Audiobooks narrated by Susan Ericksen

The Last Mrs. Astor: A New York Story Audiobook

'Kiernan's sharp-eyed biography brings back a woman who, far into her 90s, relished the dance of life.' -O, The Oprah Magazine This biography, based on firsthand knowledge and interviews with Mrs. Astor's friends and the heads of New York's great cultural institutions, gives us back the woman so loved and admired. At the age of fifty-one, Brooke Astor wedded the notoriously ill-tempered Vincent Astor, who died in 1959. In a highly publicized courtroom battle, she fought off an attempt to break Vincent's will, which left $67 million to the Vincent Astor Foundation. As the foundation's president, Mrs. Astor would use this legacy to benefit New York City. She would personally visit every grant applicant and charm anyone she met. At her hundredth birthday, princes and presidents honored her, but in 2006 a grandson petitioned the courts to have his father removed as Brooke's guardian. Once again, an Astor court battle became the stuff of headlines.

Frances Kiernan (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Poison Pen

Edinburgh is mourning recent the death of Queen Elizabeth II when Bookseller Delaney Nichols's boss comes to her with a most unusual assignment. An old friend of his, living in an estate in the village of Roslin, has found what could be a priceless relic on her property, and Delaney is tasked with investigating. Could Jolie possibly have an item of breathtaking Scottish historical significance in her possession? But when Delaney arrives at Jolie's estate, she is greeted by a legal team with a vested interest in the property. Jolie manages to remove the interlopers, but as they're examining the priceless item, they hear a scream, and meet a much less welcome discovery: a body. As Delaney digs deeper, she discovers Jolie's own fascinating history. Jolie's mother had long claimed that her daughter was the rightful heir to the throne, not Elizabeth II, because of an affair she claimed to have with King Edward VIII. The only evidence, however, is in the form of a purported journal that one of Edward's secretaries kept. The puzzles become more confusing when a connection is uncovered between this far-fetched story and the murdered man. Delaney will have to read between the lines to put together the pieces . . . or become history herself.

Paige Shelton (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Unwavering: The Wives Who Fought to Ensure No Man is Left Behind

The true story of the women who waged an epic home front battle to ensure our nation leaves no man behind. When some of America's military men are captured or go missing during the Vietnam War, a small group of military wives become their champions. Never had families taken on diplomatic roles during wartime, nor had the fate of our POWs and missing men been a nationwide concern. In cinematic detail, authors Taylor Baldwin Kiland and Judy Silverstein Gray plunge you directly into the political maneuvering the women navigated, onto the international stage they shared with world leaders, and through the landmark legacy they created.

Judy Silverstein Gray, Taylor Baldwin Kiland (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Fire and Rain is a compelling, meticulous narrative of the way national security decisions formed at the highest levels of government affect the lives of individuals at home and abroad. By drawing these connections, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg brings to life policy decisions about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, conveying their significance to a new generation of readers. She breaks fresh ground in contextualizing Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's decisions within a wider institutional and societal framework. Drawing upon a vast collection of declassified documents, Eisenberg presents an important reinterpretation of the Nixon Administration's relations with the Soviet Union and China vis a vis the war in Southeast Asia. She argues that in their desperate effort to overcome, or at least overshadow, their failure in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger made major concessions to both nations in the field of arms control, their response to the India-Pakistan war, and the diplomacy surrounding Taiwan-much of this secret. A half-century after the Paris Peace Conference marking the withdrawal of US troops and advisors from Vietnam and foreign troops from Laos and Cambodia, Fire and Rain is a dramatic account of geopolitical decision making, civil society, and the human toll of the war on the people of Southeast Asia.

Carolyn Woods Eisenberg (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity-cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits-as a path to solvency. Today, an important question remains: What if solvency was never the goal? In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital-and indeed capitalism-in times of social upheaval from below. Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies. Where these policies 'succeeded,' relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material, The Capital Order offers a damning account of the rise of austerity-and of modern economics-at the levers of contemporary political power.

Clara E. Mattei (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

Audiobook

How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate

China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country's rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China's path. In the first post-Mao decade, China's reformers were sharply divided. Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia's economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue duree lens. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China's economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without.

Isabella M. Weber (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Against the Seas: Saving Civilizations from Rising Waters

The scenario we are facing is scary: within a few decades, sea levels around the world may well rise by a meter or more as glaciers and ice caps melt due to climate change. Large parts of our coastal cities will be flooded, the basic outline of our world will be changed, and torrential rains will present their own challenges. But this is not the first time that people have had to cope with threatening waters, because sea levels have been rising for thousands of years, ever since the end of the last Ice Age. Stories told by the Indigenous people of Australia and the Pacific coast of North America, and those found in the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as Roman and Chinese histories all bear witness to just how traumatic these experiences were. The responses to these challenges varied: people adapted by building dikes, canals, and seawalls, by resorting to prayer or magic, and, very often, by moving out of the way of the rushing waters. Against the Seas explores these stories as well as the various measures being taken today to combat rising waters, focusing on five regions: Indonesia, Shanghai, the Sundarbans of Bangladesh, the Salish Sea, and the estuary of the St. Lawrence River. What happened in the past and what is being tried today may help us in the future, and, if nothing else, give us hope that we will survive.

