Audiobooks narrated by Janet Metzger

Every day across the US, 66 million poor white people pay the price for failing whiteness. In this sweeping debut, activist and chaplain Cedar Monroe writes indelibly about and for poor white people: about unlearning the American dream, untangling from white supremacy, and working for liberation alongside other poor folks. Monroe introduces us to people who are poor and unhoused in a small town in Washington, who eke out a living on land that once provided timber for the nation. On the banks of the Chehalis River, we meet residents of the largest homeless encampment in the country, who face sweeps and evictions and are targeted by vigilantes before bringing their case to federal court. We watch a community grapple with desperation, government neglect, and its own racism. Capitalism and colonialism have stolen land from Indigenous people, forced workers into dangerous jobs, and then left them to die when their labor was no longer needed. But what would happen if poor white folks rejected the empty promises of white supremacy and embraced solidarity with other poor people? What if they joined the resistance to the system that is, slowly or quickly, killing us all? Trash asks us to see anew the peril in which poor white people live and the choices we all must make.

Cedar Monroe (Author), Janet Metzger (Narrator)

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Inflamed: Abandonment, Heroism, and Outrage in Wine Country's Deadliest Firestorm

Just after midnight on October 9, 2017, as one of the nation's deadliest firestorms swept over California's Wine Country, hundreds of elderly residents from two posh senior living facilities were caught in its path. The frailest were blind, in wheelchairs, or diagnosed with dementia, and their community quickly transformed from a palatial complex that pledged to care for them to one that threatened to entomb them. The rescue of the final 105 seniors left behind on an inflamed hillside depended not on employees, but strangers whose lives intersected in a riveting tale of terror and heroism. Headlines blamed caregivers for abandonment and neglect, but the truth proved far more complex. Inflamed is the gripping and emotional narrative detailing what happened to these seniors, employees, and rescuers before, during, and after the Tubbs Fire decimated portions of Santa Rosa, including Oakmont Senior Living Villa Capri and part of Varenna at Fountaingrove. Anne Belden and Paul Gullixson are professional journalists and Sonoma County residents who spent three years recording each phase of the disaster in agonizing detail-from the botched evacuation and its excruciating aftermath to the investigations, lawsuits, and breakdowns that followed. They tell this harrowing story with a veracity and compassion only achieved by experienced reporters with local roots.

Anne E. Belden, Paul Gullixson (Author), Janet Metzger (Narrator)

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The Year in Tech, 2024: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

A year of HBR's essential thinking on tech-all in one place. Generative AI, Web3, neurotech, reusable rockets to power the space economy-new technologies like these are reshaping organizations at the hybrid office, on factory floors, and in the C-suite. What should you and your company be doing now to take advantage of the new opportunities these technologies are creating-and avoid falling victim to disruption? The Year in Tech 2024: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you understand what the latest and most important tech innovations mean for your organization and how you can use them to compete and win in today's turbulent business environment. Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind? Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues-blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more-each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow.

Harvard Business Review (Author), Janet Metzger, Paul Boehmer (Narrator)

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HBR Guide to Designing Your Retirement

Make a retirement plan that includes more than golf, mah-jongg, and grandkids. When what you do is inextricably tied to who you are for so much of your life, it can be daunting to think of who you'll be if you slow down-or stop working entirely. You've charted your own career journey, made difficult choices, led teams through times of turmoil, celebrated big wins, and moved on from devastating losses. How do you just stop? What do you do without a purpose and a plan-and a crowded calendar? How do you make this next stage of your life fulfilling and satisfying? While the idea of not working can be simultaneously wonderful and overwhelming, you can figure out what you want the end of your career and your retirement to look like before you submit your resignation. This book won't help you figure out whether or not you can afford to retire, but it will help you figure out what you'd like to do and who you'd like to be. You'll learn how to: assess your readiness to make a transition; make a plan to slow your pace-or stop completely; experiment with possible future selves; find new ways to apply old skills; communicate your plan to key partners; bridge your old identity to the new one you create; and keep connected to the passions and people that matter.

