Showing results by narrator "Karen Murray" in All Categories

The New York Times bestselling story of the golden age of luxury department stores, and the trailblazing women who ran them. The twentieth century department store: a wonderland of consumption where every wish could be met under one roof. Dropping off the baby at nursery; an afternoon tea; a stroll through the latest fashions. A wedding (or funeral) could be planned. A Bengal Tiger cub could be purchased. Inside these towering price-tag palaces, anything was possible. They were beacons of modernity, and within this atmosphere of glamour and luxury, women dominated.

Joan was only a child the last time she visited Memphis. She doesn't remember the bustle of Beale Street on a summer's night. She doesn't know she's as likely to hear a gunshot ring out as the sound of children playing. How the smell of honeysuckle is almost overwhelming as she climbs the porch steps to the house where her mother grew up. But when the front door opens, she does remember Derek. This house full of history is home to the women of the North family.

Orphaned and alone, Rachel is taken under the wing of her strict African-American grandmother and moved to a mostly black community where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and astonishing beauty start to attract a troubling level of attention. As the terrible secrets begin to emerge, Rachel learns to swallow her grief and construct her own self-image in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.

The first definitive exploration of the changing role of the twenty-first-century First Lady, painting a comprehensive portrait of Jill Biden—from a White House correspondent for The New York Times.

In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States. Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion.

Taming the Street describes how President Franklin D. Roosevelt battled to regulate Wall Street in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression. With deep reporting and vivid storytelling, Diana B. Henriques takes listeners back to a time when America’s financial landscape was a jungle ruled by the titans of vast wealth, largely unrestrained by government. Roosevelt ran for office in 1932 vowing to curb that ruthless capitalism and make the world of finance safer for ordinary savers and investors.

The road from a high school track to an Olympic starting line is long and sometimes shadowy. Obstacles like chronic injuries, under-fueled nutrition, and coercive coaching can threaten to derail careers before they’ve even begun. Frustrated by seeing young talent burn out before reaching their potential, professional distance runner Molly Huddle and college coach Sara Slattery have teamed up with trailblazing running legends and sports medicine professionals to create an essential guide to reach your running potential.

What happens when you pack almost a dozen jails, bulging at the seams with society’s cast-offs, onto a spit of landfill purposefully hidden from public view? Prize-winning journalists Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau have spent two years interviewing more than 130 people comprising a broad cross section of lives touched by New York City's Rikers Island prison complex—from incarcerated people and their relatives, to officers, lawyers, and commissioners, with stories spanning the 1970s to the present day. The portrait that emerges calls into question the very nature of justice in America.

As New York came to a halt with COVID, Michael Kimmelman composed an email to a group of architects, historians, writers, and friends, inviting them to take a walk. Wherever they liked, he wrote—preferably someplace meaningful to them, someplace that illuminated the city and what they loved about it. At first, the goal was distraction. At a scary moment when everything seemed uncertain, walking around New York served as a reminder of all the ways the city was still a rock, joy, and inspiration.

The daughter of a Danish immigrant and a black G.I., Rachel survives a family tragedy only to face new challenges. Sent to live with her strict African-American grandmother in a racially divided Northwest city, she must suppress her grief and reinvent herself in a mostly black community. A beauty with light brown skin and blue eyes, she attracts much attention in her new home. The world wants to see her as either black or white, but that's not how she sees herself.

In this intimate and innovative memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Margo Jefferson gives us her own personal and intellectual formation. As she comes of age in an America whose freedoms are distorted by race and gender, she finds herself reflected in a cast of others—jazz luminaries, writers, artists, athletes and stars. Bing Crosby and Ike Turner are among the author’s alter egos. The sounds of a jazz LP emerge as the intimate and instructive sounds of a parent’s voice. W.E.B. Du Bois and George Eliot meet illicitly.

It is 2085 and Laisve is learning to use the ancient waterways to travel through water and time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as The Brook, she discovers a talisman that will connect her with people from the past two centuries, including a squad of laborers at work on a huge national monument to liberty. As waters rise and a police state encroaches, Laisve must find her way back to the early days of her imperfect country, to forge a bond that might save all their lives—and their shared dream of freedom.

America runs on women—women who are tasked with holding society together at the seams and fixing it when things fall apart. In this tour de force, acclaimed Sociologist Jessica Calarco lays bare the devastating consequences of our status quo. Holding It Together draws on five years of research in which Calarco surveyed over 4000 parents and conducted more than 400 hours of interviews with women who bear the brunt of our broken system.

Nanette's day is not off to a good start. Her on-again, off-again relationship with Walter is off...again, and when she offers a fellow busker a place to stay for the night he ends up murdered on her kitchen floor. To make matters worse, the busker turns out to have been an undercover cop. And his former partner has taken an immediate and extreme dislike to Nanette. When she finds that the dead man stashed a wad of cash in her apartment, cash that could go to help his blind girlfriend, Nanette's desire to do the right thing lands her in trouble.

Nanette is on the rocks. Heartbroken and alone in New York, she finds what comfort she can in the bottom of a bottle. But her life seems to turn around when she's given a voodoo doll, so much so that Nanette seeks out the doll's creator, Ida, to thank her. That's when Nanette's luck seems to run out, and Ida ends up with a bullet in her head. Guilt-ridden, Nanette resolves to get justice for her new friend, only to find that Ida was hiding some dark skeletons in her closet.

When Nanette's mother calls with the news that her Aunt Vivian has gone missing, it's not exactly out of the ordinary. Vivacious and bohemian Aunt Vivian has never been one to play by the rules. This time, however, the circumstances surrounding Vivian's disappearance are rather troubling. Would Nanette be up to polishing her French language skills and flying to Paris, where she was last seen, to track her down? It's not a tough decision for Francophile Nanette.

With an unconventional Christmas setting of Egypt and written in sweet, lyrical prose, Brown Baby Jesus is sure to become a holiday classic embraced by families of all races and backgrounds.

Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged—feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage.

Coretta Scott King is known for being the wife of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but she was a civil rights activist and leader in her own right! She was a singer and an author, too, and her work made a difference for Black Americans and for all women for decades to come.

Two unsung women whose power using food as a political weapon during the civil rights movement was so great it brought the ire of government agents working against them.