Showing results by narrator "Donna Postel" in All Categories

At the end of the 1976 football season, more than forty Harvard athletes went to Boston's Combat Zone to celebrate. In the city's adult entertainment district, drugs and prostitution ran rampant, violent crime was commonplace, and corrupt police turned the other way. At the end of the night, Italian American star athlete Andy Puopolo, raised in the city's North End, was murdered in a stabbing. Three African American men were accused of the crime. His murder made national news and led to the eventual demise of the city's red-light district.

This anthology contains Angels in the Snow, The Good Shepherd, and Welcome to Bethlehem.

The Galápagos archipelago is often viewed as a last foothold of pristine nature. For 60 years, conservationists have worked to restore this evolutionary Eden after centuries of exploitation at the hands of pirates, whalers, and island settlers. This book tells the story of the islands' namesakes - the giant tortoises - as coveted food sources, objects of natural history, and famous icons of conservation and tourism. By doing so, it brings into stark relief the paradoxical, and impossible, goal of conserving species by trying to restore a past state of prehistoric evolution.

After publishing many books, and after many failed TV opportunities, Bette Roseman finally signs a network contract for a TV series based on her novel The Viagra Diaries and dreams of a hit show. But when WC Network changes her protagonist's age from 60 to 20-something, Bette angrily confronts network CEO Joshua Bitterman. She demands that her protagonist maintain her original age, but he insists the public "wants young". After betrayal, intrigue, and bartering with the network, the impassioned Bette finds herself in the middle of a high-stakes Hollywood legal court battle.

Public defender Julia Geary moves through life in simmering resentment - at her husband, a soldier killed in Iraq, leaving her a single mother; at her low-paying job; and at her overbearing mother-in-law, whose home she shares. She longs for a breakout case, and it arrives when members of the high school soccer team report seeing a teammate - Iraqi refugee Sami Mohammed - assaulting a girl in the locker room.

Your road map to achieving your aspirations, How Women Lead provides hard-won wisdom from women who have reached truly impressive heights in their careers. Written by two women's leadership experts who are themselves successful leaders, How Women Lead gives women the information they need to become high-potential leaders but don't get in business school: how to build a career on their own terms, gain the critical business management skills needed to advance, and advocate successfully for themselves.

Most people who have just been diagnosed with diabetes, or who are suffering complications for the first time, are motivated to start taking better care of themselves. The problem is that change can be overwhelming or hard to maintain. What they need is a course correction that's simple, straightforward, and achievable. The Diabetes 2-Month Turnaround is the blueprint they need for getting their self-management back in shape safely, quickly, and effectively.

Sixty-one-year-old Shelby Truman, a romance novelist, has received a request to visit her childhood friend, Eddie, who is on Death Row. Though mentally ill, Eddie is scheduled to be executed for the disturbing, brutal murders of his wife and unborn child. As Shelby travels home to Texas for the unnerving reunion, she steps back into memories of her past, recalling her five-decade-long relationship with Eddie in order to understand what led the beautiful but troubled boy who lived across the street to become a murderer.

When Cheryl Dietrich joined the US Air Force, she began a transformation from overweight introvert and military neophyte into one of the key personnel redesigning the structure of the Air Force within the Pentagon. In this stirring and revelatory memoir, Cheryl - one of only a hundred female officers of colonel rank or higher - explains what it takes to stay the course, overcome male domination issues, break the glass ceiling more than once, and deal with the political issues facing the Pentagon.

In her admired works of fiction, including the recent The Book That Matters Most, Ann Hood explores the transformative power of literature. Now, with warmth and honesty, Hood reveals the personal story behind these works of fiction. Growing up in a mill town in Rhode Island, in a household that didn't foster the love of literature, Hood nonetheless learned to channel her imagination and curiosity by devouring The Bell Jar, Marjorie Morningstar, The Harrad Experiment, and other works.

Through deep and thoughtful exploration of diaries, letters, and other personal writings penned during the spring and summer of 1865, Martha Hodes, one of our finest historians, captures the full range of reactions to the president's death - far more diverse than public expressions would suggest. She tells a story of shock, glee, sorrow, anger, blame, and fear.

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.

As a pet bereavement counselor, Maggie Brennan uses a combination of empathy, insight, and humor to help patients cope with the anguish of losing their beloved four-legged friends. Though she has a gift for guiding others through difficult situations, Maggie has major troubles of her own that threaten the success of her counseling practice and her volunteer work with a dog rescue organization.

After decades making progressive documentary films, Maggie MacGowen did not expect to fall in love with a Los Angeles cop. But Mike Trent, whom she met while investigating her sister’s shooting, is no LAPD stereotype. Tall, with salt-and-pepper hair and a craggy Bogart face, he inspires her to uproot herself and her daughter from San Francisco and move down to L.A. It takes only a week for their new life to collapse.

In 1974, Roy Frady was a perfect cop. Now he's perfect fodder for one of Maggie MacGowen's documentaries. Frady worked narcotics in the 77th Street Precinct as part of a unit nicknamed the Four Whoresmen, a bunch of hard-drinking, womanizing cops that included Maggie's current lover, homicide Detective Mike Flint. They were successful at shutting down the drug trade in their district until a series of brutality charges brought about their downfall.

In Los Angeles making a documentary about upscale daycares, Maggie MacGowen visits MacArthur Park to get complementary footage of the pubescent prostitutes that populate its dark corners. There she meets Pisces, a fourteen year-old hooker with manners that don't match her profession. As they bond over a plate of pastrami, Maggie talks her into spending the night in a shelter. But Pisces comes with baggage: A nine year-old hoodlum named Sly.

When Maggie MacGowen was a girl, her sister, Emily, lived the life of a leftist radical on the run from the FBI. Twenty-two years after the FBI finally caught her, Emily lives in Los Angeles, a doctor at a free clinic that tends to the city’s down and out. When one of her old radical buddies comes out of hiding and surrenders to the police, their long-ago crimes become front-page news. Emily calls Maggie, now a documentary filmmaker, and asks her to come visit. By the time Maggie arrives in Los Angeles, Emily is nearly dead.

Millard Lacouvy is a short, plain, fiercely independent prodigy in the male world of poker. She learns her craft in Depression-era Vancouver and then graduates to high-stakes games on the Canadian Pacific Railway. When the trains fail to satisfy either her ambition or her need for security, she goes to Bugsy Siegel’s Las Vegas. There she is haunted by the handsome conman she has known all her life, and learns that love can also be a game of chance. Along the way, Pasold gives us a rich and convincing historical portrait of Vancouver and Vegas in the ’40s.

Around the world, thousands of people who've found success in their chosen careers are getting the call to do something more with their lives - to give something back to a world in desperate need of their help. And you don't have to be a billionaire to do so. With Moulden's guidance, you can transform how you earn your daily bread and make a real difference.

Many people enter marriage with visions of "wedded bliss" only to find their expectations, hopes, and carefully conceived resolutions shattered when the dream becomes a reality.