Audiobooks narrated by Suzanne Toren

Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany

Paper, kitchen garbage, rubber, hair, fat, rags, and bones-the Nazi empire demanded its population collect anything that could be reused. Citizens conjured up schemes to squeeze value from waste or invent new purposes for defunct or spent material, no matter the cost to people or the environment. As WWII dragged on, rescued loot-much of it waste-clogged transport routes and piled up in warehouses across Europe. Historicizing the much-championed ideal of zero waste, Anne Berg shows that the management of waste was central to the politics of war and to the genesis of genocide in the Nazi Germany. Destruction and recycling were part of an overarching strategy to redress raw material shortages, procure lebensraum, and cleanse the continent of Jews and others considered undesirable. Resource extending schemes obscured the crucial political role played by virtually all German citizens to whom salvaging, scrapping, and recycling were promoted as inherently virtuous and orderly behaviors. Throughout Nazi occupied-Europe, Jews, POWs, concentration camp inmates, and enemy civilians were forced to recycle the loot, discards, and debris of the Nazi race war. In the end, the materials that were fully exploited and the people who had been bled dry were cast aside, buried, burned, or left to rot. Nonetheless, waste reclamation did not have the power to win the war.

Anne Berg (Author), Suzanne Toren (Narrator)

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Dangerous Visions

Dubbed “the most significant and controversial SF book” of its generation, Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking collection launched an entire sub-genre: New Wave science fiction. With contributions from legendary authors and multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, Dangerous Visions returns to print in a stunning new edition perfect for new and returning fans alike. A landmark short story collection that put New Wave Science Fiction on the literary map, Dangerous Visions won several prestigious awards and was nominated for many others. This now-classic anthology includes thirty-three stories by thirty-two award-winning authors, over half of whom have won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards. Contributing authors include: Robert Silverberg, Frederik Pohl, Brian W. Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, and Ellison himself. As relevant now as it was when first published, Dangerous Visions is a phenomenal collection that deserves a place on every bookshelf.

Harlan Ellison (Author), Bradford Hastings, Bronson Pinchot, Dion Graham, Edoardo Ballerini, Feodor Chin, Grover Gardner, Heath Miller, James Patrick Cronin, Jd Jackson, Jim Meskimen, Joe Hempel, Joel Froomkin, John Pirhalla, Johnny Heller, Mara Wilson, Mark Sanderlin, Natalie Naudus, Neil Hellegers, Neil Shah, P. J. Ochlan, Ramiz Monsef, Robert Fass, Scott Aiello, Scott Brick, Shiromi Arserio, Simon Vance, Stefan Rudnicki, Steve West, Steven Jay Cohen, Suzanne Toren, TBD, Thom Rivera, Tim Campbell, Vikas Adam (Narrator)

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Lovers in Auschwitz: A True Story

Brought to you by Penguin. Zippi Spitzer and David Wisnia were captivated by each other from the moment they first exchanged glances across the work floor. It was the beginning of a love story that could have happened anywhere. Except for one difference: this romance was unfolding in history's most notorious death camp, between two young prisoners whose budding intimacy risked dooming them if they were caught. Incredibly, David and Zippi survived for years beneath the ash-choked skies of Auschwitz. Under the protection of their fellow inmates, their romance grew and deepened, even as their brushes with death mounted and David's luck in particular seemed close to running out. As the war's end finally approached and the time came for them to leave the camp, David and Zippi made plans to meet again. But neither of them could imagine how long their reunion would take or how many lives they would live in the interim. They had no inkling, either, of the betrayals that would await them along the way. But David did suspect that Zippi harbored a secret-one that could explain the mystery of his survival all those years ago. An unbelievable tale of romance, sacrifice, loss, and resilience, Lovers in Auschwitz is a saga of two young people who found themselves trapped inside a waking nightmare of the Nazis' creation, yet who nevertheless discovered a love that sustained them through history's darkest hour. ©2024 Keren Blankfeld (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Keren Blankfeld (Author), Suzanne Toren, TBD (Narrator)

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Cassoulet Confessions: Food, France, Family and the Stew That Saved My Soul

