Showing results by narrator "Janet Metzger" in All Categories

An in-depth look at the life of Oakland, California native, Barclay Simpson, Strong Ties focuses on the set of convictions and leadership qualities that allowed Simpson to build a successful business from nothing and to become one of the major philanthropists in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What happens when freedom of expression comes under threat? In frank and wide-ranging interviews, historian and critic Leonard S. Marcus probes the experience of thirteen leading authors of books for young people.

"No women need apply." These four discouraging words of admonition often greeted female physicians looking for jobs in the frontier-era West. Despite the dire need for medical help, it seemed most trappers, miners, and emigrants would rather suffer and die than be treated by a female doctor. Nevertheless dozens of highly trained women headed West, where they endured hardship and prejudice as they set broken limbs, performed operations, delivered generations of babies - and solidified a place for women in the medical field.

Women around the country are running in - and winning - elections at an unprecedented rate. It appears that women are on a steady march toward equal representation across state legislatures and the US Congress, but there is a sharp divide in this representation along party lines. Most of the women in office are Democrats, and the number of elected Republican women has been plunging for decades. In The Partisan Gap, Elder examines why this disparity in women's representation exists and why it's only going to get worse.

As part of their own spiritual quest, miracle experts Katie Mahon and Joan Luise Hill discovered that when we are truly awake and present, miracles abound. It started by sharing their own stories which quickly prompted an unexpected outpouring of stories from others. Stories that had never been told, stories that didn't seem to matter, and stories that had been forgotten. While some defy explanation, others invite us to take a closer look, to discover common ground with each other, and to seek meaning in a whole new way.

When 22-year-old Susan Stachler was diagnosed with cancer, her mother, Laura, was struck by déjà vu. The same illness that took her sister's life was threatening to take her daughter's too. Heartbroken but steadfast, Laura pledged to help Susan through the worst of her treatments. When they discovered that Laura's homemade ginger cookies soothed the side effects of Susan's chemotherapy, the mother - daughter duo soon found themselves opening the business "Susansnaps" and sharing their gourmet gingersnaps with the world.

In 1865, the Civil War was winding down and the country was reeling from Lincoln's assassination. Thousands of Union soldiers, released from Confederate prisoner-of-war camps, were to be transported home on the steamboat Sultana. With a profit to be made, the captain rushed repairs to the ship so the soldiers wouldn't find transportation elsewhere. More than 2,000 passengers boarded in Vicksburg, Mississippi...on a boat with a capacity of 376.

A seven-year-old girl breaks through the hysteria and violence of a dysfunctional mother in this story of small triumphs.

In this 2010 Pushcart Prize-nominated essay, Thaisa Frank describes a cultural clash between a Muslim student and her professor. Though the misunderstanding at first seems poised to derail one life, if not two, it yields an empathic glimpse into a different culture.

In 1933 in the Shenandoah Valley, there isn't a place for Lum (short for Columbia), a 33-year-old intersex woman. She travels by schedule from one branch of the family to another, assisting with cooking, childcare, and housework. Always an outsider, even in her own family, Lum secretly collects postcards of people like the Dog-faced Girl, imagining their stories, and nurtures her lifelong friendship with Smiley, an African-American man who sells furniture, odds and ends, and a little moonshine.

Ronnie's husband is supposed to move out today. But when Jeff pulls into the driveway drunk, with a shotgun in the front seat, she realizes nothing about the day will go as planned.

Trapped in no man's land in the final days of World War I, Private Ransom James MacTavish consoles a dying Lieutenant by reading to him the letters of his fiancee, Elizabeth, a high born Charleston Lady. When the officer dies, Ransom is stranded alone between the American and German trenches. His sole comfort is reading the elegant letters from the officer's fiancee. Although he is penniless, Ransom comes home determined to win Elizabeth's heart but soon discovers he must compete with a wealthy suitor.

Not the easiest choice for Ana Moreno, who has a history of B and E convictions and a problem with authority. But it's a decision she and four other felons are willing to make to stay out of a jail cell.

Life is good for Dr. Laura Nelson. Her kids have their ups and downs, but seem well adjusted to high school and college; her research project at the university is going well; and she is highly regarded as the chief of surgery at Tampa City Hospital. The sense of tranquility is disrupted when she is drawn into the diagnosis of the first case of HIV/AIDS seen in Tampa. But the challenge of this new disease is dwarfed by the disaster that impacts Laura’s life a few days later. A highly resistant bacterial infection is raging in the surgical intensive care unit, and patients are dying.

A mystery for young adults and anyone else who's been wrongly accused. A year ago Frankie was a middle-school baseball star. Now, she's been banned from pitching and accused of killing a cat. Frankie didn't do it, but who amongst her houseboat neighbors did? Can she catch the culprit with the help of a former TV star and a not-so-friendly German shepherd?

Lisa Landon makes her living with her voice — a voice fueled by a heartbreak she vows never to experience again. But despite her renown, Lisa’s real ambition is to escape the memories that follow her from one sold-out engagement to the next. Perhaps that’s what brings her to the exotic desert nation of Sedikhan and the nightclub where she meets Clancy Donahue.

The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders, yet reforms to reduce the numbers of those incarcerated have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, an ever-widening carceral state has sprouted in the shadows, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship - posing a formidable political and social challenge. In Caught, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state remains so tenacious in the United States.

In The Digital Transformer's Dilemma: How to Energize Your Core Business While Building Disruptive Products and Services, the authors show companies how to go digital while also advancing their core business. The book emphasizes how to strike a difficult balance between establishing a new (digital) business and revitalizing - and digitizing - the legacy business.

In the watershed year of 1919, world leaders met in Paris, promising to build a new international order rooted in democracy and social justice. Female activists demanded that statesmen live up to their word. Excluded from the negotiating table, women met separately, crafted their own agendas, and captured global headlines with a message that was both straightforward and revolutionary: Enduring peace depended on recognition of the fundamental humanity and equality of all people.

The reason we need sleep has long mystified scientists, but it’s crystal clear that we do need it. In fact, the more we learn about what happens while we snooze, the more we discover new benefits for multiple processes including hormone balance, immune function, emotional health, learning, and memory. Studies show that even one night of disturbed rest leads to measurable impairments, and for this mini-collection, we’ve gathered the most recent research on the mechanisms of sleep.