Showing results by narrator "Elisabeth Rodgers" in All Categories

When recently widowed Maggie McElroy is called to China to settle a claim against her late husbands estate, she is blindsided by the discovery that he may have led a double life. Since work is all that will keep her sane, her magazine editor assigns her to profile Sam, a half-Chinese American who is the last in a line of gifted chefs tracing back to the imperial palace. As she watches Sam gear up for Chinas Olympic culinary competition by planning the banquet of a lifetime, she begins to see past the cuisines artistry to glimpse its coherent expression of Chinese civilization.

Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena's father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal - a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong - that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination. The Last Thing He Wanted is a tour de force - persuasive in its detail, dazzling in its ambiguities, enchanting in its style.

Mapping the Heavens provides a tour of the "greatest hits" of cosmological discoveries - the ideas that reshaped our universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy and structured by dark matter. Priyamvada Natarajan, our guide to these ideas, is at the forefront of the research - an astrophysicist who literally creates maps of invisible matter in the universe.

It’s been twenty-five years since the shocking disappearance of a female student and the distinguished Creative Writing professor who died while searching for her. When an alumna dies in a shockingly similar way to the story she wrote, and then another succumbs to a similar fate, they realize someone has decided at long last to avenge the crimes of the past. Will the secret of what they did twenty-five years ago be revealed? Will any of them be alive at the end of the weekend to find out?

In Vera Kelly: Lost and Found, Rosalie Knecht gives Vera her highest-stake case yet, as Vera quickly puts her private detective skills to good use and tracks a trail of breadcrumbs across southern California to find her missing girlfriend. She travels first to a film set in Santa Ynez and, ultimately, to a most unlikely destination where Vera has to decide how much she is willing to commit to save the woman she loves.

Great teams are built and maintained with great intention, though they can make it look deceptively easy. Too many teams engage in dysfunctional behaviors or fall into territorialism, apathy, and unproductive relationships. The result? An overwhelmed, unengaged, and stressed-out workforce that settles for average or poor performance.

It is New York, 1904, and Dulcy Remfrey, despite an idiosyncratic, traveling childhood, faces the predictable life of a woman of the time. But all that changes when her eccentric father returns from his expedition to Africa without any of the proceeds from the sale of a gold mine. It seems he's lost his mind along with the money, and Dulcy's obsessive ex-fiancé (and her father's business partner) insists she come to Seattle to decipher her father's cryptic notebooks, which may hold clues to the missing funds.

Memory: A Very Short Introduction explores the fascinating intricacies of human memory. Is it one thing or many? How does memory change as we age? And what about so-called recovered memories - can they be relied upon as a record of what actually happened in our personal past? This book brings together our most recent knowledge to address (in a scientifically rigorous but highly accessible way) these and many other important questions about how memory works, and why we can't live without it.

When archeologist Riley Smith comes to ask Eve Duncan for help, Eve has to say no. Traveling halfway around the world on a dangerous quest is not her expertise as a forensic sculptor. But Eve is intrigued by the prospect of an isolated island that holds a secret locked in time.

Henry, Tess, Winnie, and Suz banded together in college to form a group they called the Compassionate Dismantlers. Following the first rule of their manifesto - "To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart" - these daring misfits spend the summer after graduation in a remote cabin in the Vermont woods committing acts of meaningful vandalism and plotting elaborate, often dangerous, pranks. But everything changes when one particularly twisted experiment ends in Suz's death and the others decide to cover it up.

The Bodine ranch and resort in western Montana is a family business, an idyllic spot for vacationers. A little over thirty thousand acres and home to four generations, it's kept running by Bodine Longbow with the help of a large staff, including new hire Callen Skinner. There was another member of the family once: Bodine's aunt, Alice, who ran off before Bodine was born.

Sometimes the journey home is its own reward. Once upon a time, Rick Sullivan had a promising future. One of Jewell Cove's star athletes and reigning heartthrobs, he joined the Marines and had the world in the palm of his hand - until it all came crashing down. His honorable discharge doesn't make him the hometown hero everyone wants him to be, and there's little reprieve from the demons that haunt him at night. Still, even though it seems that all hope is gone, fate has something else in store.

An unnamed narrator’s life is unraveling. Her only child has left home, and her twenty-year marriage is strained. Anticipation about her soon-to-be-released book of poetry looms. She seeks answers to the paradoxes of love, desire, and parenthood among the Greek and Roman gods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As she passes her days teaching at a boys’ prep school, spending her off-hours sequestered in the museum’s austere galleries, she is haunted by memories of a yearlong friendship with a colleague, a fellow poet struggling with his craft.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) began in 1995, but even in the first 10 years of its existence it generated debate, controversy, and even outrage. Rulings on beef hormones and tuna-dolphin cases provide graphic examples of how the organization regulates and intrudes into areas of individual consumer choice, ethical preferences, and cultural habits. This deep and far-ranging impact of the WTO on peoples' everyday lives means that it is not just an institution of interest to economists, but to everyone.

Transitions of the Heart is the first collection to ever invite mothers of transgender and gender variant children of all ages to tell their own stories about their child’s gender transition. Often transitioning socially and emotionally alongside their child but rarely given a voice in the experience, mothers hold the key to familial and societal understanding of gender difference.

Companies spend billions of dollars annually on diversity efforts, with remarkably few results. Too often diversity efforts rest on the assumption that all that's needed is an earnest conversation about "privilege." That's not enough. To truly make progress with diversity, equity and inclusion, we must focus less on documenting the problem and more on just stopping the transmission of it.

Do you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day's news, the willingness to be alone. The shelves of the world's great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed.

San Francisco, 1915. As America teeters on the brink of world war, Charmian and her husband, famed novelist Jack London, wrestle with genius and desire, politics and marital competitiveness. Charmian longs to be viewed as an equal partner who put her own career on hold to support her husband, but Jack doesn't see it that way...until Charmian is pulled from the audience during a magic show by escape artist Harry Houdini, a man enmeshed in his own complicated marriage. Suddenly charmed, Charmian's eyes open to a world of possibilities.

Imagine you are nine years old. Your best friend’s father is arrested, half your classmates disappear from school, and someone burns down the house across the road. Imagine you have to cross a snow-covered mountain range at night in order to escape the soldiers who are trying to kill you. How would you deal with these memories once you are an adult? Jones, a relief worker and child psychiatrist, interviewed over 40 Serb and Muslim children who came of age during the Bosnian War and now returns, 20 years after the war began, to discover the adults they have become.

Black Market Billions blows the lid off the world's fastest-growing illicit industry: organized retail crime. Hitha Prabhakar reveals how criminals with ties to terrorist groups around the world are committing huge product thefts, and using the profits to fund terrorist acts. Prabhakar connects the dots and follows the money - from consumers dying for a deal to terrorist cells eager to do the killing.