Showing results by narrator "Donna Postel" in All Categories

It's the phone call every parent dreads: in the middle of the night, Sandy Cline learns that her twenty-year-old son, Jordan, has been in a car accident. Her nephew, Travis, was also in the car, along with Travis's girlfriend. All three are alive - but barely. The car was smashed against a tree along a remote and winding road, beautiful but deadly, in their rural Texas Hill Country town.

In the tradition of Peter Matthiessen's Wildlife in America or Aldo Leopold, Brenda Peterson tells the 300-year history of wild wolves in America. It is also our own history, seen through our relationship with wolves. The earliest Americans revered them. Settlers zealously exterminated them. Now, scientists, writers, and ordinary citizens are fighting to bring them back to the wild. Peterson, an eloquent voice in the battle for 20 years, makes the powerful case that without wolves, not only will our whole ecology unravel, but we'll lose much of our national soul.

Gilly O’Connell’s nightmares aren’t just bad dreams; they’re glimpses of terrifying realities to come. Gilly has spent her entire life trying to suppress the foreboding visions. So when a dismissed premonition leads to her husband’s murder, she buries the guilt and pain by running from it. Three years later, after overcoming a battle with addiction and starting over in a small Texas town, Gilly dares to believe the worst is over. That is, until another crime rips her heart open: the abduction of a three-year-old girl. Gilly knows more about it than anyone.... She’s dreaming again.

While investigating financial crimes for CNN Money, Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken were intrigued by reports that elderly Americans were giving away thousands of dollars to mail-in schemes. With a little digging, they soon discovered a shocking true story. Victims received personalized letters from a woman who, claiming amazing psychic powers, convinced them to send money in return for riches, good health, and good fortune. The predatory scam has continued unabated for decades, raking in more than $200 million in the United States and Canada alone - with investigators from all over the world unable to stop it.

Lillian Hellman was a giant of 20th-century letters and a groundbreaking figure as one of the most successful female playwrights on Broadway. Yet the author of The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic is today remembered more as a toxic, bitter survivor and literary fabulist, the woman of whom Mary McCarthy said, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" In A Difficult Woman, renowned historian Alice Kessler-Harris undertakes a feat few would dare to attempt: a reclamation of a combative, controversial woman who straddled so many political and cultural fault lines of her time.

A historic western that opens in 1873, a time when recession is forcing thousands westwards to recoup their fortunes. The West is tough, brutal and the Indian is the enemy. But when a white woman is raped, it is a half-breed Cheyenne who comes to the rescue. From the author of Jake and Upland Passage.

One in 10 American children has a parent under criminal justice supervision - incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. One in 33 American children - and one in eight African American children - goes to sleep without access to a parent because that parent is in jail. Despite these staggering numbers, the children of prisoners remain largely invisible to society. Journalist Nell Bernstein shows, through the deeply moving stories of real families, how the children of the incarcerated are routinely punished for their parents' status.

The mother of a bullied first grader, popular blogger Carrie Goldman's inspiring true story triggered an outpouring of support from online communities around the world. In Bullied, she gives us a guide to the crucial lessons and actionable guidance she's learned about how to stop bullying before it starts. It is a book born from Goldman's post about the ridicule her daughter suffered from bringing a Star Wars thermos to school.

Meredith Maran lived a daughter's nightmare: she accused her father of sexual abuse, then realized, nearly too late, that he was innocent. During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans became convinced that they had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy. Journalist, mother, and daughter Meredith Maran was one of them.

As parts of everyday life begin to fade away, one teacher struggles to keep a semblance of normality for the teenagers in her classroom. But what can she teach to students who know they will one day be the final remnants of mankind? "The Last Teacher" is a story from The Great De-Evolution series about the lessons that are most important in life.

In this collection of natural-history essays, biologist Joan Maloof embarks on a series of lively, fact-filled expeditions into forests of the eastern United States. Through Maloof's engaging, conversational style, each essay offers a lesson in stewardship as it explores the interwoven connections between a tree species and the animals and insects whose lives depend on it - and who, in turn, work to ensure the tree's survival.

After a 25-year career spent fighting for women's rights around the globe at the expense of time with her family, Karen Sherman looked around and realized she didn't really know her children and felt little connection to her husband. With her world - work, marriage, family - crashing down, she made the rash decision to move to Rwanda with her three sons, an experiment she dubbed "our year of living dangerously".

Stephanie D. Preston explores how and why we developed a surprisingly powerful drive to help the vulnerable. She argues that the neural and psychological mechanisms that evolved to safeguard offspring also motivate people to save strangers in need of immediate aid. Merging extensive interdisciplinary research that spans psychology, neuroscience, neurobiology, and evolutionary biology, Preston develops a groundbreaking model of altruistic responses.

In the years after World War II, the airline stewardess became one of the most celebrated symbols of American womanhood. Stewardesses appeared on magazine covers, on lecture circuits, and in ad campaigns for everything from milk to cigarettes. Airlines enlisted them to pose for publicity shots, mingle with international dignitaries, and even serve (in sequined minidresses) as the official hostesses at Richard Nixon's inaugural ball. Embodying mainstream America's perfect woman, the stewardess was an ambassador of femininity and the American way both at home and abroad.

Two very different women with this in common: Each harbors her own secret, her own reason why she can't just let this go. Neither can yield, not before they've dredged up all that's hidden, even if it has the power to shatter all they've built.

Nina Godiwalla offers a behind-the-scenes look at the recklessness that ruled Wall Street during the dot-com boom days. But Suits is also a story of the family that Nina left behind: a story of fathers and daughters, the pursuit of honor, swapping your grandmother's shrimp curry for takeout sushi and cocktails. A vibrant snapshot of an immigrant family with big dreams, Suits reveals how much we've been conditioned to trade for success.

Countless times throughout our lives, we're presented with a choice to help another soul. Rescuing Ladybugs highlights the true stories of remarkable people who didn't look away from seemingly impossible-to-change situations and instead worked to save animals. Prepare to be transported to Borneo to release orangutans, Brazil to protect jaguars, Africa to connect with chimpanzees and elephants, the Maldives to free mantas, and Indonesia, the only place where dragons still exist in the wild.

For swimming champion Nancy Stearns Bercaw, the pool was a natural habitat. But on land, she could never shake the feeling of being a fish out of water. Starting at age two, Nancy devoted her life to swimming, even qualifying for the 1988 Olympic Trials in the fifty-meter freestyle event. But nearly two decades later, when she hung up her cap and goggles, she was confronted with a different kind of challenge: learning who she was out of the lanes.

In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-20th century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups.

In 1997 New York City hipsters Lee and Ed were at a crossroads. Money was tight, their careers were floundering, their apartment was tiny, and their relationship, frankly, was dysfunctional. Then, on a fateful day in August, they decided on impulse to visit a nearby animal shelter, just to look at dogs. In a split-second decision that would change their lives, they brought home Wallace. They quickly realized that this spaniel mix was more than they could handle.