Showing results by narrator "Kathe Mazur" in All Categories

In the spring of 2012, the Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the future of the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions. It has already been deployed to cure deadly diseases, fight the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, and make inheritable changes in the genes of babies.

Well, 1983 certainly wasn't boring for the Welch family. Somehow, between their handsome father's mysterious death, their glamorous soap-opera-star mother's cancer diagnosis, and a phalanx of lawyers intent on bankruptcy proceedings, the four Welch siblings managed to handle each new heartbreaking misfortune in the same way they dealt with the unexpected arrival of the forgotten-about Chilean exchange student—together.

Something’s rotten in Apple country! Hildy Biddle is a high school reporter eager to stand up for the truth. She’s just waiting for a chance to prove herself as a journalist, and yearning for a big story. The trouble is, the town’s biggest story stars...a ghost. Not a very easy interview! This ghost has the town in a tizzy, and the local paper is playing up people’s fears with shocking headlines of eerie happenings and ghostly sightings. Hildy’s determined to discover what’s really going on, but her desire to uncover the truth is making some people awfully nervous.

A wife struggles to make sense of her husband’s sudden disappearance. A mother mourns her teenage son through the music collection he left behind. A woman shepherds her estranged parents through her brother’s wedding and reflects on the year her family collapsed. A young man comes to grips with the joy—and vulnerability—of fatherhood. And, in the masterly opening novella, two teenagers from very different families forge a sustaining friendship, only to discover the disruptive and unsettling power of sex.

When Judy Goldman’s husband of almost four decades has a routine spinal injection to alleviate back pain, he is instantly paralyzed from the waist down - a phenomenon no doctor can explain or undo. She’s forced to take over, navigating the byzantine medical world they suddenly find themselves in. Her husband is forced to give in. This is the starting point for Together, which looks at the changes every couple faces - the slow, ordinary ones brought about by time and the sudden, dramatic ones that take us by surprise.

L.A. is no place for widows. This is what 44-year-old Hannah Bernal quickly discovers after the tragic death of her handsome and loving husband, John. Misery and red-rimmed eyes are little tolerated in the land of the beautiful. But life stumbles on: Hannah's sweet three-year-old daughter, Ellie, needs to be dropped off at her overpriced preschool, while Hannah herself must get back to work in order to pay the bills on "Casa Sugar", the charming Spanish-styled bungalow they call home. Fortunately, Hannah has her "Grief Team" for emotional support....

At nineteen, Annie Black trades a bleak future in a washed-out California town for a London winter of drinking and abandon. Twenty years later, she is a San Francisco lighting designer and happily married mother of three who has put her reckless youth behind her. Then a photo from that distant winter in Europe arrives inexplicably in her mailbox, and an old obsession is awakened.

Isabella d'Este, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, born into privilege and the political and artistic turbulence of Renaissance Italy, is a stunning black-eyed blonde and a precocious lover and collector of art. Worldly and ambitious, she has never envied her less attractive sister, the spirited but naive Beatrice, until, by a quirk of fate, Beatrice is betrothed to the future Duke of Milan.

What does it really mean to be a good father? What did your father tell you that has stayed with you throughout your life? Was there a lesson from him, a story, or a moment that helped to make you who you are? Is there a special memory that makes you smile when you least expect it?

I’m a real ace at arguing with myself. Take a subject like Tanner Cobb. On the one hand, he stole. On the other, he helped his little brother read and count. Then again, he stole shoes in front of his little brother. But, he brought the shoes back and offered to make up for what he’d done. My mind said, don’t trust him. My instincts said, he might not be all bad. Inconsistencies are a royal pain; the older you get, the more they multiply. After a life-altering summer on the road, Jenna Boller is dripping with newfound maturity.

Katharine can’t believe what she’s seeing. Her world has always been planned and orderly, but now, she’s petrified that she’s going insane, and she’s equally afraid that she’s not. What if the strange creatures she’s seeing really are disappearing and the messages showing up in Latin actually mean something?

In Jennifer duBois’s mesmerizing and exquisitely rendered debut novel, a long-lost letter links two disparate characters, each searching for meaning against seemingly insurmountable odds. With uncommon perception and wit, duBois explores the power of memory, the depths of human courage, and the endurance of love.

Max Maguire, a twenty-nine-year-old female detective with the New York Police Department, flies to France to attend the wedding of her friend, Chloé Marceau, at a grand estate east of Paris in the Champagne region. There Max meets an older man, the urbane Olivier Chaumont, and experiences a fairy-tale evening. But when Chloé’s widowed aunt, the beautiful and successful Léa de Saint-Pern, is found murdered, Max and Olivier are snapped back into their professional roles.

From Washington to Kennebunkport to Texas to old Europe and new Europe during the past two decades, Maureen Dowd has trained her binoculars on the Bush dynasty, putting them, as both 41 and 43 have complained to her, "on the couch". Here she wittily dissects the Oedipal loop-de-loop between father and son and the Orwellian logic of the rush to war in Iraq.

Thirty original stories - each inspired by a Janis Ian song - from some of the biggest names in science fiction and fantasy, including: Tad Williams, Harry Turtledove, Orson Scott Card, Joe Haldeman, John Varley, Mercedes Lackey, Judith Tarr, Janis Ian, and others.

The book we've all (certainly every woman between 25 and 75) been waiting for. Classy, chic, convincing, funny, wise, well-written and very timely. It's the ultimate non-diet book, which nonetheless shows us how to eat with balance, control and above all pleasure. Chuck out all the radical diet books, think about what you eat and why, and then enjoy eating the right things (and some of the wrong ones) intelligently, and in smaller portions. Eat, like a French woman, with your head not your stomach.

Andrea Cort, protagonist of Emissaries From The Dead and The Third Claw of God, returns with her lovers Oscin and Skye Porrinyard for a visit to the distant planet Vlhan, whose towering inhabitants regularly gather a ritual that is half art-form, half-suicide. Once before, the ritual went wrong, and became a bloody assault on human beings…but that’s history now, and Andrea seeks only information in the ongoing mystery that has come to consume her life.

Dahlia Barr does not suffer fools - or her own government, with which she is normally at odds. Shrewd, brash, and as tough as she is beautiful, the controversial Israeli attorney specializes in defending Palestinians accused of terrorism. She is also a devoted mother, a soon-to-be-divorced wife, and the lover of a handsome American television correspondent. To Dahlia’s astonishment, the Israeli security establishment one day approaches her with a tantalizing proposition: Join us.

The remarkable untold story of how a group of sixteen determined women used the power of the collective and the tools of science to inspire ongoing radical change. This is a triumphant account of progress, whilst reminding us that further action is needed.

England, 1944. An American volunteers to copilot a plane carrying special agents to their drop spot over Normandy. Her personal mission: to find her brother, who is missing in action. Their plane is shot down, and only she and five agents survive. Now they are on the run for their lives. As they head to Paris, the beautiful aviatrix Velva Jean Hart becomes Clementine Roux, a daring woman on a mission with her team to capture an operative known only as Swan.