Audiobooks narrated by Lisa S. Ware

Blighted: A Story of People, Politics, and an American Housing Miracle

Blighted is a powerful narrative about the decades-long decay and remarkable two-year reinvention of Summerdale, an aging apartment community located in one of Atlanta's grittiest corridors. Blighted unfolds in the voices of ruthless drug dealers, phantom tenants, fearless landlords, the working poor, educators, and visionary local leaders. After purchasing the property from an absentee overseas owner, Marjy Stagmeier and her partners methodically tackled the crisis festering inside the gated 244-unit apartment property. Two years of relentless work later, Stagmeier reveals how the team that she led built community from chaos. Stagmeier demonstrates how marginalized housing perpetuates intergenerational poverty and the collapse of nearby public schools while showing the multifaceted challenges of improving dire living conditions. Blighted offers a unique insider perspective of the political, human, and economic challenges of delivering equitable housing in a market fueled by inflationary prices, insatiable demand, and competing and often dubious agendas. Summerdale's success is a bright model of how affordable housing, education, healthcare, and social capital can interconnect to build vibrant, sustainable communities. From there, kids, families, working people, and neighborhoods can thrive.

Margaret Stagmeier (Author), Lisa S. Ware (Narrator)

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Shadows into Light: A Generation of Former Child Soldiers Comes of Age

During the civil war that ravaged Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002, an estimated 20,000 children were forced to join the fighting. As villages were raided and youths rounded up, it was not uncommon for a child to be ordered to kill a friend, relative, or neighbor. The goal was to make it impossible for the captives to return home and be accepted back into their communities. But when the conflict ended, many of the children did find their way home. Theresa Betancourt and her collaborators in Sierra Leone launched a study of more than 500 boys and girls who had been pulled into the war, tracking them for over two decades. The results were surprising: despite everything they had suffered, this was not a lost generation. In fact, the most dominant trend was one of healing and increasing acceptance. The lives of the former child soldiers were shaped not just by their personal ordeals but also by the responses of their families, peers, and communities. Shadows into Light describes heartbreak and despair but also remarkable triumphs. Betancourt's study provides insight into the long-term psychological and developmental effects of family separation, war, and exposure to violence. The lessons go beyond Sierra Leone's tragedy, suggesting that we should think of children's risk and resilience more as products of the post-trauma environment than as individual traits.

Theresa S. Betancourt (Author), Lisa S. Ware (Narrator)

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Florida Lore: The Barefoot Mailman, Cowboy Bone Mizell, the Tallahassee Witch and Other Tales

This fascinating collection of myths, legends, and folktales celebrates the diversity of characters and cultures across the Sunshine State. Florida boasts mysterious tales that stretch back more than twelve thousand years. Dive into the lives of the proud Wakulla Pocahontas and the Ghost of Bellamy Bridge. Meet local lawbreakers like John Ashley, as well as transplants like Ma Barker and Al Capone. Stalk stumpy gators or Hogzilla as they prowl Florida's swamps and suburbs. Discover the quintessential Cracker cowboy and the Barefoot Mailman, plus the origin of names like Boca Raton and Orlando. Storyteller Caren Neile, PhD, shares myths, legends, and folktales that reflect the diversity of characters and cultures that make Florida such a fascinating place.

Caren Schnur Neile (Author), Lisa S. Ware (Narrator)

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Psycholinguistics: A Very Short Introduction

This Very Short Introduction to psycholinguistics is an accessible and engaging description of how people use language. Talking and understanding language probably seem like simple and straightforward skills, but research in psycholinguistics has shown that complex computations take place behind the scenes when you communicate with others. Recent debates concerning how AI tools such as ChatGPT work highlight some of these core questions about the language faculty and how it is that humans comprehend, produce, and learn language. The book begins with an overview of the fields of linguistics and psychology and how they have cooperated from the earliest days of psycholinguistics. Issues that are considered include: (1) How successfully do people adapt what they say to the needs of their audience when they design their phrases and sentences? (2) How do people read languages such as Chinese, which do not use an alphabetic writing system? (3) Do the size and efficiency of a person's memory affect how effectively people use language? (4) Is bilingualism cognitively advantageous, and if so, what are the mechanisms that lead to this so-called bilingual advantage? And (5) Do users of sign language gesture when they communicate? These questions and more are answered using insights from the latest research based on methods from the cognitive and neurosciences.

