The Givenness of Things Essays

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Coleen Marlo may have the most beautiful and rich voice in the audiobook world. It's always a pleasure to listen to her. When Marilynne Robinson focuses on contemporary concerns, this production all comes together--with Robinson's thoughtfulness combined with Marlo's smooth and sincere reading… AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2016]

Publisher's Summary

Robinson has plumbed the depths of the human spirit in her novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Lila and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and in her new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern predicament and the mysteries of faith. These 17 essays examine the ideas that have inspired and provoked one of our finest writers throughout her life. Whether she is investigating how the work of the great thinkers of the past, Calvin, Locke, Bonhoeffer - and Shakespeare - can infuse our lives, or calling attention to the rise of the self-declared elite in American religious and political life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on display. Exquisite and bold, The Givenness of Things is a necessary call for us to find wisdom and guidance in our cultural heritage, and to offer grace to one another.

Take Pride Why the Deadliest Sin Holds the secret to Human Success

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Narrating this eye-opening examination of the uniquely human emotion of pride, Coleen Marlo combines a deft understanding of the author's academic thinking with a practical grasp of why her ideas are relevant to everyday life. Marlo's subtle intensity and vocal clarity make her an excellent choice to perform this book. Authentic human pride, which goes beyond the survival emotions shared by our primate cousins, is the feeling that who we are and what we're doing counts for something. It drives us to care about our place in the world and to accomplish feats that have meaning. With inspiring stories and Marlo's down-to-earth performance, it's easy for listeners to apply these lessons to themselves. The book also explains how narcissism, hubris, and arrogance represent corruptions of authentic pride that pit us against others instead of earning their genuine affirmation. T.W. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine [Published: OCTOBER 2016]

A leading psychologist reveals how our most misunderstood emotion - pride - has shaped our minds and our culture, and shows how we can harness its power.

Why did Paul Gauguin abandon middle-class life to follow the path of a starving artist? What inspired Bill Gates to give away so much of his hard-won fortune? How has Donald Trump succeeded so excessively, when his winning style could easily be his greatest liability?

As the renowned emotion researcher Jessica Tracy reveals in Take Pride, each of these superachievers has been motivated by an often maligned emotion: pride. Its dark, hubristic side is well known, but Tracy shows that pride is also essential for helping us become our best, brightest selves. By making us care about how others see us and how we see ourselves, pride makes us strive for excellence. In the right doses and the right contexts, it has been proven to boost creativity, motivate altruism, and confer status and power on those who display it. In Take Pride, Tracy explains why we came to feel pride and how we can make this double-edged emotion serve us - rather than the other way around.

The Hamilton Affair

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Cobbs uses fiction to flesh out one of the most important--and, these days, the most heralded--of the Founding Fathers. Alexander Hamilton, brilliant but illegitimate, was intent on establishing his own legitimacy, placing him in opposition to many of the Founding Fathers who put limits on who was eligible for liberty and freedom. Coleen Marlo's narration brings to life the political maneuvering that is still such a basic part of our system. Without using accents, she manages to make each member of this large group of characters unique and recognizable through his or her dialogue, helping the listener to understand the characters and their motivations. Her pacing and tone through stretches of narrative show that the times may have changed, but people and their motivations remain the same. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine [Published: SEPTEMBER 2016]

Set against the dramatic backdrop of the American Revolution, and featuring a cast of iconic characters such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the Marquis de Lafayette, The Hamilton Affair tells the sweeping, tumultuous, true love story of Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler, from tremulous beginning to bittersweet ending - his at a dueling ground on the shores of the Hudson River, hers more than half a century later after a brave, successful life…With its flawless writing, brilliantly drawn characters, and epic scope, The Hamilton Affair will take its place among the greatest novels of American history.

Fast Forward: How Women Can Achieve Power and Purpose

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Fast Forward, by two women leaders with experience and access throughout corporate America and around the world, takes the next step. Through interviews with a network of over fifty trailblazing women, it shows women how to accelerate their growing economic power and combine it with purpose to create success and meaning in their lives while building a better world.