Harvard Business Review (Author), Christopher Grove, Janet Metzger (Narrator)

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Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction

In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery was created to do just that. Dreamland tells the surprising story of this unlikely government program and its role in American life as well as the global story of migration. Historian Carly Goodman takes listeners from Washington, DC, where proponents deployed a colorblind narrative about our 'nation of immigrants' to secure visas for white immigrants, to the African countries where it flourished and fostered dreams of going to America. From the post office to the internet, aspiring emigrants, visa agents, and others embraced the lottery and tried their luck in a time of austerity and limits. Rising African immigration to the United States has enriched American life, created opportunities for mobility, and nourished imagined possibilities. But the promise of the American dream has been threatened by the United States' embrace of anti-immigrant policies and persistent anti-Black racism.

Carly Goodman (Author), Janet Metzger (Narrator)

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A Promise Kept: The Muscogee (Creek) Nation and McGirt v. Oklahoma

'At the end of the Trail of Tears there was a promise,' United States Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the decision issued in the case of McGirt v. Oklahoma. And that promise, made in treaties between the United States and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation more than 150 years earlier, would finally be kept. With the Court's ruling, the full extent of the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation was reaffirmed-meaning that 3.25 million acres of land in Oklahoma were recognized as 'Indian Country.' A Promise Kept explores the circumstances and implications of McGirt v. Oklahoma, likely the most significant Indian law case in well over a hundred years. Combining legal analysis and historical context, this book gives an in-depth, accessible account of how the case unfolded and what it might mean for Oklahomans, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and other tribes throughout the United States. Robbie Ethridge traces the history of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation from its inception to its resurgence in Oklahoma in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Robert J. Miller considers McGirt v. Oklahoma, examining important related cases, precedents that informed the Court's decision, and future ramifications. Their work clarifies the stakes of a decision that, while long overdue, raises numerous complex issues profoundly affecting federal, state, and tribal relations and law.

Robbie Ethridge, Robert J. Miller (Author), Janet Metzger (Narrator)

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Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Poss

The work of queer autistic scholar Nick Walker has played a key role in the evolving discourse on human neurodiversity. Neuroqueer Heresies collects a decade's worth of Dr. Walker's most influential writings, along with new commentary by the author and new material on her radical conceptualization of Neuroqueer Theory. This book is essential for anyone seeking to understand the foundations, terminology, implications, and leading edges of the emerging neurodiversity paradigm.

Nick Walker (Author), Janet Metzger (Narrator)

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A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World's Most Misunderstood Bird

Part field guide, part history, part ornithology primer, and altogether fun. Fact: Pigeons are amazing, and until recently, humans adored them. We've kept them as pets, held pigeon beauty contests, raced them, used them to carry messages over battlefields, harvested their poop to fertilize our crops-and cooked them in gourmet dishes. Now, with A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching, listeners can rediscover the wonder. Equal parts field guide and quirky history, it covers behavior: Why they coo; how they flock; how they preen, kiss, and mate (monogamously); and how they raise their young (on chunky pigeon milk). Anatomy and identification, from Birmingham Roller to the American Giant Runt to the Scandaroon. Birder issues, like what to do if you find a baby pigeon stranded in the park. And our lively shared story together, including all the things we've taught them-Ping-Pong, for example. 'Rats with wings?' Think again. Pigeons coo, peck and nest all over the world, yet most of us treat them with indifference or disdain. So Rosemary Mosco, a bird-lover, science communicator, writer, and cartoonist, is here to give the pigeon's image a makeover, and to help every town- and city-dweller get closer to nature by discovering the joys of birding through pigeon-watching.

