Showing results by narrator "Elizabeth Wiley" in All Categories

Why do some Americans find pleasure in sleeping outside, particularly when so many others, past and present, have had to do so for reasons other than recreation? Never only a vacation choice, camping has been something people do out of dire necessity and as a tactic of political protest. Yet the dominant interpretation of camping as a modern recreational ideal has obscured the connections to these other roles. Camping Grounds rediscovers unexpected and interwoven histories of sleeping outside.

England, 1895. Louisa West, a young beauty from Boston, looks like she has it all: a handsome husband in Henry, she is lady of Ashworth Manor, and one day she’ll be a duchess. But in truth, her life is falling apart. Louisa’s honeymoon is barely over when her husband deserts her, leaving her devastated and alone. She flees to Paris, longing to escape her grief, but finds only tragedy....

As her Pappi fights to save his family during the Holocaust, Irene's childhood is lost. Play is restricted. Family and friends disappear. Finally, with the Dutch police at their door comes the reality that Irene's father has not moved his family far enough from Hitler's Germany. By January 1945, the family is struggling to survive a death camp. Irene's first-person memoir, Shores Beyond Shores, is an account of how the heart keeps its common humanity in the most inhumane and turbulent of times.

Josie Posey and her posse of Mahjong Mavens are at it again, in this cozy mystery where the retired big city crime reporter turned small town crime solver uncovers another murder in picturesque English Village. When the clockmaker's daughter returns home for a visit, reporter Josie Posey is assigned the task of interviewing the talented watch designer. That very afternoon the young woman falls from a ladder while inventorying antique clocks.

Zander - the most feared of all the Eternal Guardians. It's rumored he can't be killed, and he always fights like he has nothing to lose. But as a descendant of the famed hero Achilles, he's got to have a vulnerability . . . somewhere. Forces of daemons are gathering and have broken through the barriers of the Underworld. Now more than ever the Eternal Guardians are needed to protect both their own realm and the humans.

Orpheus has just one goal: To rescue his brother from the underworld. He's not expecting a woman to get in the way. Especially not a Siren as gorgeous as Skyla. He has no idea she's an assassin sent by Zeus to seduce, entrap, and ultimately destroy him. Yet Skyla herself might have the most to lose. There's a reason Orpheus feels so familiar to her, a reason her body seems to crave him...The truth could reveal a deadly secret as old as the Eternal Guardians themselves.

Diane Arbus was one of the most brilliant and revered photographers in the history of American art. Her portraits, in stark black and white, seemed to reveal the psychological truths of their subjects. But after she committed suicide at the age of 48, the presumed chaos and darkness of her own inner life became, for many viewers, inextricable from her work. In the spirit of Janet Malcolm's classic examination of Sylvia Plath, The Silent Woman, William Todd Schultz's An Emergency in Slow Motion reveals the creative and personal struggles of Diane Arbus.

As an environmental journalist and conservationist, Marjory Stoneman Douglas spent her life fighting to preserve the Florida Everglades. Now celebrated as a subtropical paradise with a diverse ecosystem, the Everglades was once considered a worthless swamp. Marjory recognized the wetlands as a treasured river, home to an array of species unlike anywhere else in the world—and she was determined to help protect it.

The young and beautiful daughter of a wealthy family, Ginevra longs to share her poetry and participate in the artistic ferment of Renaissance Florence but is trapped in an arranged marriage in a society dictated by men. The arrival of the charismatic Venetian ambassador, Bernardo Bembo, introduces Ginevra to a dazzling circle of patrons, artists, and philosophers.

A lurid crime scene photo of a beautiful woman arrives on mystery writer Bunny Prescott's doorstep with no return address - and it's not the first time she's seen it. The reemergence of the photo, taken 55 years earlier, sets her on a journey to reconstruct the vicious summer that changed her life. In the summer of 1945, Ceola Bliss is a lonely 12-year-old tomboy, mourning the loss of her brother, Robbie, who was declared missing in the Pacific. One unforgettable August day, Robbie's friend Jay leads Ceola and Bunny to a stretch of woods where he found a dead woman, but when they arrive, the body is gone.

