Authors: John Steinbeck.
Audio Cassette, 1 pages
Publisher: Highbridge Audio
Publication Date: 1994-08-01
Edition: Unabridged

Reviews :

    At the age of 58, Steinbeck, with his French poodle Charley, set out to redisover the country he had been writing about about for so long--from Maine to California.8 cassettes....

Authors: Kelly Corrigan.
Audio Cassette, pages
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication Date: 2008-01-08
Edition: Unabridged

Reviews :

    In a coming of age memoir about a woman who loved being a girl and the things that made her finally grow up, Kelly Corrigan brilliantly explores the "middle place" between childhood and adulthood, and how one woman made the leap to the other side.

"The thing you need to know about me," she begins, "is that I am George Corrigan's daughter, his only daughter." Intertwining her own story with that of her larger-than-life, Irish-American, born-salesman father, Corrigan illustrates an unbelievably powerful and healing father/daughter relationship which evolves as they both must battle cancer.

Uplifting without shying away from the realities of illness, Corrigan's highly personal story examines what it means when the one person who has been your source of strength is in need of some himself, and that bittersweet "in between" moment when you're a devoted wife and mother, but you'll always be daddy's girl....

Authors: Danielle Steel.
Audio Cassette, pages
Publisher: Random House Audio
Publication Date: 1998-09-08
Edition: Unabridged

Reviews :

    "This is the story of an extraordinary boy with a brilliant mind, a heart of gold, and a tortured soul. It is the story of an illness, a fight to live, and a race against death."

From the day he was born, Nick Traina was his mother's joy. By nineteen, he was dead. This is Danielle Steel's powerful personal story of the son she lost and the lessons she learned during his courageous battle against darkness. Sharing tender, painful memories and Nick's remarkable journals, Steel brings us a haunting duet between a singular young man and the mother who loved him--and a harrowing portrait of a masked killer called manic depression, which afflicts between two and three million Americans.

Nick rocketed through life like a shooting star. Signs of his illness were subtle, often paradoxical. He spoke in full sentences at age one. He was a brilliant, charming child who never slept. And at first, even his mother explained away his quicksilver moods. Nick always marched to a different drummer. His gift for writing was extraordinary, his musical talent promised a golden future. But by the time he entered junior high, Danielle Steel saw her beloved son hurtling toward disaster and tried desperately to get Nick the help he needed--the opening salvos of what would become a ferocious pitched battle for his life.

Even as he struggled, Nick's charisma and accomplishments remained undimmed. He bared his soul in his journal with uncanny insight, in searing prose, poetry, and song. When he was finally diagnosed and treated, it bought time, but too little. In the end, perhaps nothing could have saved him from the insidious disease that had shadowed him from his earliest years.

At once a loving legacy and an unsparing depiction of a devastating illness, Danielle Steel's tribute to her lost son is a gift of life, hope, healing, and understanding to us all....

    It's hard to listen to any story that deals with the loss of a child, but Danielle Steel's memoir of her son, Nick Traina, is both tender and engrossing. In this unabridged audio version of His Bright Light, Steel leads us through Nick's battle with manic depression and her fight to help him survive. Although Steel herself narrates the introduction, actress Traci Godfrey, who portrays the author's strong emotions without becoming maudlin, reads the book. Anyone who has known a loved one affected by depression will identify strongly with Ms. Steel's passionate recollections of her son's life. (Running time: 9.5 hours, two cassettes) --Sharon Griggins...

Authors: David J. Pelzer.
Audio Cassette, pages
Publisher: Recorded Books
Publication Date: 2001-09
Edition: Unabridged

Reviews :

    The sequel to "A Child called 'It'", this second title in a planned trilogy continues the painful tale of the author's childhood. After surviving his abusive mother and alcoholic father, he lived in five different foster homes, spent time in juvenile detention and joined the Air Force....

Authors:
Audio Cassette, pages
Publisher: Audio Literature
Publication Date: 1999-11
Edition: Unabridged

Reviews :

    The master of the confessional explores the poignant truths and hilarious absurdities of fatherhood in this meditation on a single day in his life soon after his son Theo was born. Read by Spalding Gray. Simultaneous....

Authors:
Audio Cassette, pages
Publisher: HarperAudio
Publication Date: 1998-09-01
Edition: Abridged

Reviews :

    From the critically acclaimed author of "My Own Country" comes a riveting and forceful memoir of a doctor coming to personal terms with love and loss through the death of his best friend and tennis partner....

    What is it about sports that makes some men wax as mystical as a Castanedan Yaqui? In the hands of writers such as David James Duncan and Norman Maclean, the simple, repetitive motions of baseball, fly-fishing, and golf have acquired almost numinous significance. In The Tennis Partner, Dr. Abraham Verghese takes on his own fascination with tennis and comes up with as good an explanation as any: "In the way we controlled the movement of a yellow ball in space, we were imposing order on a world that was fickle and capricious. Each ball that we put into play, for as long as it went back and forth between us, felt like a charm to be added to a necklace full of spells, talismans, and fetishes, which one day add up to an Aaron's rod, an Aladdin's lamp, a magic carpet. Each time we played, this feeling of restoring order, of mastery, was awakened."

