tragically be the leading nightly news story in any community. After a high school shooting at her alma mater, a college journalism student returns home to interview students, teachers, parents, and friends of the suspects. Intermingled with her interviews are journal entries written by the two troubled boys responsible for the shooting.

First came parents with the good sense to flee Europe in 1940 and the good fortune to reach the land of freedom. Their daughter, Ruth, grew up in the shadow of genocide - but in tandem with the birth of Israel, which remained her lodestar. She learned that although Jewishness is biologically transmitted, democracy is not, and both require intensive, intelligent transmission through education in each and every generation.

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the world.... It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits. Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it's the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this 11-by-11-foot space. But with Jack's curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows Room cannot contain either much longer.

Historicizing the much-championed ideal of zero waste, Anne Berg shows that the management of waste was central to the politics of war and to the genesis of genocide in the Nazi Germany. Destruction and recycling were part of an overarching strategy to redress raw material shortages, procure lebensraum, and cleanse the continent of Jews and others considered undesirable. Resource extending schemes obscured the crucial political role played by virtually all German citizens to whom salvaging, scrapping, and recycling were promoted as inherently virtuous and orderly behaviors.

Filmmaker and medical doctor Lena Einhorn uses all her scientific skills to elucidate the true story about the historical Jesus, changing, perhaps irrevocably, the study of New Testament history and the way we see the relationship between Jesus and the apostle Paul.