Black Ops - the intelligence arm of the Meridian Alliance Fleet came calling with an offer Henricksen couldn't refuse: a ship - an entire squadron of ships, actually - and crew to command. A chance to get back to the stars. Too bad he didn't ask more questions before accepting the assignment. Too bad no one told him just how dangerous this particular skunkworks project was. They call the ship the RV-N: Reconnaissance Vessel-Non-combat, Raven for short. A stealth ship - fast, and maneuverable, and brutal as hell.

In the next decade and a half, China and India will become two of the world's indispensable powers - whether they rise peacefully or not. During that time, Asia will surpass the combined strength of North America and Europe in economic might, population size, and military spending. Both India and China will have vetoes over many international decisions, from climate change to global trade, human rights, and business standards.

Ever since his cousin Adelaide disappeared, Cole Cameron has been searching for her and for Isaiah Jones, whom he blames for her kidnapping, after a hellacious fight in town involving - if the stories of drunken saloon goers were to be believed - men who changed into wolves. Being a practical man, Cole doesn't believe it.

Then he is rescued from a pack of strangely intelligent wolves by none other than his quarry, Isaiah.

Nine years ago, archaeologist Maren Hudson lost everything when a member of her team was killed during a routine dive. Now she's been drawn back to Mexico and the career she walked away from in order to protect the most precious thing in the world: her daughter. One desperate phone call brings salvage expert Thad Leighton back to Mexico. For his murdered brother, he's ready to settle the score, but one look at Maren and everything changes. Years may have passed, but she's still as mesmerizing as she once was.

Damon: For 25 years he's served as a plaything for the gods. With no memory of his past, he has no way of knowing if this is his ultimate fate, but he senses there has to be more to life. Damon's hope for more comes in the form of the Sirens' newest recruit. Elysia is unlike any trainee he's ever met. Not only can she remember where she came from - an ability the Sirens block - but she has an instant connection to Damon, one he's never before felt and doesn't understand. Soon Damon is willing to do anything to have Elysia. Even risk the wrath of the gods to break her out of Olympus.

Americans' current trust in journalists is at a dismayingly low ebb, particularly on the subject of national and international politics. It might be tempting to look back to the mid-twentieth century, when the nation's press corps was a seemingly venerable and monolithic institution that conveyed the official line from Washington with nary a glint of anti-patriotic cynicism. As Kathryn McGarr's City of Newsmen shows, however, the real story of what Cold War-era journalists did and how they did it wasn't exactly the one you'd find in the morning papers.

A masterful blend of historical and modern fiction by a best-selling, award-winning author, The Best Polish Restaurant in Buffalo chronicles a century of life in America for one humble Polish farm girl and three generations of her descendants in Buffalo, New York.

In Tokyo, Angelica Navarro, a Filipina nurse who has been working in Japan for the last five years, is the caretaker for Sayoko Itou, an intensely private woman about to turn 100 years old. Angelica is a dedicated nurse, working night and day to keep her paperwork in order, obey the strict labor laws for foreign nationals, study for her ongoing proficiency exams, and most of all keep her demanding client happy.

Drew is an army brat, a hotshot athlete poised to be his high school’s star pitcher, when he has to move for the sixth time in fifteen years—this time to West Berlin, where American soldiers like his dad hold an outpost of democracy against communist Russia in Hitler’s former capital. Meanwhile, in East Berlin, his cousin Matthias has grown up in the wreckage left by Allied bombing during World War II, on streets ruled by the Communist Party’s secret police.

When Lise, a pianist, suffers a nervous breakdown early in her marriage, her husband, in a warped act of protection and jealousy, has her piano taken away. With prose that is precise and emotionally affecting, Andrea J. Buchanan vividly renders how Lise's separation from her one source of expression and fulfillment cascades into her relationship with her daughter, leaving a legacy of trauma that echoes through the generations to come.