Showing results by narrator "Robin Miles" in All Categories

In the shadows of a seismic shift in American politics comes Tom Rachman's timely and hilarious new work. Basket of Deplorables takes an incisive and satirical look at the United States in the era of Trump data breaches, liberal self-righteousness, red-hat rancor, Starbucks macchiatos, Ultimate Fighting factories, and Internet sinkholes.

On November 7, 1991, basketball legend Magic Johnson stunned the world with the news that he was HIV-positive. For the millions who tuned in as he shared his news, Magic's revelation became a seminal moment for the nation. Now twenty-five years later, Cookie Johnson shares her story and the emotional journey that started on that day - from life as a pregnant and joyous newlywed to one filled with the fear that her husband would die, she and her baby would, too, be infected with the virus.

When the entire collection of the Fireman's Museum ironically goes up in flames, Nell Pratt discovers one of the charred pictures isn't the one that was originally exhibited. But getting to the bottom of the mystery is bound to get Nell burned....

The new exhibit at the Philadelphia children's museum, Let's Play, isn't meant to be shocking - but when one of the installers is zapped with a fatal electrical charge, it's up to Nell to put her detective skills on display.

Jamaica, 1938. Gloria Campbell is sixteen years old when a single violent act alters the course of her life forever. Taking along her younger sister, she flees their hometown to forge a new life in Kingston. But in a capital city awash with change, a black woman is still treated as a second-class citizen. From a room in a boarding house and a job at a supply store, Gloria finds her way to a house of ill repute on the edge of the city, intrigued by the glamorous, financially independent women within.

From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin' s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator.

Trying to escape her embarrassing immigrant mother, Vimbai moves into a dilapidated house in the dunes and discovers that one of her new roommates has a pocket universe instead of hair, there's a psychic energy baby living in the telephone wires, and her dead Zimbabwean grandmother is doing dishes in the kitchen.

Beverley Cottrell had a dream life: a prestigious job, a beautiful husband and baby boy. This is stolen from her one winter afternoon when her son Malakay is kidnapped from a parked car. Despite a media campaign, a full police investigation, and the offer of a reward, Malakay is never found. Beverley's marriage soon dissolves and her husband immigrates from England to the U.S. with a new wife.

For the last 20 years, Dr. Hawa Abdi and her daughters have run a refugee camp on their family farm not far from war-torn Mogadishu, which has grown to shelter 90,000 displaced Somalis: men, women, and children whose lives have been shattered by violence and poverty and who are in urgent need of medical attention. She founded a one-room clinic in 1983, but then the Somalian government collapsed, famine struck and aid groups fled. So she allowed displaced people to find refuge on her 1300 acres of farmland.

In 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron: 100 nested tales told by a group of young men and women passing the time at a villa outside Florence while waiting out the gruesome Black Death, a plague that killed more than 25 million people. Some of the stories are silly, some are bawdy, some are like fables. In March of 2020, the editors of The New York Times Magazine created The Decameron Project, an anthology with a simple, time-spanning goal: to gather a collection of stories written as our current pandemic first swept the globe.

Structured as a triptych, Africaville chronicles the lives of three generations of the Sebolt family - Kath Ella, her son Omar/Etienne, and her grandson Warner - whose lives unfold against the tumultuous events of the 20th century from the Great Depression of the 1930s, through the social protests of the 1960s to the economic upheavals in the 1980s.

Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America to be enslaved, eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis was then the only person alive to tell the story of his capture and bondage—fifty years after the Atlantic human trade was outlawed in the United States. Cudjo shared his firsthand account with legendary folklorist, anthropologist, and writer Zora Neale Hurston.

Five years have passed since Darcy Eberhardt left Raub for dead on Ulream. Darcy and her ragtag multispecies crew have used those years well, searching for her lost love, Adam, throughout the disreputable fringes of galactic society—though the odds are stacked against them. Along the way, they liberate the vulnerable and accumulate allies, some of them dubious.

The intersection of motherhood and creative life is explored in these writings on mothering that turn the spotlight from the child to the mother herself. Here, in memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays, and fiction, mothers describe firsthand the changes brought to their lives by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering.

Martha Grimes's Hotel Paradise was hailed by Booklist as "superb...beyond genre...one of the year's best." Now, Grimes returns to the same small town, intertwining the threads of one young girl's unexplained death with another young girl's attempt at making sense of her own life.

In This Common Secret, Dr. Susan Wicklund chronicles her emotional and dramatic twenty-year career on the front lines of the abortion war. Growing up in working class, rural Wisconsin, Wicklund had her own painful abortion at a young age. It was not until she became a doctor that she realized how many women shared her ordeal of an unwanted pregnancy - and how hidden this common experience remains.

Rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity, set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, Everything Inside is at once wide in scope and intimate, as it explores the forces that pull us together, or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant.

In Amelia Bedelia Gets a Break, Amelia Bedelia is left in charge of her class pet—a hamster named Harry—over school break, and she's excited to learn all about caring for an animal. But when Harry goes missing, Amelia Bedelia is upset. Her friends Dawn and Clay help her search the house and make "lost pet" signs, but it seems hopeless, until Amelia Bedelia puts herself in Harry's shoes and finds him hiding in her favorite spot in the house.

John’s House provides all he needs. Surrounded by a vast, beautiful ocean under a void of sky, the House is John’s haven. He is alone, but never lonely; he is here now, but neither remembers nor longs for a before. In his House, John is safe and untroubled. But then a terrible shadow creature breaks in—and it wants him out. Pushed from the House, John falls into the light… And finds himself in modern-day Los Angeles, the first person to ever come back from the other side.

At The Society for the Preservation of Pennsylvania Antiques, fundraiser Eleanor "Nell" Pratt solicits donations - and sometimes solves crimes. When a collection of George Washington's letters is lost on the same day that an archivist is found dead, it seems strange that the Society president isn't pushing for an investigation. Nell goes digging herself, and soon uncovers a long, rich history of crime.