Showing results by narrator "Christa Lewis" in All Categories

After dumping her cheating fiancé and canceling the wedding, Mallory Shepard can't bear another disaster. So when the former bride-to-be unexpectedly inherits Thistle Park, a ramshackle mansion in her ex's hometown of Port Quincy, it's a problem she can't afford - literally. It’s full of stray cats, peeling wallpaper, and nosy neighbors, and Mallory is dying to sell it off - once she finally fixes up both the place and her messy life.

In one of the most inventive travel books in years, Ina Caro invites listeners on 25 one-day train trips that depart from Paris and transport us back through 700 years of French history. Whether taking us to Orléans to evoke the visions of Joan of Arc or to the Place de la Concorde to witness the beheading of Marie Antoinette, Caro animates history with her lush descriptions of architectural splendors and tales of court intrigue. "[An] enchanting travelogue" (Publishers Weekly), Paris to the Past has become one of the classic guidebooks of our time.

Set in 1949 Paris, Slim Moran runs the Pitchipoi Agency with her Nazi Hunter boyfriend, Daniel. Their specialty: to find those lost in the last war. After a couple of easy cases, business has ground to halt, and Daniel has just gone on another manhunt this time to find the Nazi Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie. Slim is bored until a British spymistress asks her to find a missing woman spy long presumed dead.

Cora Bender killed a man. But why? What could have caused this quiet, lovable young mother to stab a stranger in the throat, again and again, until she was pulled off his body? For the local police it was an open-and-shut case. Cora confessed; there was no shortage of proof or witnesses. But Police Commissioner Rudolf Grovian refused to close the file and began his own maverick investigation.

Some women capture our attention like no others. Faith Bacon and Sally Rand were beautiful blondes from humble backgrounds who shot to fame behind a pair of oversize ostrich fans, but with very different outcomes. It was the golden age of American entertainment, and Bacon and Rand fought their way through the competitive showgirl scene of New York with grit and perseverance. They played peek-a-boo with their lives, allowing their audiences to see only slivers of themselves. Little is known about who they really were, until now.

The son of a sweetmaker, Karl Jochum has ambitions for a life beyond his father's shop. Through hard work and perseverance he determines to open a cafe in Berlin where the Emperor will one day dine. As the city grows and prospers, so too does Karl's business empire, and he rises to become the proprietor of Europe's finest and most luxurious hotel. Situated close to Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, the Hotel Quadriga is a glorious monument to Imperialist Germany.

It's the summer of 1888, and names like Carnegie, Astor, Pullman, and Bostwick line the premier resort's registry as society's elite gather on its grandiose front porch to see—and be seen. But Chase Bostwick isn't interested in being seen. As the second son of a wealthy financier, he's only interested in work—in Chicago—so being tasked by his father to chaperone his wearisome mother and boisterous little sister during their Michigan summer holiday is Chase's personal purgatory masquerading as paradise for never was a man more ill-suited to leisure.

In the late 1850s, a physician in New York City used a syringe and glass tube to inject half a drop of sperm into a woman's uterus, marking the first recorded instance of artificial insemination. From that day forward, doctors and scientists have turned to technology in ever more innovative ways to facilitate conception. Fertility Technology surveys this history in all its medical, practical, and ethical complexity, and offers a look at state-of-the-art fertility technology in various social and political contexts around the world.

Velveteen Vargas is an 11-year-old from Brooklyn who is granted a summer vacation in the country, courtesy of the nonprofit Fresh Air Fund. Her host family is a couple in upstate New York: Ginger, a failed artist on the fringe of Alcoholics Anonymous; and Paul, an academic who wonders what it will mean to "make a difference" in such a contrived situation.

Three young Jewish sisters from Leipzig, Germany huddle together in the cold darkness of night waiting for their smugglers to rescue them and bring them to freedom in Belgium. Their mother, in a state of shock following Kristallnacht, is left behind, sedated in a psychiatric hospital. November 1938 begins the four year ordeal of the seven member Kroch family who endure unfathomable conditions in their fight for survival: imprisonment in French internment camps, hiding in a tiny tool shed, and adapting to the deplorable conditions of a Nazi prison.

The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans - the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia - before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress.

In the summer of 1961, a wall of barbed wire goes up quickly in the dead of night, officially dividing Berlin. Luisa Voigt lives in West Berlin, but her grandmother lives across the border and is now trapped inside the newly isolated communist country of East Germany. Desperate to rescue her grandmother and aware of the many others whose families have been divided, Luisa joins a secret spy network, risking her life to help bring others through a makeshift underground tunnel to West Germany. Their work is dangerous, and not everyone will successfully escape or live to see freedom.

Lately, Kate has a lot on her dessert plate. She's launching a cookie-of-the-day challenge in the heart of Coral Cay, providing sweet treats for the reception of the town's handsome new veterinarian - not to mention dealing with tourists in town for a pirate festival and the surprise arrival of her former fiance, Evan, who seems determined to win her back. And if that's not enough, a skeleton has been found - in the backyard behind her best friend Maxi's floral shop. Kate knows Maxi could never hurt a fly.

Workaholic Camille Ashland is at the top of her game. She has built a thriving business, is raising a lovely daughter, and lives in a newly decorated home. Her life is full until a heart attack and near-death experience change everything.

Germany, 1945. The bloodiest war in history is at an end. Now the retribution and search for justice begin. In a series of Nuremberg trials, war criminals are hanged or commit suicide. Others are judged and sent to prison for their parts in the most heinous crimes of all time. But in the final trial, one in which ordinary Germans are forced to confront their complicity, a leading American defense counselor has to consider questions of good and evil when he defends a simple mechanic, a man who kept the gas chambers in working order.

The ideal of a new Germany swept up Sophie Scholl in a maelstrom of patriotic fervor - that is, until she realized the truth behind Hitler's machinations for the fatherland. Now she and other students in Munich, the cradle of the Nazi government, have banded together to form a group to fight for the truth: the White Rose. Risking everything to print and distribute leaflets calling for Germans to rise up against the evil permeating their country, the White Rose treads a knife's edge of discovery by the Gestapo.

In the South Carolina Hills, along the Savannah River Watershed, in the fall of 1829, 14-year-old, three-quarter Cherokee Sahani, whose Christian name is Charity, sets out on a journey with her 83-year-old white grandfather to Fort Charlotte for what she thinks is a trip to trade the pelts he has accumulated in order to replenish their supplies. However, Charity soon discovers that her grandfather's objective in making this trip is to get her married off and settled somewhere.

Growing up under Fascist censorship in Nazi Germany, Ruth Rappaport absorbed a forbidden community of ideas in banned books. After fleeing her home in Leipzig at fifteen and losing both parents to the Holocaust, Ruth drifted between vocations, relationships, and countries, searching for belonging and purpose. When she found her calling in librarianship, Ruth became not only a witness to history but an agent for change as well. This epic true story reveals a driven woman who survived persecution, political unrest, and personal trauma through a love of books....

Maria von Wedemeyer knows the realities of war. Her beloved father and brother have both been killed on the battlefield. The last thing this spirited young woman needs is to fall for a man under constant surveillance by the Gestapo. How can she give another piece of her heart to a man so likely to share the same final fate? Yet when Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an old family friend, comes to comfort the von Wedemeyers after their losses, she discovers that love isn't always logical.

In Prevail Until the Bitter End, Alexandra Lohse explores the gossip and innuendo, the dissonant reactions and perceptions of Germans to the violent dissolution of the Third Reich. Mobilized for total war, soldiers and citizens alike experienced an unprecedented convergence of military, economic, social, and political crises.