Coleen Marlo narrates with the self-assured tone required for an audiobook that aims to empower women to change the world with their talents and energy. With her appealing, always comprehensible phrasing, she has a wonderful range of intensity. She empathizes convincingly with the true stories used to illustrate the book's message: Women have tremendous power to create good, and, with increasing economic power and public awareness of their skills, they are paving the way for more women to overcome obstacles and become change agents. The women interviewed by the authors are mostly high-functioning executives and entrepreneurs, almost all still challenged by negative biases in lending and investing practices. But for women anywhere on the occupational or financial spectrums, these are stories that will keep their inner fires bright and move them forward with their lives and projects. T.W. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine [Published: JANUARY 2016]

"Fast Forward shows us how leaders at every level can use their power and purpose to help more and more women achieve their dreams for a better life." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

THE PROMISE

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From the author of The Personal History of Rachel Dupree, shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers and long listed for the Orange Prize.

1900. Young pianist Catherine Wainwright flees the fashionable town of Dayton, Ohio in the wake of a terrible scandal. Heartbroken and facing destitution, she finds herself striking up correspondence with a childhood admirer, the recently widowed Oscar Williams. In desperation she agrees to marry him, but when Catherine travels to Oscar's farm on Galveston Island, Texas—a thousand miles from home—she finds she is little prepared for the life that awaits her. The island is remote, the weather sweltering, and Oscar's little boy Andre is grieving hard for his lost mother. And though Oscar tries to please his new wife, the secrets of the past sit uncomfortably between them.

BODIES OF WATER

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In 1960, Billie Valentine is a young housewife living in a sleepy Massachusetts suburb, treading water in a dull marriage and caring for two adopted daughters. Summers spent with the girls at their lakeside camp in Vermont are her one escape - from her husband's demands, from days consumed by household drudgery, and from the nagging suspicion that life was supposed to hold something different. In this deeply tender novel, T. Greenwood weaves deftly between the past and present to create a poignant and wonderfully moving story of friendship, the resonance of memories, and the love that keeps us afloat.

Zelda Fitzgerald: The Tragic, Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess

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Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the first American flapper." Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.

Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins From the Vietnam War

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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER

Thirty Years of Treason, Volume 1: Excerpts from Hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938 - 1968

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Various narrators

The testimony that the author has gleaned for this book from the 30-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee focuses on HUAC's treatment of artists, intellectuals, and performers. This highly listenable and absorbing collection of significant excerpts from the hearings shows with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel that investigated possible subversive activities in a "dignified" manner to a huge, unrelenting accusatory finger from which almost no one was safe.

THRIVE

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Coleen Marlo narrates this intelligent personal growth book with the directness we associate with the author, the hard-driving founder of the online newspaper The Huffington Post. Marlo's performance asserts and reinforces Huffington's powerful insights with reassuring confidence. This satisfying blend of personal sharing and wisdom feels precious and ancient. Instead of burning out striving for power or financial success, the three legs of her Third Metric (well-being, wisdom, wonder) direct us to get off our treadmill, quiet the mind and body, and learn the joy of service to others. Coming from such a prodigious achiever and read with such appealing authority, these are truths that overstretched listeners will savor and want to bring into their lives. T.W. © AudioFile 2014

Arianna Huffington's personal wakeup call came in the form of a broken cheekbone and a nasty gash over her eye - the result of a fall brought on by exhaustion and lack of sleep. The co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, one of the fastest growing media companies in the world, celebrated as one of the world's most influential women, gracing the covers of magazines, she was, by any traditional measure, extraordinarily successful. Yet as she found herself going from brain MRI to CAT scan to echocardiogram, to find out if there was any underlying medical problem beyond exhaustion, she found herself wondering, is this really what success feels like?