Rosemary Mosco (Author), Janet Metzger (Narrator)

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Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s

All families have secrets but the facts requiring secrecy change with time. Nowadays a lesbian partnership, a 'bastard' son, or a criminal grandfather might be of little or no consequence but could have unraveled a family at an earlier moment in history. Margaret K. Nelson is interested in how families keep secrets from each other and from outsiders when to do otherwise would risk eliciting not only embarrassment or discomfort, but profound shame and, in some cases, danger. Drawing on over 150 memoirs describing childhoods in the period between the aftermath of World War II and the 1960s, Nelson highlights the importance of history in creating family secrets and demonstrates the use of personal stories to understand how people make sense of themselves and their social worlds. Keeping Family Secrets uncovers hidden stories of same-sex attraction among boys, unwed pregnancies among teenage girls, the institutionalization of children with mental and physical disabilities, participation in left-wing political activities, adoption, and Jewish ancestry. The members of ordinary families kept these issues secret to hide the disconnect between the reality of their own family and the prevailing ideals of what a family should be. Keeping Family Secrets sheds light not only on decades-old secrets but pushes us to confront what secrets our families keep today.

Margaret K. Nelson (Author), Janet Metzger (Narrator)

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Justice in the Age of Judgment: From Amanda Knox to Kyle Rittenhouse and the Battle for Due Process

When unscrupulous Italian prosecutors waged an all-out war in the media and courtroom to wrongly convict American exchange student Amanda Knox for a murder she didn’t commit, family and friends turned to Seattle attorney and media legal analyst Anne Bremner to help win her freedom. The case was dubbed the “trial of the decade” and would coincide with the explosion of social media and a new era of trying cases in public as much as the courtroom. While Italian prosecutors, the press, and online lynch mobs convicted Knox in the court of public opinion, Bremner would draw upon her decades in the courtroom and in front of the camera to turn the tide with a new kind of defense in pursuit of justice. Bremner takes us inside some of the biggest cases of recent times and offers her expert insights and analysis as our legal system faces unprecedented forces fighting to tip the scales of justice their way. Why couldn’t prosecutors convict O.J. Simpson despite all of the evidence seemingly proving he killed his wife Nicole? Could a jury remain unbiased in the face of overwhelming public pressure in the trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd? Justice in the Age of Judgement is Bremner’s unparalleled and unflinching look at the captivating cases tried on Twitter and TV, where the burden of proof and fundamental legal tenet of “innocent until proven guilty” is under assault from the court of public opinion.

Anne Bremner, Doug Bremner (Author), Janet Metzger (Narrator)

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Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom

Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America's slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses, a person's only protection against the scourge was to 'get acclimated' by surviving the disease. About half of those who contracted yellow fever died. Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans's strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what Kathryn Olivarius terms 'immunocapital.' As this original analysis shows, white survivors could leverage their immunity as evidence that they had paid their biological dues and could then pursue economic and political advancement. For enslaved Blacks, the story was different. Immunity protected them from yellow fever, but as embodied capital, they saw the social and monetary value of their acclimation accrue to their white owners. Whereas immunity conferred opportunity and privilege on whites, it relegated enslaved people to the most grueling labor. The question of good health is always in part political. Necropolis shows how powerful nineteenth-century white Orleanians pushed this politics to the extreme. They constructed a society that capitalized mortal risk and equated perceived immunity with creditworthiness and reliability.

Kathryn Olivarius (Author), Janet Metzger (Narrator)

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Sondheim in Our Time and His

Sondheim in Our Time and His offers a wide-ranging historical investigation of the landmark works and extraordinary career of Stephen Sondheim, a career which has spanned much of the history of American musical theater. Each author uncovers those aspects of biography, collaborative process, and contemporary context that impacted the creation and reception of Sondheim's musicals. In addition, several authors explore in detail how Sondheim's shows have been dramatically revised and adapted over time. Multiple chapters invite the listener to rethink Sondheim's works from a distinctly contemporary critical perspective and to consider how these musicals are being reenvisioned today. Through chapters focused on individual musicals, and others that explore a specific topic as manifested throughout his entire career, plus an afterword by Kristen Anderson-Lopez; by digging deep into the archives and focusing intently on his scores; from interviews with performers, directors, and book writers, and close study of live and recorded productions-volume editor W. Anthony Sheppard brings together Sondheim's past with the present, thriving existence of his musicals.

W. Anthony Sheppard (Author), Janet Metzger, Paul Boehmer (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Janet Metzger