Fernanda Ferreira (Author), Lisa S. Ware (Narrator)

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The Alice Crimmins Case

New York, Summer of 1965. One hot summer, two young children disappeared from their first-floor apartment in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, New York. Their mother, Alice Crimmins, reported them missing to the police. Later that day, the body of four-year-old Missy was found in a vacant lot, showing signs of having been strangled. The body of five-year-old Eddie, Jr., was found several days later. Police were immediately suspicious of the mother. Recently divorced, with teased red hair and heavy makeup, Alice Crimmins did not fit the maternal ideal held by the predominantly Catholic police detectives on the case. Her every action was scrutinized: Was she behaving like a grief-stricken mother or like a coldhearted killer? After three years of police surveillance, Alice was charged with the murder of her children in 1968 in a highly publicized trial. Ultimately found guilty of manslaughter, Alice spent a decade in prison before being released on parole in 1977. But was she truly guilty, or just the victim of police bias and misogynistic judgment? Journalist Anaïs Renevier revisits the case, exploring one of the most famous and divisive trials in recent American history.

Anais Renevier (Author), Lisa S. Ware (Narrator)

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Understanding Nature: Ecology for a New Generation

Understanding Nature is a new kind of ecology textbook: a straightforward resource that teaches natural history and ecological content, and a way to instruct students that will nurture both Earth and self. While meeting the textbook guidelines set forth by the Ecological Society of America, Understanding Nature has a unique ecotherapy theme, using a historical framework to teach ecological theory to undergraduates. This textbook presents all the core information without being unnecessarily wordy or lengthy, using simple, relatable language and discussing ecology in ways that any student can apply in real life. Uniquely, it is also a manual on how to improve one's relationship with the Earth. The book includes traditional ecological knowledge as well as the history of scientific ecological knowledge. Understanding Nature teaches theory and applications that will heal the Earth. It also teaches long-term sustainability practices for one's psyche. Professor Louise Weber is both an ecologist and a certified ecopsychologist, challenging ecology instructors to rethink what and how they teach about nature. Her book bridges the gap between students taking ecology to become ecologists and those taking ecology as a requirement, who will use the knowledge to become informed citizens.

Louise M. Weber (Author), Lisa S. Ware (Narrator)

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The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made

Wealth is central to the American pursuit of happiness and is an overriding measure of well-being. Yet wealth is conspicuously absent from African American households. Why do some 3.5 million Black American families have zero or negative wealth? Historian Calvin Schermerhorn traces four hundred years of Black dispossession and decapitalization—what Frederick Douglass called plunder—through the stories of families who have strived to earn and keep the fruits of their toils. Their struggles reveal that the ever-evolving strategies to strip Black income and wealth have been critical to sustaining a structure of racialized disadvantage. These accounts also tell of the quiet heroism of those who worked to overcome obstacles and defy the plunder. From the story of Anthony and Mary Johnson, abducted from Angola and brought to Virginia in 1619, to the enslaved Black workers dispossessed by the Custis-Washington family, to Venture Smith (born Broteer Furro), who purchased his freedom, to three generations of a family enslaved in the South who moved north after Emancipation, to the Tulsa massacre and the subprime lending crisis, Schermerhorn shows that we cannot reckon with today's racial wealth inequality without understanding its unrelenting role in American history.

Calvin Schermerhorn (Author), Lisa S. Ware (Narrator)

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The Dressmaker's Mirror: Sudden Death, Genetics, and a Jewish Family's Secret

Experts agree on the value of genetic testing when there is a family history of disease, or if the patient has an illness frequently caused by a mutation. Knowing the disease mutation lets family members find out if they have it too and need preventive care. The book explains that doctors can order tests with genetic counseling at relatively low cost and how this will help them prescribe preventive actions, make earlier diagnoses, and get better outcomes. The book's genetic discussions also delve into the implications of broad-based genetic screening without a family history. Policymakers are considering the benefits and drawbacks of this approach and I present both sides of this debate. While working on this book I uncovered a family secret hidden for over one hundred years. Family lore had it that a heavy dressmaker's mirror fell on and killed my uncle when he was four. But the death certificate told a different story—his true cause of death was heart failure. My grandparents fabricated the accident to protect their surviving children's marriage prospects. Long before the discovery of DNA, my grandparents intuited and feared James Watson's message, 'We used to think that our fate was in our stars, but now we know that, in large measure, our fate is in our genes.' The book suggests genetic testing and associated medical intervention can change our fates.