THE BITE IN THE APPLE

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Steve Jobs was a remarkable man who wanted to unify the world through technology. For him, the point was to set people free with tools to explore their own unique creativity. Chrisann Brennan knows this better than anyone. She met him in high school, at a time when Jobs was passionately aware that there was something much bigger to be had out of life, and that new kinds of revelations were within reach.

The Bite in the Apple is the very human tale of Jobs's ascent and the toll it took, told from the author's unique perspective as his first girlfriend, co-parent, friend, and—like many others—object of his cruelty. Brennan writes with depth and breadth, and she doesn't buy into all the hype. She talks with passion about an idealistic young man who was driven to change the world, about a young father who denied his own child, and about a man who mistook power for love.

On the Noodle Road

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Jen Lin-Liu takes a journey that follows the origins of pasta, traveling and eating a path through western China, Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, and across the Mediterranean to Italy. Narrator Coleen Marlo captures the author's diverse roots with crisp American accents and perfectly uttered Chinese phrases. She deftly shifts from travelogue to personal musings to vivid, mouthwatering ingredient descriptions, often with audible longing. Lin-Liu set herself to discover how ancient culinary migrations led to the development of pasta cookery in diverse cultures. She learned the skills of blending, shaping, and comparing noodles in a variety of cuisines--and shared goals, gender roles, and the search for self among a global sisterhood of women. A.W. © AudioFile 2013

"Delightful. . . . This book is not just for foodies or cooks: any and all will enjoy it." ---Library Journal Starred Review

"A footloose, spontaneous and appetite-whetting journal of culinary adventure." ---Kirkus

"Lin-Liu's journey is a bold palate-awakening adventure, endearingly rendered." ---Publishers Weekly

The Widows of Braxton County

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Widows of Braxton County by Jess McConkey is a haunting and suspenseful novel about family secrets and how well we really know the people we love. Kate is looking forward to starting a new life with her new husband, Joseph Krause. She leaves the big city and moves with him to the Iowa farm that has been in his family for more than 140 years. Instead of something out of Country Living, Kate finds life on the farm a struggle. She hears gossip from the unfriendly neighbors about the connection between the Krause family and a mysterious death decades before. As the past creeps into Kate's present, she's caught in a web of dangerous, unexplainable events.

NOAH

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Veronica Cruz has been through hell and back. After disconnecting with the world two years ago to be at the side of her dying mother, she's left alone, unemployed, overweight, and feeling a decade older than her twenty-eight years. When her best friend coaxes her into joining the local gym to ditch her depression and rejuvenate her life, she meets Noah. Assigned to help Veronica lose weight, Noah is everything she expected a young trainer to be—perfectly chiseled, supportive and motivating. Add to that, he's incredibly sexy. He's everything she's ever looked for in a man. What she least expected was for him to fall for her, but he has. There's just one glaring problem: Noah is eight years younger.

GIO

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When tragedy strikes in the ring, Giovanni Bravo falls into a deep depression, walking away from his dream of boxing to train instead. He agrees to a two-month getaway, helping train Felix Sanchez, his high school buddy and now welterweight champ of the world. Once at Felix's lavish boxing complex, Gio is reunited with Bianca Rubio, someone he remembers only as the girl with the innocent doe eyes back in high school. Not only does her refreshing, cheerful demeanor take Gio's mind off his troubled conscience, but he finds himself falling for her fast and hard. The problem? Bianca is Felix's girlfriend.

HECTOR

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Womanizer—check. Cocky—check. Dangerous—checkmate.

Staying away from him was indisputably the sensible thing to do. The problem? She wasn't just drawn to him; she was utterly mesmerized.

Charlotte Brennan is no stranger to heartache and mortification. Her past is full of both. So when amazing and incredibly intense Hector Ayala literally jumps into Charlee's life, her walls are immediately up. Letting her guard down and sharing her past and deepest secret is not happening. Charlee is not looking to get her heart crushed once again. However, her willpower proves to be no match for Hector's mesmerizing pull.

