Showing results by narrator "Kate Harper" in All Categories

Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are young, attractive but impoverished New Yorkers. They are in love and decide to marry, but realise their chances of happiness are slim without the wealth and society that their more privileged friends take for granted. Nick and Susy agree to separate when either encounters a more eligible proposition.

Though mankind has traded tangible goods for millennia, recent technology has changed the fundamentals of trade, in both legitimate and illegal economies. In the past three decades, the most advanced forms of illicit trade have broken with all historical precedents and, as Dark Commerce tells, now operate as if on steroids, tied to computers and social media. Author Louise Shelley examines how new technology, communications, and globalization fuel the exponential growth of dangerous forms of illegal trade and considers diverse ways of responding to this increasing challenge.

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row - a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year - and they're still rising. Case and Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class.

Jack London was the epitome of the hard-drinking, hard-living novelist. His extraordinary career included spells as an oyster pirate, sailor, hobo, prospector in the Klondike Gold Rush, reporter in the Russo-Japanese war and round-the-world yachtsman. A chronic alcoholic, he died aged just 40, having written some of the best-loved adventure stories in American literature. Included here are three of his most famous works, together with a thrilling original drama about the man himself and a fascinating documentary exploring his turbulent life.

And Still the Waters Run tells the tragic story of the liquidation of the independent Indian republics of the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles, known as the Five Civilized Tribes. At the turn of the twentieth century, the tribes owned the eastern half of what is now Oklahoma, a territory immensely wealthy in farmland, forests, coal, and oil. Their political and economic status was guaranteed by the federal government—until American settlers arrived.

The Sky Is for Everyone is an internationally diverse collection of autobiographical narratives by women who broke down barriers and changed the face of modern astronomy. This audiobook vividly describes how, before 1900, a woman who wanted to study the stars had to have a father, brother, or husband to provide entry, and how the considerable intellectual skills of women astronomers were still not enough to enable them to pry open doors of opportunity for much of the twentieth century. After decades of difficult struggles, women are closer to equality in astronomy than ever before.

The world is never done catching up with Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the author of Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” and other classics. A prophet of environmentalism and vegetarianism, an abolitionist, and a critic of materialism and technology, Thoreau even seems to have anticipated a world of social distancing in his famous experiment at Walden Pond. In Now Comes Good Sailing, 27 of today’s leading writers offer wide-ranging original pieces exploring how Thoreau has influenced and inspired them.

Janet Moodie has spent years as a death row appeals attorney. Overworked, underpaid and recently widowed, she's had her fill of hopeless cases and is determined that this will be her last. Her client is Marion 'Andy' Hardy, convicted 15 years ago along with his brother, Emory, of the kidnapping, rape and murder of two prostitutes, but Janet discovers a series of errors made by his previous lawyers. Andy may well be guilty of something, but what?

This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment and expiation, set in the rigid moral climate of 17th-century New England. The young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritan judges. However, it is not so much her harsh sentence, but the cruelties of slowly exposed guilt as her lover is revealed, that hold the reader enthralled all the way to the book's poignant climax.

Walt Whitman said, "...poetry is the voice of the nation, expressing its deepest concerns, ambitions and longings," which is certainly true of the great classic poetry of America. This wide-ranging anthology, from the earliest poets of the 16th century to the present day, reflects the changing preoccupations and visions of Americans, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, E.E. Cummings, and more.

The California desert. A four-year-old boy disappears, plunging his parents into the public hell of a media witch-hunt. But the desert is inexplicable and miraculous, and the family's fate is bound up with that of all those who have travelled before them through this brutally powerful landscape. Multilayered and a compulsively readable, Gods Without Men is a heartfelt exploration of our search for pattern and meaning in a random and chaotic universe.

Set against the 1970s San Fransisco skyline, Maupin's Tales of the City introduces the unconventional tenants of 28 Barbary Lane, the domain of the eccentric, marijuana-growing landlady Anna Madrigal. Mary Ann Singleton, a naive young woman newly arrived from Cleveland, Ohio, moves into an apartment there and soon becomes friends with other tenants of the building....

What does your body language say about you? From strangers on the street, to your closest friends and family - even if you're not speaking, you're saying a lot with your body. Body Language explores the way we use our bodies to communicate, the way we hold ourselves, the way we sit, stand, and point our hands, feet and eyes can all reveal how we are feeling in any given situation.

Satisfaction has a price... and it's Deadly. For three Las Vegas women, The Strip is an adults-only playground where excitement and seduction never sleep. Billie, Jennifer and Kristin all have one thing in common: Cam Lawford, the stud-for-hire whose career-ending sports injury led him to a new life of luxury hotel rooms and generous women. Now one of them has sent him to an early grave. Who knew the business of sex and satisfaction could be such a dangerous game?

Moving deftly from the colonial era to just before the First World War, Jen Manion uncovers the riveting and very personal stories of ordinary people who lived as men despite tremendous risk, danger, violence, and threat of punishment. Female Husbands weaves the story of their lives in relation to broader social, economic, and political developments in the United States and the United Kingdom while also exploring how attitudes toward female husbands shifted in relation to transformations in gender politics and women’s rights.

The struggle to pay for college is one of the defining features of middle-class life in America today. At kitchen tables all across the country, parents agonize over whether to burden their children with loans or to sacrifice their own financial security by taking out a second mortgage or draining their retirement savings. Indebted takes listeners into the homes of middle-class families throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life.

The endearing classic tale of Katy Carr and her family. Gangly, quick-tempered Katy means to be beautiful and beloved and as good as an angel one day. But meanwhile her resolutions somehow get forgotten or go horribly wrong. A wonderful family story read by actress Kate Harper.

In Ruth Davidson's Yes She Can we meet world-beating women from fields as diverse as science, politics, the military, business and sport. They share their own journeys to the top - whether that's becoming Prime Minister, winning an Olympic gold medal or teaching male special forces how to fight. They share the bad times, too, the challenges faced and difficulties to hurdle, explaining what they've learned along the way. We also see the author's own path as she tracks the societal shifts that have seen women advance - and discuss how far we've still got to go.

In The Leadership Lab, best-selling author Chris Lewis and superstar megatrends analyst Dr. Pippa Malmgren help you lead your team through this change successfully. Covering everything from how to build a new type of leadership trust when other spheres of public power have been overturned, to robots overtaking companies and worldwide indebtedness affecting business, this audiobook explains not only why the old rules no longer apply, but also how to blaze a trail in this new world order and be the best leader you can be.

While we can feel, know, and study the body, the soul refuses definition. Where does it begin and end? What does the soul have to do with love? Does it exist at all, and if so, does it outlast the body? Or are the soul and body really one and the same? These are questions posed by the characters who inhabit this book of stories by the award-winning Russian writer Ludmila Ulitskaya.