Showing results by narrator "Andrea Gallo" in All Categories

Justine and Seth Gunderson are trying to make plans and sort out their future after losing their business—the Lighthouse restaurant—to arson. The investigation is ongoing, but the prime suspect disappeared right after the fire. And this kind of crisis can be hard on a marriage. In the meantime, the drama of everyday life goes on for everyone in town: Maryellen’s difficult pregnancy means she needs to ask for help from an unlikely source, Lynette might have to figure out how to handle a broken heart, and someone gets involved with a celebrity!

Teri Miller has noticed that something seems to be worrying her international chess champion husband, Bobby Polgar. He told her he’s “protecting his queen,” and she has the oddest feeling that he isn’t talking about chess, but about her. Rachel Pendergast has two men seriously interested in her, and she’s going to have to make a choice. But Linnette McAfee recently left town because her love life fell apart. Still, Cedar Cove has a way of helping everybody out. That’s just how it is in this warmhearted small town.

1987. Supermodel Harlow Hayes seeks solace in a quaint Florida beach town to heal from a heartbreak that shattered her entire world. To her surprise, she encounters Matt Knight—a Hollywood A-lister with a bad-boy reputation—who has returned to his hometown to help his plucky grandmother, Tuesday, save her century-old skating rink, the Starlight.

At birth, Violet and Rose Flowers were identical, save for a tiny bluish-purple mark gracing Violet’s slender neck. By nineteen, their temperaments distinguish them, as different as the flowers their mother named them for—Violet, wild and outgoing, and Rose, solitary and reserved. Still, they are each other’s world. Then, on a sweltering, terrible August night in 1928, an explosion rocks Lamb’s Dance Hall in Possum Flats, Missouri, engulfing it in flames, leaving one twin among the dozens dead, and her sister’s life forever changed.

Teens and pre-teens flock to any new offering from New York Times best-selling author Gordon Korman. Told through multiple viewpoints, Ungifted follows Donovan Curtis through his year at a magnet school for gifted and talented kids. Thanks to an administrative foul-up, the decidedly mediocre student Donovan finds himself enrolled in the Academy of Scholastic Distinction. Out of place and out of luck, Donovan joins the robotics team. And while he learns a few lessons from his gifted classmates, he also teaches a few of his own.

Having returned to Chicago, young socialite Anna Nicholson can't seem to focus on her upcoming marriage. The new information she's learned about her birth mother continues to pull at her, and she hires Pinkerton detectives to help her find the truth. But as she meets people who once knew her mother and hears stories about the past, Anna soon discovers that some secrets are better left hidden.

In the first brisk days of autumn, a woman arrives in Scotland having left her job at an all-girls school in London in mysterious circumstances. Moving into a cottage on the remote estate of Hare House, she begins to explore her new home—a patchwork of hills, moorland and forest. But among the tiny roads, dykes and scattered houses, something more sinister lurks: local tales of witchcraft, clay figures and young men sent mad.

Temple Grandin’s professional training as an animal scientist and her history as a person with autism have given her a perspective like that of no other expert in the field. Grandin and coauthor Catherine Johnson present their powerful theory that autistic people can often think the way animals think—putting autistic people in the perfect position to translate “animal talk.”

A quarter of a century after her memoir, Thinking in Pictures, forever changed how the world understood autism, Temple Grandin—the “anthropologist from Mars,” as Oliver Sacks dubbed her—transforms our awareness of the different ways our brains are wired. Do you have a keen sense of direction, a love of puzzles, the ability to assemble IKEA furniture without crying? You are likely a visual thinker.

Over the last 20 years, New York City has been convulsed by enormous challenges: terrorist attack, blackout, hurricane, recession, pandemic. New Yorkers is a grand portrait of the irrepressible city and a hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people. Craig Taylor spent years meeting New Yorkers - rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant - and getting them to share indelible true tales.

There are no Nobel Prizes for parenting or education, but if there were, Esther Wojcicki would be the bookies’ favourite. Known as the Godmother of Silicon Valley - or simply Woj - Esther’s three daughters have all gone on to huge success in their professional fields and, more importantly, their personal lives. What’s her secret? As we face an epidemic of parental and childhood anxiety, Woj has the advice every parent wants to hear: climb out of that helicopter and relax.

If we face America’s racial history squarely, will it mean that the American project is a failure? Conversely, if we think the American project is a worthy endeavor, do we have to lie, downplay, or equivocate about our past? In this book, we use the classical liberal lens to ask Americans on the political right to seriously reckon with America’s deep racial pain—much of which arises from violations of rights that conservatives say they deeply value.

In The Four Threats, Lieberman and Mettler explore five historical episodes when democracy in the United States was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound, even fatal, damage to the American democratic experiment, and on occasion antidemocratic forces have prevailed. From this history, four distinct characteristics of democratic disruption emerge. Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power...have threatened the survival of the republic.

When Temple Grandin was born in 1947, autism had only just been named. Today it is more prevalent than ever, with one in 88 children diagnosed on the spectrum. And our thinking about it has undergone a transformation in her lifetime: Autism studies have moved from the realm of psychology to neurology and genetics, and there is far more hope today than ever before thanks to groundbreaking new research into causes and treatments. Now Grandin reports from the forefront of autism science, bringing her singular perspective to a thrilling journey into the heart of the autism revolution.

In this Romantic Times Top Pick, Christy Award finalist Linda Nichols follows the wanderings of Miranda DeSpain, a young woman still haunted by a painful adolescent experience. When Miranda finds a clue to this mystery from her past, she travels to an idyllic Virginia town. There, an 11-year-old girl helps her find lodging and a job. Suspicious of strangers, the police chief discovers there's absolutely no record of Miranda. And then he notices his niece's picture among Miranda's belongings.

In the summer of 1969, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel carried out horrific acts of butchery on the orders of the charismatic cult leader Charles Manson. At their murder trial the following year, lead prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi described the two so-called Manson Women as "human monsters". But to anyone who knew them growing up, they were bright, promising girls, seemingly incapable of such an unfathomable crime. Award-winning journalist Nikki Meredith began visiting Van Houten and Krenwinkel in prison to discover how they had changed during their incarceration.

"Welcome to Rockwell Land," writes Deborah Solomon in the introduction to this spirited and authoritative biography of the painter who provided 20th-century America with a defining image of itself. As the star illustrator of The Saturday Evening Post for nearly half a century, Norman Rockwell mingled fact and fiction in paintings that reflected the we-the-people, communitarian ideals of American democracy. But who was this man who served as our unofficial "artist in chief" and bolstered our country's national identity?

In the early 1960s, Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration became one of the most celebrated women in America when she prevented a deadly sedative from entering the U.S. market. A Canadian-born pharmacologist and physician, Kelsey saved countless Americans from the devastating side effects of thalidomide, routinely given to pregnant women to prevent morning sickness. As the FDA medical officer charged with reviewing Merrell Pharmaceutical’s application for approval, Kelsey was unconvinced that there was sufficient evidence of the drug’s efficacy and safety.

In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times reporter and best-selling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an upstanding family in small-town South Carolina. Many of them were doctors, but still, they are struck down by an inscrutable illness. Finally they discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of providential events. Meanwhile science, progressing for 50 years along a parallel track, handed the Baxleys a question - not a cure but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease.

From the time she was little, Martha Jankowski has been digging in the dirt, much to the dismay of her mother. Now she dreams of being a paleontologist and is determined to make her parents proud by uncovering the next big discovery. When Martha finds what she hopes to be a fully intact dinosaur skeleton—one that could win her an acclaimed exhibit—she learns another team is competing against her and could steal her chance at being recognized for this momentous discovery.