Mary Soderstrom (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Sustainably Investing in Digital Assets Globally

In Sustainably Investing in Digital Assets Globally, international finance and fintech expert Selva Ozelli delivers an eye-opening and insightful discussion of cryptocurrency investment, as well as the risks and opportunities that await those who deal in this promising new technology. In the book, the author explores how cryptocurrencies have been used by illicit operators throughout the US and the world and how legitimate investors have sought to limit their exposure to illegal activity. Listeners will also find comprehensive treatments of US-based and global cryptocurrency regulations, as well as: advice for investors concerned about the environmental sustainability of blockchain technology but who still wish to invest in cryptocurrencies; information about a variety of countries and governments who have explored and implemented various cryptocurrency initiatives inside their own borders; and discussions surrounding the drive by many central banks to introduce a digital currency, in addition to the surging popularity of non-fungible tokens. A can't-miss handbook for the crypto-curious investor, Sustainably Investing in Digital Assets Globally deserves a place in the bookshelves of anyone with an interest in international finance, fintech, technology, or cryptocurrency.

Selva Ozelli (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Brilliant Commodity: Diamonds and Jews in a Modern Setting

During the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of diggers, prospectors, merchants, and dealers extracted and shipped over 50 million carats of diamonds from South Africa to London. The primary supplier to the world, South Africa's diamond fields became one of the formative sites of modern capitalist production. At each stage of the diamond's route through the British empire and beyond-from Cape Town to London, from Amsterdam to New York City-carbon gems were primarily mined, processed, appraised, and sold by Jews. In A Brilliant Commodity, historian Saskia Coenen Snyder traces how once-peripheral Jewish populations became the central architects of a new, global exchange of diamonds. Centuries of restrictions had limited Jews to trade and finance, businesses that often heavily relied on internal networks. Jews were well-positioned to become key players in the earliest stage of the diamond trade and its growth into a global industry. Relying on mercantile and familial ties across continents, Jews created a highly successful commodity chain that included buyers, brokers, cutters, factory owners, financiers, and retailers. Working within a diasporic ethnic community that bridged city and countryside, metropole and colony, Jews helped build a flourishing diamond industry and a place for themselves in the modern world.

Saskia Coenen Snyder (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Emotional First Aid Kit: A Practical Guide to Life After Bariatric Surgery

The second edition of this book is written for anyone who wants to change his or her life through bariatric weight loss surgery. Learn realistic and practical strategies for dealing with emotional difficulties encountered before and after your weight loss surgery that help you: - Relieve stress without using food - Modify unhealthy behavior - Overcome hurdles to establishing a consistent exercise program - Deal with negative reactions by friends, family, and spouse to your weight loss - Prevent relapse . . . and more.

Cynthia L. Alexander Psyd, Cynthia L. Alexander, Psy.D. (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and-at times-white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race-as well as on the role of religion in racial shift-in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Laura Arnold Leibman (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Freedom from Health Anxiety: Understand and Overcome Obsessive Worry about Your Health or Someone El

Are you constantly worrying about your health, or the health of a loved one? Do you frequently check yourself for lumps, bumps, tingling, or pain? Do you find yourself endlessly looking up symptoms on the internet? Perhaps you find yourself asking others for reassurance or validation that you're okay, obsessing over health scares in the media, or monitoring your blood pressure on an hourly basis? No matter how your health anxiety manifests, it can be a crippling psychological burden. Endlessly ruminating about illness and death can affect all aspects of life-at home, work, school, as well as the doctor's office. In Freedom from Health Anxiety, nationally recognized anxiety expert Karen Lynn Cassiday teaches you skills to conquer health anxiety, once and for all. You'll learn to switch from focusing on worst-case scenarios to appreciating the joy of the present moment-regardless of health status. Using a blend of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), positive psychology, and the author's 'learned inhibition' model, you'll finally acquire the tools you need to take charge of your fear and break the cycle of stressing over your-or your loved one's-well-being. You'll also learn effective methods for tolerating health uncertainty, getting in touch with your body's cues, and rediscovering the pleasure of the present.

Karen Lynn Cassiday Phd, Karen Lynn Cassiday, Phd (Author), Susan Ericksen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Susan Ericksen