The Escape Artist

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Susanna Miller loses custody of her 11-month-old son, Tyler, but rather than turning the little boy over to her ex-husband and his new wife, she goes on the run. She dyes her hair, changes her name and escapes from Boulder, Colorado, leaving behind everyone she knows, including Linc Sebastian, the man who has been her best friend since childhood and who knows her better than anyone. Susanna lands in Annapolis, Maryland, alone, frightened, and always looking over her shoulder for someone who might recognize her. Just as she's beginning to feel safe in her new surroundings, she stumbles across information that could save the lives of many people...if she's willing to take it to the police. But going to the authorities means revealing her identity, admitting her guilt, and worst of all, losing her son.

Equal parts family drama, love story, and thriller, The Escape Artist is the poignant story of a mother's unbreakable bond with her child and the resiliency of a love that transcends distance and time.

Into The Dark

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Can a stranger share your memories?

That's the question that haunts Brenna Spector when she first sees footage of missing webcam performer Lula Belle. Naked but hidden in shadow, the "performance artist" shares her deepest, darkest secrets with her unseen male audience.... Wecrets that, to Brenna, are chillingly familiar.

Brenna has perfect memory, able to recall in astonishing detail every moment of every day of her adult life. But her childhood - those carefree years before the traumatic disappearance of her sister, Clea - is frustratingly vague. When Brenna listens to the stories Lula Belle tells her audience, stories only Brenna and Clea could know, those years come to life again in vivid detail. Convinced the missing internet performer has ties to her sister, Brenna takes the case - and in her quest for Lula Belle unravels a web of obsession, sex, guilt, and murder that could regain her family... or cost her life.

THE THINKING MOM'S REVOLUTION: AUTISM BEYOND THE SPECTRUM

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Publisher's Summary

The Thinking Moms’ Revolution (TMR) is a group of 23 moms (and one awesome dad) from Montana to Malaysia who all have children with developmental disabilities. Initially collaborating online about therapies, biomedical intervention, alternative medicine, special diets, and doctors on the cutting edge of treatment approaches to an array of chronic and developmental disabilities, such as autism, sensory processing disorders, food allergies, ADHD, asthma, and seizures, they've come together into something far more substantial.

Suspecting that some of the main causes may be overused medicines, vaccinations, environmental toxins, and processed foods, they began a mission to help reverse the effects. In the process, they became a tight-knit family dedicated to helping their kids shed their diagnoses.

Here, collected by Helen Conroy and Lisa Joyce Goes, are the stories of their fights to recover their kids from autism and related disorders. With each chapter written by a different TMR member, they share how they discovered one another, what they learned from one another, and why it’s important to have close friends who understand what it's like to parent a child with special needs. You'll read about their experiences, and learn how their determination and friendships have become a daily motivation for parents worldwide.

THE DRUNKEN BOTANIST: THE PLANTS THAT CREATE THE WORLD'S GREAT DRINKS

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Every great drink starts with a plant. Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley. Gin was born from a conifer shrub when medieval physicians boiled juniper berries with wine to treat stomach pain. The Drunken Botanist uncovers the surprising botanical history and fascinating science and chemistry of over 150 plants, flowers, trees, and fruits (and even a few fungi).

Audio Review:
THE DRUNKEN BOTANIST :
The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks 
Amy Stewart
Read by Coleen Marlo

From the apples of hard cider to the lime garnish of a cocktail, plants are vital to the imbibing experience. Author Amy Stewart looks into every aspect of that connection, even providing plenty of recipes. Coleen Marlo narrates the short pieces with gusto while respecting the informative nature of the material. She is delightfully entertaining as she tells listeners about the use of gunpowder to test rum and about the insects in figs and cherries, among many other topics. However, some things, like drink recipes and the variant spellings of "whiskey," may leave listeners wishing they'd bought the book in print to savor and use as a reference. Either way, this title is bound to entertain imbibers as it informs. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine [Published: APRIL 2013]