Showing results by narrator "Tamara Marston" in All Categories

There's a college affordability crisis happening in the US right now. Tuition rates have soared, while increases in blue collar wages have slowed to a crawl. This adds up to a painful realization for lower-income young people desperately hoping to go to college: there's no way to pay for it. Bobbi Dempsey shares her brutally honest first-person account of the struggle to pay for her children's and her own education on a working-class salary.

Thunder bellows as Jenny and her father pull up to the gate of Worthington Hall. As they inch onto the grounds of the ancient estate, a disheveled young woman thrusts her head through the open window. "Leave!" she yells. "Before it's too late! He'll kill you. I swear." Jenny is terrified, but her dad laughs it off. The girl is just an actress - part of the medieval fair being held on the castle grounds. But it's not long before Jenny wishes they'd heeded the warning.

A woman flees the hospital even as her infant son is breathing his last breaths. An aging construction worker comes to grips with the end of the only life he's ever known. A deadbeat father meets his son for the first time, only to be blindsided by the boy's birth defect. A man steals a corpse in order to give his father the burial he wanted.

Maddy and Clark never had much - just each other, the kids, and a never-sink spirit. When Maddy enters a jingle contest and wins a trip for two to Venice and half a million dollars, they're singing for joy. But sudden change can be a mixed blessing....

Black Ops Advertising dissects this rapid rise of "sponsored content," a strategy whereby advertisers have become publishers and publishers create advertising - all under the guise of unbiased information. Covert selling, mostly in the form of native advertising and content marketing, has so blurred the lines between editorial content and marketing message that it is next to impossible to tell real news from paid endorsements.

After months of following one-size-fits-all advice for a 57-year-old widow, Linda Crill is still miserable, until she makes a rebellious spur-of-the-moment decision: she trades her corporate suits for motorcycle leathers and commits herself to a 2,500-mile road trip down America’s Pacific Northwest coast on a Harley. The problem: she doesn’t know how to ride and has only 30 days to learn. Four short weeks later, Linda joins two men and a woman for a white-knuckled, exhilarating road trip along the west coast from Vancouver, Canada, to the wine country of Mendocino, California....

Ten years after the fall of Saigon, a tentative friendship blossoms between a Portland writer and the Vietnamese woman who sells her morning coffee and cigarettes, framing a powerful and original meditation on class, gender, and the power of storytelling to heal the wounds of war.

What made Silicon Valley happen, and why has it persisted? The Valley’s premier historian tackles these questions in a lively blend of history and storytelling.

>A young man, relatively new to Fox Creek and living with his elderly grandmother, is discovered dead in his bed after having been severely beaten. Unfortunately, the first person to see the body is Carver Ellis; and the first police officer on the scene is already convinced that young Ellis not only found the body but murdered the victim. It's up to Victoria Sears and her new best friend from down-mountain, Lynn Hanson, to join together a tortuous series of clues to uncover precisely how and why Eric Johansson died.

Nineteenth-century America was rife with Protestant-fueled anti-Catholicism. Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez reveals how Protestants nevertheless became surprisingly and deeply fascinated with the Virgin Mary, even as her role as a devotional figure who united Catholics grew. Documenting the vivid Marian imagery that suffused popular visual and literary culture, Alvarez argues that Mary became a potent shared exemplar of Christian womanhood around which Christians of all stripes rallied.

Addie doesn't know who left the footprints in the snow outside her house, but she's convinced it's someone seeking revenge for the horrific crime her autistic son committed a year ago. Follow Addie as she tries to uncover the trespasser's identity and come to terms with the actions of a son she loves but can't understand.

With Share This! both regular folks of a progressive bent and committed activists can learn how to go beyond swapping movie reviews and vacation photos (not that there's anything wrong with that). At the moment, the same kinds of people who dominate the dialog off-line are dominating it online, and things will never change if that doesn't change. Progressives need to get on social networks and share their stories, join conversations, connect with others - and not just others exactly like themselves.

Maxine Whitshaw, a middle-aged copyeditor frustrated with her humdrum existence, wins a lottery for a trip to the moon alongside the rich and famous. But once she leaves her husband in charge of their two boys in order to take flight, she lets go not only of gravity, but of the rules and expectations that have been guiding her all along.

What begins as a deliciously wicked portrait of a midcentury marriage, filled with pork chops, cinnamon rolls, golden shoe string fries, and mashed potato mountains crowned with lakes of butter, quickly transforms into a food story on acid, eating its way to the heart of a loveless relationship.

If Veda’s mama hadn’t pounded religion into her “the way she pounded the dirt out of Papa’s overalls”, she probably wouldn’t have married Raymond in the first place. It’s the Great Depression, and jobs are scarce, but it seems to Veda that Raymond uses religion as an excuse for why he can’t find work. He can’t work on the Sabbath, he can’t work around crude or vulgar men, and he will not join a union.

Beatleness explains how the band became a source of emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual nurturance in fans’ lives, creating a relationship that was historically unique. Looking at that relationship against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, political assassinations, and other events of those tumultuous years, the audiobook critically examines the often-heard assertion that the Beatles changed everything.

Go behind the window displays. Behind the racks. Two personal shoppers for Manhattan's biggest department stores have written a wildly dishy novel that goes behind the dressing rooms of New York's fashion elite. At Frankel's New York, the wives of billionaires and Hollywood celebrities sip champagne while stylists and tailors cater to every whim. And one person has made it her career to help these Amex-wielding shoppers create the perfect look.

Monica Szabo, a middle-aged, moderately successful painter, encounters B, a wealthy commodities broker who collects her work. B volunteers to be her muse, offering her everything that male artists have always had to produce great art: time, space, money, and sex. (He is even willing to pose for her.)Soon after she and B become lovers, Monica starts work on a controversial new series of paintings based on her perception that the deposed Christs of Renaissance art were not dead, but post orgasmic.

Avis Muir is a brilliant pastry chef, Brian Muir a corporate real estate attorney. Their son, Stanley, is the proprietor of a trendy food market. Their beautiful daughter, Felice, is missing. A runaway at 13, Felice has spent five years modeling tattoos, skateboarding, clubbing, and sleeping in a squat house or on the beach. She's about to turn 18. Soon all of the Muirs will be forced to confront their anguish, loss, and sense of betrayal.

Eighteen years ago, Stanford MBA Michele Raffin pulled off the road to help an injured dove, a momentary impulse that ignited in her a fervent commitment to saving vulnerable bird species. Today, her suburban home plays host to Pandemonium Aviaries, one of the largest avian rescue sanctuaries and endangered breeding facilities in the country, with a maze of 54 individual aviaries that house over 40 species, 14 of which are listed as threatened with extinction.