Susan Weiss Liebman (Author), Lisa S. Ware (Narrator)

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Something for Nothing: Arbitrage and Ethics on Wall Street

In 2001, Goldman Sachs structured a complex financial contract so that its client, the government of Greece, would appear to have far less debt than it actually did. When news of this transaction came out years later, the inevitable question arose: Even though Goldman's actions were legal, were they ethically wrong? Is modern finance itself inherently unethical? In Something for Nothing, financial economist Maureen O'Hara explains that one of the key innovations of modern finance is its reliance on arbitrage, the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets to generate profits and remove inefficiencies. When done correctly, arbitrage can create value at little or no cost (in effect, getting 'something for nothing'); but it can also be an exploitative tool. In a lucid, insightful discussion of the ethics of arbitrage in modern finance, O'Hara reveals how the rules can often be stretched into still-legal yet highly unethical business practices. Examining key cases in clear and persuasive prose, O'Hara illuminates various aspects of financial ethics, from the Goldman Greek transaction to Lehman Brothers' attempt to cover up its debt, JPMorgan Chase's maneuvers in California's energy markets, Bernie Madoff's trading strategies in the 1980s, high-frequency trading practices, and toxic loans in France.

Maureen O'Hara (Author), Lisa S. Ware (Narrator)

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Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death

When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom. With humor and empathy, Susana Monsó tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Monsó, one of today's leading experts on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own. Blending philosophical insight with new evidence from behavioral science and comparative psychology, Playing Possum dispels the anthropocentric biases that cloud our understanding of the natural world, and reveals that, when it comes to death and dying, we are just another animal.

Susana Monsó (Author), Lisa S. Ware (Narrator)

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Ordinary Angels

THE AMAZING TRUE STORY—NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE A true story full of drama, love, insurmountable odds, and miraculous triumph experienced by ordinary people who rose up to answer the call to help an innocent child, about one woman in particular who looked beyond her own limitations to say yes to the impossible. Sharon Stevens, twice divorced, barely making enough to support herself, would never claim to be an angel. Early in life, perilous situations were thrust upon her. As an adult, she gravitated toward adventure and spur-of-the-moment decisions that often put her on the precipice of disaster and kept her in the pathway of people who would take advantage of her. If your aim is to find fault with her, she would be an easy target, but look again. This diminutive hair stylist was not the person you would have chosen for such a monumental task with a life hanging in the balance—but God chose her, nonetheless. And where you or I would probably have done the very least we could do, Sharon said 'yes' to the impossible. She might never have stepped up and risked everything she had to help a complete stranger, but for the events that unfolded that unusually cool Kentucky August morning.

Sharon Stevens Evans (Author), George W. Sarris, Lisa S. Ware (Narrator)

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The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can't Hack the Future of Food

A concise and feisty takedown of the all-style, no-substance tech ventures that fail to solve our food crises. Why has Silicon Valley become the model for addressing today's myriad social and ecological crises? With this book, Julie Guthman digs into the impoverished solutions for food and agriculture currently emerging from Silicon Valley, urging us to stop trying to fix our broken food system through finite capitalistic solutions and technological moonshots that do next to nothing to actualize a more just and sustainable system. The Problem with Solutions combines an analysis of the rise of tech company solution culture with findings from actual research on the sector's ill-informed attempts to address the problems of food and agriculture. As this seductive approach continues to infiltrate universities and academia, Guthman challenges us to reject apolitical and self-gratifying techno-solutions and develop the capacity and willingness to respond to the root causes of these crises. Solutions, she argues, are a product of our current condition, not an answer to it.

Julie Guthman (Author), Lisa S. Ware (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Lisa S. Ware