Showing results by narrator "Kathleen Godwin" in All Categories

A wisdom-filled memoir that doubles as a sweeping travelogue reaching from Boston to Sardinia and back again. Gorgeously written and culturally astute. The Boston Globe. When a big-city journalist quits her dream job to move to a remote Italian island for love, she discovers a whole new life beyond the romantic fantasies of Italy spun by books and movies. Struggling to adapt to a different culture, she buys a quirky house in the Sardinian countryside, goes to art school and becomes obsessed with home improvement and renovation.

Through her experiences in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Marianne Preger-Simon offers a rare account of exactly how Cunningham taught and interacted with his students. She describes the puzzled reactions of audiences to the novel non-narrative choreography of the company’s debut performances. She touches on Cunningham’s quicksilver temperament, lamenting his early frustrations with obscurity and the discomfort she suspects he endured in concealing his homosexuality and partnership with composer John Cageyet she celebrates above all his dependable charm, kindness, and engagement.

From the perch of poverty, farm life, family, and the confining community in which Janice Ellis grew up, she found her sense of purpose and determination to change things, to make them better. It was there that she gained an initial understanding of the importance of ethics and values, justice and equality, and caring for humanity in fostering a good society.

At a hot springs retreat in Montana, whiskey-swigging Maude, the nearly eighty-year-old chef, longs for the glory days when the retreat hosted martini-sipping celebrities instead of long-haired hippies who refuse to wear deodorant. Brooke, feisty, adventurous, and a bit reckless, proposes a reunion at the retreat with her best friends to get away from the chaos of her life with teenagers and the emotional aftermath of her postponed wedding.