For both Verghese and his tennis partner, a fourth-year medical student named David Smith, the game is a much-needed island of order in the midst of personal chaos. Both men are struggling to rebuild their lives, Verghese undergoing a painful divorce, Smith struggling with an intravenous cocaine addiction. For a brief, idyllic period, their friendship flourishes; Verghese mentors Smith in the examining room, while Smith, an Australian who competed briefly on the pro circuit, ends up Verghese's teacher on the court. But there are dark corners to David's personality, and under the mounting pressures of medical school and his increasingly complicated love life, these come to the fore. Even as he learns how to inhabit his new life, Verghese watches with horror as his friend relapses, dries out, then relapses again. The author of the powerful My Own Country, a chronicle of caring for AIDS patients in rural Tennessee, Verghese once again proves that the skills of a good doctor are strikingly similar to those of a good writer. Careful observation, compassion, restraint: these are the instruments Verghese uses to stunning effect in The Tennis Partner. A paean to the healing powers of tennis, this book is also a moving meditation on friendship, fatherhood, love, addiction, and the particular loneliness of physicians. --Mary Park ...

Authors: Elizabeth K. Stratton.
Audio Cassette, pages
Publisher: Sound Ideas
Publication Date: 1996-10-01


Reviews :

    The founder of a spiritual healing school reveals conveys her techniques for a new life, such as meditation, spiritual counseling, psychic self-defense, and the laying-on-of-hands. Read by Elizabeth K. Stratton. ...

Authors: Harry Crews.
Audio Cassette, pages
Publisher: Amer Audio Prose Library Inc
Publication Date: 1987-06

Authors: Jennifer Allen.
Audio Cassette, pages
Publisher: Brilliance Audio Unabridged
Publication Date: 2000-10-10
Edition: Unabridged

Reviews :

    Subtitled: The Scrimmage of a Football Coach's Daughter

George Allen was a top-ranked NFL coach throughout the 1960s and 1970s, coaching in turn the Chicago Bears, the Los Angeles Rams, and the Washington Redskins. Raised in a home dominated by her three football obsessed older brothers and her father's relentless schedule, the author came of age in a cauldron of testosterone and a win-at-all-costs mentality.

While the household was buffeted by the coach's tumultuous firings and hirings, which periodically propelled the family to a new city, Jennifer dreamed of being the first female quarterback in the NFL. But as she grew, she yearned mostly to be someone that her father would notice. In a world where only football mattered, what could she strive for, who could she become?

Allen has written a memoir of the father she tried so hard to know, the family life that was wistfully sacrificed to his endless, fanatical pursuit of the Super Bowl. What emerges is a fascinating and singular behind-the-scenes look at professional football and a memorable, bittersweet portrait of a father and his daughter, told by an accomplished and assured writer....

Authors: Edward Ball.
Audio Cassette, pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication Date: 1998-05-01
Edition: Abridged

Reviews :

   

In 1698, Elias Ball traveled from his home in Devon, England, to Charleston, South Carolina, to take possession of his inheritance: part of a plantation and twenty slaves. Elias and his progeny built an American dynasty that lasted for six generations, acquiring more than twenty Plantations and enslaving close to four thousand Africans and African Americans until 1865, when Union troops arrived on the lawns of the Balls' estates to force emancipation.

Edward Ball, a descendant of Elias, has written a nonfiction American saga that is part history, part journey of discovery. Ball chronicles the lives of the people who lived in his ancestors' lands: the violence and the opulence, the slave uprisings and escapes, the white and black heroes of the American Revolution, the mulatto children of Ball masters and "Ball slaves," and the culminating shock of the Civil War. He reconstructs the genealogies of slave families—from the first African captives, through ten generations, to the present—and travels to Sierra Leone to visit a prison from which his family once bought workers.

Most remarkable of all, Ball has traveled all over the United States to meet descendants of Ball slaves (who number between 75,000 and 100,000 living Americans). In a series of memorable encounters, Ball hears from black families—some of whom are his blood kin—their stories, passions, and dreams, and reveals how the effects of slavery live on in black and white life and memory. Slaves In the Family is a microcosm of America's defining national experience, a story of people confronting their inescapable common history....

    Writer Edward Ball opens Slaves in the Family with an anecdote: "My father had a little joke that made light of our legacy as a family that had once owned slaves. 'There are five things we don't talk about in the Ball family,' he would say. 'Religion, sex, death, money and the Negroes.'" Ball himself seemed happy enough to avoid these touchy issues until an invitation to a family reunion in South Carolina piqued his interest in his family's extensive plantation and slave-holding past. He realized that he had a very clear idea of who his white ancestors were--their names, who their children and children's children were, even portraits and photographs--but he had only a murky vision of the black people who supported their livelihood and were such an intimate part of their daily lives; he knew neither their names nor what happened to them and their descendents after they were freed following the Civil War. So he embarked on a journey to uncover the history of the Balls and the black families with whom their lives were inextricably intertwined, as well as the less tangible resonance of slavery in both sets of families. From plantation records, interviews with descendents of both the Balls and their slaves, and travels to Africa and the American South, Ball has constructed a story of the riches and squalor, violence and insurrection--the pride and shame--that make up the history and legacy of slavery in America....