Showing results by narrator "Pam Ward" in All Categories

Following the trail of an unexpected family connection, acclaimed journalist Pam Fessler has unearthed the lost world of the patients, nurses, doctors, and researchers at Carville who struggled for over a century to eradicate Hansen's disease, the modern name for leprosy. Amid widespread public anxiety about foreign contamination and contagion, patients were deprived of basic rights - denied the right to vote, restricted from leaving Carville, and often forbidden from contact with their own parents or children.  

Organized in keeping with our knowledge of the migration of human groups through history, with statistics and a cultural portrait of each ethnic group, People of the World becomes a fascinating round-the-world tour of customs and traditions, as well as a go-to source for background information to round out one's own family history. From the Tuvans of Siberia to the Samoans and Tahitians of Polynesia, from the Mapuche of Chile to the Sami of Scandinavia, 222 of the world's 10,000-plus ethnic groups are featured.

Every town has at least one beloved if misunderstood eccentric, and Beanie Bradsher belongs to Mayhew Junction. Some - LouWanda Crump, for example - would call Beanie a spectacle, but Beanie just marches - and dresses - to the beat of a different drum.

Today it is known as Roosevelt Island. In 1828, when New York City purchased this narrow, two-mile-long island in the East River, it was called Blackwell's Island. There, over the next hundred years, the city would build a lunatic asylum, prison, hospital, workhouse, and almshouse. Stacy Horn has crafted a compelling and chilling narrative told through the stories of the poor souls sent to Blackwell's, as well as the period's city officials, reformers, and journalists (including the famous Nellie Bly). Damnation Island re-creates what daily life was like on the island....

A woman goes about certain rituals of sex with her second husband, sharing the bed with the ghosts of her sexual past. A beautiful young art student embarks on an affair with a much older, married, famous artist. A middle-aged woman struggles with the decline of her mother, once glamorous and still commanding; their fraught relationship causes unexpected feelings, both shaming and brutal. A man finds that his father has died while in the midst of extramarital sex and wonders what he should do with the body.

It’s always somebody else’s kid - until it’s yours. When Katherine James and her husband found out their son was using heroin, their responses ran the gamut: disbelief, anger, helplessness, guilt. As they struggled to come to grips with their son’s addiction and decide how best to help him, their home became a refuge for an unlikely assortment of their son’s friends, each with their own story, drawn by the simple love and acceptance they found there - “the Lost Boys”, James calls them.

The Big Ratchet is the story of the ratchets: the technologies and innovations, big and small, that propelled our species from hunters and gatherers on the savannahs of Africa to shoppers in the aisles of the supermarket. Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3,000 calories every day. This is such an astonishing thing in the history of life as to verge on the miraculous. The Big Ratchet is the story of how it happened.

Every year, 30–40 young Amish men descend on the cozy little town of West Kootenai, Montana, arriving in the spring to live there for six months and receive “resident” status for the hunting season in the fall. They arrive as bachelors, but go home with brides! Sarah Shelter has lived in...

From the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street, however divergentt heir political views, these groups seem united by one thing: outrage over a system of power and influence that they feel has stolen their livelihoods and liberties. Increasingly, protesters on both ends of the political spectrum and the media are using the word corrupt to describe an elusory system of power that has shed any accountability to those it was meant to help and govern. But what does corruption and unaccountability mean in today's world?

Personal answers to the difficult "whys" of suffering. New 16-page photo section and illustrations by Joni. Originally published in 1978, A Step Further is Joni Eareckson Tada's response to thousands of letters she received from people puzzled about the "whys" of suffering. Joni answers these...

Set in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Coming to America series is Love Comes Softly meets Little House on the Prairie. Dear Mary, New Prospects, Montana, is nothing like England--so terrifying and beautiful at the same time, and much larger than I dared imagine when you and I first embarked...

Permanent Present Tense tells the incredible story of Henry Gustav Molaison, known only as H. M. until his death in 2008. In 1953, at the age of 27, Molaison underwent a dangerous "psychosurgical" procedure intended to alleviate his debilitating epilepsy. The surgery went horribly wrong, and when Molaison awoke he was unable to store new experiences. For the rest of his life, he would be trapped in the moment. But Molaison’s tragedy would prove a gift to humanity.

With Christmas approaching, Sadie is preparing for a large blended-family gathering including many new grandchildren - in their home in Fort Collins, Colorado. Even with the festive chaos, Sadie drops everything when word gets out that her friend, Mary, is the victim of a holiday robbery. Though priceless to the family, the collection has been valued at $40,000, and the Christmas tree in the care facility has never looked so good. But before the ornaments can be retrieved by Mary, 11 of the most expensive ornaments are stolen.

A response to all those grandmother books with flowers and puppies on the cover, Grandma Rules is a book for the hip, baby boomer grandma who realizes that after all the work she put into her own kids, she can take a break and have fun with her grandkids. A perfect gift for the greatest grandmothers you know, this book is laugh-out-loud funny while offering useful insights and tips on how to embrace the world’s greatest job.

Alafair Tucker is a strong woman and the core of her family’s life on a farm in Oklahoma where backbreaking work and the daily logistics of caring for her husband and their nine children, and of being a good neighbor, requires determination and a clear head. She’s also a woman of strong opinions, and it is her opinion that her neighbor, Harley Day, is a drunkard and a reprobate. So, when Harley’s body is discovered frozen in a snowdrift one January day in 1912, she isn’t surprised that his long-suffering family isn’t particularly broken up. When Alafair helps Harley’s wife prepare the body for burial, she discovers that Harley’s demise was anything but natural.

In 1932, the city of Natchez, Mississippi, reckoned with an unexpected influx of journalists and tourists as the lurid story of a local murder was splashed across headlines nationwide. Two eccentrics, Richard Dana and Octavia Dockery, enlisted an African American man named George Pearls to rob their reclusive neighbor, Jennie Merrill, at her estate. During the attempted robbery, Merrill was shot and killed.

From the author of The New York Times number one best-selling novel The Carpetbaggers comes the story of Madison Dupre, a young and ambitious art curator who is fixated on reaching the top of the rarefied world of priceless antiquities - an insular playground of the mega-rich, the super-privileged and even the occasional money launderer. This glamorous world is also a world of unimaginable ugliness and ego.

New York state assemblyman, assistant secretary of the Navy, New York City police commissioner, governor of New York, vice president, and, at 42, the youngest president ever: in his own words, Theodore Roosevelt "rose like a rocket". He was also a cowboy, a soldier, a historian, an intrepid explorer, and an unsurpassed environmentalist - all in all, perhaps the most accomplished chief executive in our nation's history.

From the cradle to college, tell your daughters the truth about life before they believe the culture's lies. For mothers with girls newborn to eighteen, Five Conversations You Must Have with Your Daughter is simply a must-have audiobook. Youth culture expert Vicki Courtney helps moms pinpoint and prepare the discussions that should be ongoing in the formative years.

This comprehensive survey of Catholic history in what became the United States spans nearly 500 years, from the arrival of the first Spanish missionaries to the present. Distinguished historian Leslie Tentler explores lay religious practice and the impact of clergy on Catholic life and culture as she seeks to answer the question, What did it mean to be a "good Catholic" at particular times and in particular places?