Showing results by narrator "Bernadette Dunne" in All Categories

Bridie's life has been a series of wrongs. The potato famine in Ireland. Being sent to the poorhouse when her mother's new job in America didn't turn out the way they'd hoped. Becoming an orphan. And then there's the latest wrong - having to work for a family so abusive that Bridie is afraid she won't survive. So she runs away to Seneca Falls, New York, which in 1848 is a bustling town full of possibility. There, she makes friends with Rose, a girl with her own list of wrongs, but with big dreams, too.

The Three Graces of Val-Kill changes the way we think about Eleanor Roosevelt. Emily Wilson examines what she calls the most formative period in Roosevelt's life, from 1922 to 1936, when she cultivated an intimate friendship with Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, who helped her build a cottage on the Val-Kill Creek in Hyde Park on the Roosevelt family land. In the early years, the three women - the "three graces", as Franklin Delano Roosevelt called them - were nearly inseparable.

After President Woodrow Wilson suffered a paralyzing stroke in the fall of 1919, his wife, First Lady Edith Wilson, began to handle the day-to-day responsibilities of the chief executive. Mrs. Wilson had had little formal education and had only been married to President Wilson for four years, yet in the tenuous peace following the end of World War I, she dedicated herself to managing the office of the president, reading all correspondence intended for her bedridden husband.

Sapphira Dodderidge, a Virginia lady of the 19th century, marries beneath her and becomes irrationally jealous of Nancy, a beautiful slave. One of Cather's later works.

By the end of the Civil War, nearly half a million slaves had taken refuge behind Union lines in what became known as "contraband camps". These were crowded, dangerous places, yet some 12 to 15 percent of the Confederacy's slave population took almost unimaginable risks to reach them, and they became the first places Northerners came to know former slaves en masse.

For All the Obvious Reasons is Lynn Stegner's superb collection of nine remarkably distinct tales of passion, clear-eyed wisdom, and honesty honed to a cutting edge. These are stories the listener can't shake: A woman living a marital shadow life realizes that her long compensating heart has begun to ominously decompensate. An affluent New Yorker becomes a hoarder to escape a future he cannot bear to take up. A baby dies in a miasma of sibling resentments, and from that the secrets of culpability unravel.

When Derek Jeter was eight years old, he announced that he was going to play baseball for the New York Yankees. Jeter earned the attention of major league scouts in high school and was drafted to the New York Yankees in 1992. Named Rookie of the Year, he helped the Yankees win the World Series five times and became team captain in 2003. With his good looks, easygoing personality, and sense of humor, Derek has always been a fan favorite. Retiring from baseball in 2014, Derek Jeter leaves behind a legacy.

Jayne Dennagee has spent her life running from the "doctor death" legacy of her father. His Kervorkian-copycat methods of euthanasia ruined her childhood, covering it in shame. She won't let him steal her future, too. After changing her name to Becka, she assumes a new life and new job caring for the ailing mother of a handsome young businessman, Isaac Hughes. Becka struggles to sort out her feelings for her new boss just as her patient passes away under unusual circumstances.

Ardis Cameron mines extensive interviews, fan letters, and archival materials including contemporary cartoons and cover images from film posters and foreign editions to tell how the story of a patricide in a small New England village circulated over time and became a cultural phenomenon.

The Doll Collection is exactly what it sounds like: a treasured toy box of all-original dark stories about dolls of all types, including everything from puppets and poppets to mannequins and baby dolls. Featuring everything from life-sized clockwork dolls to all-too-human Betsy Wetsy-type baby dolls, these stories play into the true creepiness of the doll trope but avoid the clichés that often show up in stories of this type.

The matriarch of a Long Island clan with a stubbornly suicidal son and a defiant, restless granddaughter, Esther has hired a Russian landscaper to watch over the family as well as the grounds of their secluded waterfront estate. But he has been watching Esther, too. And his love for her is growing wild enough to uproot them all.

Twenty-year-old Ruth Stutzman is a wonderful caregiver - but she has no experience with children. Laid off because of budget cuts from her job at a retirement home, she's relieved to find work - even if it means temporarily watching widower Martin Rhodes's brood of six! Martin has been doing his best since his wife's passing, but he and the children need help. Their house, once full of laughter and light, has been darkened by sadness. .

Christina Kempf has always felt that God chose Aden Reese to be her husband. When they were children, Aden was there to save her when she fell through a patch of thin ice, and he's been by her side ever since. After his parents died in a car accident 10 years ago, the Kempfs raised Aden as one of their own, and everyone sees Aden and Christina as brother and sister. But Christina has never given up hope that Aden will one day see her as the perfect woman for him…and ask her to be his wife.

What defines Boston? Its history? Its landmarks? Its sports teams and shrines? Perhaps the question should be, who defines Boston? From Henry David Thoreau to Dennis Lehane, Boston has been beloved by many of America's greatest writers, and there is no better group of men and women to capture the heart and soul of the Hub. In Our Boston, editor Andrew Blauner has collected both original and reprinted essays from Boston-area writers past and present, all celebrating the city they love.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice.

In 1986, Jean Fritz went to China and talked to survivors of the Long March. It is from their recollections and her own broad, personal knowledge of Chinese history that Fritz has written one of the most compelling accounts of the incredible 6,000-mile journey across China made by the Communist Army in 1934 and 1935. Fritz takes us on the route of the 60-mile-long First Front Army, the unit of Mao Zedong that wound its way through a terrain so perilous it was often more threatening than their battles with the enemy.

The United States Congress in 1929 passed legislation to fund travel for mothers of the fallen soldiers of World War I to visit their sons’ graves in France. Over the next three years, 6,693 Gold Star Mothers made the trip. In this emotionally charged, brilliantly realized novel, April Smith breathes life into a unique moment in American history, imagining the experience of five of these women. They are strangers at the start, but their lives will become inextricably intertwined, altered in indelible ways.

This year, a modern-day Scrooge learns the true meaning of Christmas with the help of a suddenly sexy old friend. A down-on-his-luck baseball star finds a beautiful new beginning with a hometown girl. And a prim-and-proper teacher is determined to bring out the holiday spirit in a grumpy tree farmer. Settle in for the season with this collection of very merry short fiction.

For 15 years, Eleanor Roosevelt and her handsome doctor, David Gurewitsch, were friends, traveling, entertaining, and eventually buying a townhouse together in Manhattan. Their friendship has always intrigued historians, but not much is known about it. David kept detailed journals and took thousands of photos, but he never publicly discussed their time together.

Wollie Shelley is a greeting card artist struggling to keep afloat financially and to pursue - despite a series of recent disasters - the search for the love of her life. She reluctantly agrees to be a contestant on the reality television show Biological Clock. The show's premise: six eligible singles date each other, and the audience votes on which couple would make the best parents.