Cassoulet Confessions is an enthralling memoir by award-winning food and travel writer Sylvie Bigar that reveals how a simple journalistic assignment sparked a culinary obsession and transcended into a quest for identity. Set in the stunning southern French countryside, this honest and poignant memoir conveys hunger for authentic food and a universal hunger for home. In Cassoulet Confessions, Sylvie travels across the Atlantic from her home in New York to the origin of cassoulet-the Occitanie region of Southern France. There she immerses herself in all things cassoulet: the quintessential historic meat and bean stew. From her first spoonful, she is transported back to her dramatic childhood in Geneva, Switzerland, and finds herself journeying through an unexpected rabbit hole of memories. Not only does she discover the deeper meanings of her ancestral French cuisine, but she is ultimately transformed by having to face her unsettling, complex family history. Sylvie's simple but poetic prose immerses us in her story: we smell the simmering aromas of French kitchens, empathize with her family dilemmas, and experience her internal struggle to understand and ultimately accept herself.

Sylvie Bigar (Author), Suzanne Toren (Narrator)

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Summons to Berlin: Nazi Theft and A Daughter's Quest for Justice

On his deathbed, Dr. Joanne Intrator's father poses two unsettling questions: 'Are you tough enough? Do they know who you are?' Joanne soon realizes that these haunting questions relate to a center-city Berlin building at 16 Wallstrasse that the Nazis ripped away from her family in 1938. But a decade is to pass before she will fully come to grasp why her father threw down the gauntlet as he did. Repeatedly, Joanne's restitution quest brings her into confrontation with yet another of her profound fears surrounding Germany and the Holocaust. Having to call on reserves of strength she's unsure she possesses, the author leans into her professional command of psychiatry, often overcoming flabbergasting obstacles perniciously dumped in her path. The depth and lucidity of psychological insight threaded throughout Summons to Berlin makes it an attention-grabbing standout among books on like topics. As a listener, you'll come away delighted to know just who Dr. Joanne Intrator is. You'll also finish the book cheering for her, because in the end, she proves far more than tough enough to satisfy her father's unnerving final demands.

Joanne Intrator (Author), Suzanne Toren (Narrator)

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Vergil: The Poets Life

A biography of Vergil, Rome’s greatest poet, by the acclaimed translator of the Aeneid The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) became the world’s first media celebrity, a living legend. But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure; we know that he was born into a modest rural family, that he led a private and solitary life, and that, in spite of poor health and unusual emotional vulnerabilities, he worked tirelessly to achieve exquisite new effects in verse. Vergil’s most famous work, the Aeneid, was commissioned by the emperor Augustus, who published the epic despite Vergil’s dying wish that it be destroyed. Sarah Ruden, widely praised for her translation of the Aeneid, uses evidence from Roman life and history alongside Vergil’s own writings to make careful deductions to reconstruct his life. Through her intimate knowledge of Vergil’s work, she brings to life a poet who was committed to creating something astonishingly new and memorable, even at great personal cost.

Sarah Ruden (Author), Suzanne Toren (Narrator)

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Book of Queens: The True Story of the Middle Eastern Horsewomen Who Fought the War on Terror

The untold story of generations of Middle Eastern freedom fighters-horsewomen who safeguarded an ancient breed of Caspian horse-and their efforts to defend their homelands from the Taliban and others seeking to destroy them."A breathtaking book that revisits nearly one hundred years of Iranian history, highlighting the power and beauty of women who refuse to be subdued." ―Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of A Woven World Book of Queens reaches back centuries to the Persian Empire and a woman disguised as a man, facing an invading army, protected only by light armor and the stallion she sat astride. Mahdavi draws a thread from past to present: from her fearless Iranian grandmother, who guided survivors of domestic violence to independent mountain colonies in Afghanistan where the women, led by a general named Mina, became their country's first line of defense from marauding warlords. To the female warriors who helped train and breed the horses used by US Green Berets when they touched down in October 2001, with a mission but insufficient intelligence on the ground-women whose contributions were then forgotten. Pardis Mahdavi chases the legacy of Caspian horses and the women whose lives are saved by them, drawing on decades of research, newly-discovered diaries, and exclusive military sources. Among those intersecting stories is that of American Louise Firouz, who helped bring the breed back from the brink of extinction, connecting Virginia traders to British royals to the son of the Shah. Firouz's life is forever changed when she meets Mahdavi's own family, who run an unusual smuggling operation in addition to raising horses in a wild bid for freedom. Book of Queens is an epic tale of hidden women whose communal knowledge was instrumental in saving an animal as ancient as civilization, and who were the genesis of their own liberation.

