Showing results by narrator "Susan Ericksen" in All Categories

Rainey Bliss Adams desperately needed a new start when she and her daughter Ariel relocated from St. Louis to Old Gate and settled into the house where the Bliss family had lived for over a century. Rainey's husband had been killed in a freak explosion that left her 14 year-old daughter Ariel scarred and disfigured. At the grand housewarming party, Bliss House begins to reveal itself again.

It's 1967, and Susan Gifford is one of the first female correspondents on assignment in Saigon. She is dedicated to her job and passionately in love with an American TV reporter. Son is a Vietnamese photographer anxious to get his work into the American press. Together they cover every aspect of the war, from combat missions to the workings of field hospitals.

For sister and brother Lily and Robert Brewster and the rest of Hudson Valley, the dark days of the Depression mean deprivation all around. Their poor town has lost its post office, and now the mail gets dumped at the train station. When Robert helps a young widow haul her newly arrived German grandfather's trunks home, he thinks he may have found a new set of friends.

Three years ago, a child's death sent one innocent man to prison and blew open a vortex of corruption at the heart of Manhattan's lucrative construction industry. Joe Cole was that innocent man. A former Buildings Department inspector, the ex-con now lives a broken life, cut off from his wife and daughter, and from the city he loves.

In the drought-ridden spring of 1934, Bena Jonnsen, her husband Ted, and their newborn baby relocate from their home in Minnesota to Pueblo, a Western plains town plagued by suffocating dust storms and equally suffocating social structures. Little can thrive in this bleak environment, neither Bena and Ted's marriage nor the baby, whom Bena believes - despite her husband's constant assurances - is slipping away from her.

"Why do we write?" With this question Joyce Carol Oates, in this new collection of seminal essays and criticism, begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities. Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer's inspiration - do subjects haunt those who might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something "happen" to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer's best work?

Most New Yorkers, even famous ones, have cherished rituals and favorite places that connect them to their city in unique ways. They have their beloved restaurants, museums, parks, galleries, landmarks, haunts, and hideaways. It may be watching tango dancers on Saturday nights in Central Park. Or riding a bike over the Brooklyn Bridge for a slice of Grimaldi's pepperoni pizza and a view of the Manhattan skyline from across the East River.

Anna O’Shea has failed at marriage, shed her job at a law firm, and she’s trying to re-create herself when she and her recalcitrant nephew are summoned to the past in a manner that nearly destroys them. Her twenty-first-century skills pale as she struggles to find her nephew in nineteenth-century Ireland. For one of them, the past is brutally difficult, filled with hunger and struggle. For the other, the past is filled with privilege, status, and a reprieve from the crushing pain of present-day life. For both Anna and her nephew, the past offers them a chance at love.

Danger lurks beneath the glitter of the 16th-century French court. The queen lies dying; the king has but months to live. Their two daughters, Claude and young Renee, are heiresses to the rich duchy of Brittany. Countess Louise, their guardian, schemes to steal their inheritance. For years she has envied the dying Queen Anne, the girls' mother. She plots to marry wealthy Claude to her son. Her unexpected guardianship presents a golden opportunity, but only if she can remove their protectress Baronne Michelle, who loves the princesses and safeguards their interests.

The brilliant V. I. Warshawski returns in another hard-hitting entry, combining razor-sharp plotting and compelling characters with a heady mix of timely political and social themes.“Both Paretsky and the sharp-tongued justice-seeker, V. I. Warshawski, remain formidable.

Fire and Rain is a compelling, meticulous narrative of the way national security decisions formed at the highest levels of government affect the lives of individuals at home and abroad. By drawing these connections, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg brings to life policy decisions about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, conveying their significance to a new generation. She breaks fresh ground in contextualizing Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's decisions within a wider institutional and societal framework.

When some of America's military men are captured or go missing during the Vietnam War, a small group of military wives become their champions. Never had families taken on diplomatic roles during wartime, nor had the fate of our POWs and missing men been a nationwide concern. In cinematic detail, authors Taylor Baldwin Kiland and Judy Silverstein Gray plunge you directly into the political maneuvering the women navigated, onto the international stage they shared with world leaders, and through the landmark legacy they created.

Half of America's two million farms made less than $300 in 2019. Between rising land costs, ever-more expensive equipment, the growing uncertainty of the climate, and few options for health care, farming today is a risky business. For many, simply staying afloat is a constant struggle. Bet the Farm chronicles this struggle through Beth Hoffman's eyes as a beginning farmer. She must contend with her father-in-law, who is reluctant to hand over control of the land. The couple also must balance the books, hoping that farming isn't a fantasy that takes every cent of their savings.

For the picturesque town of Oceanview on the Oregon Coast, May brings blossoming fruit trees and the annual UFO festival. As Aunt Eloise tries out alien costumes on their Havana brown cat Everett, Wren is off to meet with a her go-to guy for local fruit tree honey. But when she arrives, Elias Brentwood is lying on the ground amidst destroyed hives and a swarm of angry bees. As blue-eyed Officer Jim Hampton investigates and the town is invaded by its own swarm of crackpots, Wren and Aunt Eloise decide the only way to catch the bee wrangler's killer is to set up a sting.

Bethral, a beautiful warrior, and Ezren, a quick-witted storyteller, are confronted with a civil war and a tribe or warriors with their own code of honor and their own rules of pleasure and partnership. To stay alive, they must learn new customs, confront their enemies, and conceal Ezren's fiery power.

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados.

During the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of diggers, prospectors, merchants, and dealers extracted and shipped over 50 million carats of diamonds from South Africa to London. The primary supplier to the world, South Africa's diamond fields became one of the formative sites of modern capitalist production. At each stage of the diamond's route through the British empire and beyond—from Cape Town to London, from Amsterdam to New York City—carbon gems were primarily mined, processed, appraised, and sold by Jews.

In Sustainably Investing in Digital Assets Globally, international finance and fintech expert Selva Ozelli delivers an eye-opening and insightful discussion of cryptocurrency investment, as well as the risks and opportunities that await those who deal in this promising new technology. In the book, the author explores how cryptocurrencies have been used by illicit operators throughout the US and the world and how legitimate investors have sought to limit their exposure to illegal activity.

The scenario we are facing is scary: within a few decades, sea levels around the world may well rise by a meter or more as glaciers and ice caps melt due to climate change. Large parts of our coastal cities will be flooded, the basic outline of our world will be changed, and torrential rains will present their own challenges. But this is not the first time that people have had to cope with threatening waters, because sea levels have been rising for thousands of years, ever since the end of the last Ice Age.