Pardis Mahdavi (Author), Nikki Massoud, Pardis Mahdavi, Sean Rohani, Shila Ommi, Sitara Attaie, Suzanne Toren (Narrator)

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The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History

With the publication of Essay on the Principle of Population and its projection of food shortages in the face of ballooning populations, British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus secured a leading role in modern political and economic thought. In this startling new interpretation, Deborah Valenze reveals how canonical readings of Malthus fail to acknowledge his narrow understanding of what constitutes food production. Valenze returns to the eighteenth-century contexts that generated his arguments, showing how Malthus mobilized a redemptive narrative of British historical development and dismissed the ways that people adapted to the challenges of subsistence needs. She uses history, anthropology, and food studies to redirect our attention to the margins of Malthus's essay, where activities such as hunting and gathering were rendered extraneous. She demonstrates how Malthus's omissions and his subsequent canonization provided a rationale for colonial imposition of British agricultural models, regardless of environmental diversity. By broadening our conception of human livelihoods, Valenze suggests pathways to resistance against the hegemony of Malthusian political economy. She invites us to imagine a world where monoculture is in retreat and the margins are recentered as spaces of experimentation, nimbleness, and human flourishing.

Deborah Valenze (Author), Suzanne Toren (Narrator)

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Family Lexicon

An Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking-when he isn't provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini's Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives. Family Lexicon is about a family and language-and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true. 'Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy [it],' Ginzburg tells us at the start. 'The places, events, and people are all real.'

Natalia Ginzburg (Author), Suzanne Toren (Narrator)

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When Winter Came: A Country Doctor’s Journey to Fight the Flu Pandemic of 1918

Mary Beth Sartor Obermeyer grew up listening to her grandfather, Dr. Pierre Sartor, describing his remarkable life, including his collaboration with Mayo Clinic, which spanned several decades. Long after Dr. Sartor died, Beth found a handwritten memoir of his experiences caring for patients during the influenza pandemic of 1918 nestled among other family documents in a lockbox. Thus began the journey. Beth used her skills as a journalist to discover how Dr. Sartor saved lives amid a global crisis … how he won the love of his patients throughout his career … and how he earned the respect of his colleagues, who named him Iowa’s General Practitioner of the Year. Beth tells the story of her grandfather—a compassionate, skilled physician who does the best of things in the worst of times—with warmth and wisdom. Medicine has changed greatly since her grandfather practiced on the Midwestern prairie, but however winter may come to each of our lives, we all want a doctor like Pierre Sartor.

Mary Beth Sartor Obermeyer (Author), Peter Bradbury, Suzanne Toren (Narrator)

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Combined Destinies: Whites Sharing Grief About Racism

By beginning a conversation that encourages self-examination and compassion, Combined Destinies invites readers to look at how white Americans have been hurt by the very ideology that their ancestors created. Editors Ann Todd Jealous and Caroline T. Haskell, both experienced psychotherapists skilled at facilitating dialogue about racial issues, are cognizant of the challenges that even the thought of such conversations often presents. Their book is based on the premise that for positive and lasting change to occur, hearts as well as minds must be opened. This courageous anthology posits that unearned privilege has damaged the psyche of white people as well as their capacity to understand racism. Drawing on the intimate stories of diverse contributors, Combined Destinies is organized thematically, with individual chapters focusing on topics such as guilt, shame, silence, and resistance.

Ann Todd Jealous, Caroline T. Haskell (Author), Ann Richardson, Barbara Henslee, Bernadette Dunne, Caroline Shaffer, Carrington Macduffie, Dion Graham, Hillary Huber, Johnny Heller, Justine Eyre, Pamela Almand, Patrick Lawlor, Robert Fass, Robin Miles, Suzanne Toren, Traber Burns (Narrator)

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Hiding in Plain Sight: how a Jewish girl survived Europe's heart of darkness

Polish Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. By using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities, she was the only member of her family to survive World War II. When Dutch journalist Pieter van Os stumbled upon Mala's story, he set out to revive the world through which she had made her way from war-ravaged middle Europe to the nascent state of Israel, before finally settling in the Netherlands. With her memoir and their interviews as guide, van Os physically retraced Mala's steps, stopping in at local archives and remote villages, searching for anyone who might have known or helped her seventy-five years before. At times sounding like an erudite detective story, this poignant, rich book is an engrossing meditation on what drives us to fear the 'other', and what in turn might allow us to feel compassion for them.

Pieter Van Os (Author), Suzanne Toren (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Suzanne Toren