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Just Kids
- Narrated by: Patti Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
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In 1989, just before famously controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe died too young of AIDS complications at age 42, he made his very best friend promise to tell their story. Patti Smith took many years to do it, but the incredible result, Just Kids has proven well worth the wait. Winner of the National Book Award, Smith's delicate tribute to her relationship with Mapplethorpe and their love affair with New York City is read by Patti Smith herself.
No one else could narrate this, and no one else could have written this. After Smith ditched college to move to New York in 1967, a chance encounter in which Mapplethorpe saved her from an expectant date by pretending to be her angry boyfriend touched off one of the most historic artistic partnerships the city had ever seen. Embarking at first as lovers, they clung to their art and each other through poverty and misfortune in the late-60s, moving steadily closer to the center of cultural influence in the 70s. Mapplethorpe struggled with coming out of the closet and Smith struggled to find an artistic medium that suited her best. Together, they swam through everything that made New York great and terrible, each eventually emerging as a pioneering independent spirit that to this day knows no equal.
Smith's voice as both the writer and the narrator is simply unimpeachable. Reflective and soft-spoken, she humbly attempts to capture two decades of this inspirational partnership. Listeners can tell she is thinking through every image she has written here, pausing occasionally to let it sink in for herself or to let the dialogue get caught in her throat. By turns haunted and poetic, by turns silly and sarcastic, Smith trips along these enchanting bits of history in a way that is utterly endearing. It's not at all like inviting somebody famous to entertain you with gossip at dinner. Real respect must be paid. Listeners will be in awe of the fact that Patti Smith comes across as a totally normal person who stumbled into an extraordinary life. Even if you've already passed totally engrossed through the hard copy of this book, to hear it from Patti Smith's own mouth is simply an otherworldly experience. This audiobook is an essential companion to the text that will not only bear repeated listening, but will beg for it. Megan Volpert
Publisher's summary
National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2010
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.
Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to 42nd Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous - the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years.
Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late 60s and 70s and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.
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IMPECCABLE BEAUTIFUL Writing, Interesting Story
- By Jordyn on 05-24-17
By: Heather O'Neill
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Insomniac City
- New York, Oliver, and Me
- By: Bill Hayes
- Narrated by: Stephen Bel Davies
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at 48 years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.
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Touching and Intimate Portrait
- By Amazon Customer on 01-18-19
By: Bill Hayes
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Late in the Day
- A Novel
- By: Tessa Hadley
- Narrated by: Abigail Thaw
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their 20s. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer’s evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: She is at the hospital. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. The loss warps their relationships.
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It's all in the performance
- By RueRue on 02-08-19
By: Tessa Hadley
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Beer Money
- A Memoir of Privilege and Loss
- By: Frances Stroh
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Frances Stroh's earliest memories are ones of great privilege: shopping trips to London and New York, lunches served by black-tied waiters at the Regency Hotel, and a house filled with precious antiques, which she was forbidden to touch. Established in Detroit in 1850, by 1984 the Stroh Brewing Company had become the largest private beer fortune in America and a brand emblematic of the American dream itself; while Stroh was coming of age, the Stroh family fortune was estimated to be worth $700 million.
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Beer boring
- By Richard E. Putt Jr. on 05-22-16
By: Frances Stroh
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American Rose
- A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee
- By: Karen Abbott
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
With the critically acclaimed Sin in the Second City, best-selling author Karen Abbott “pioneered sizzle history” (USA Today). Now she returns with the gripping and expansive story of America’s coming-of-age - told through the extraordinary life of Gypsy Rose Lee and the world she survived and conquered. America in the Roaring Twenties. Vaudeville was king. Talking pictures were only a distant flicker. Speakeasies beckoned beyond dimly lit doorways; money flowed fast and free.
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Well done biography of a complicated Icon
- By Moire on 01-27-11
By: Karen Abbott
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Russian Winter
- A Novel
- By: Daphne Kalotay
- Narrated by: Kathleen Gati
- Length: 14 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Russian Winter, the beautiful debut novel by critically acclaimed writer Daphne Kalotay, a famed ballerina’s jewelry auction in Boston reveals long-held secrets of love and family, friendship and rivalry, harkening back to Stalinist Russia. Called “tender, passionate, and moving” by Jenna Blum, the New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us, Russian Winter is a perfect choice for fans of the novels of Debra Dean (The Madonnas of Leningrad), Ann Patchett (Bel Canto), and Ian McEwan (Atonement).
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Read this review; Sophisticated and wonderful!
- By Cookie on 01-15-12
By: Daphne Kalotay
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Come to the Edge
- A Memoir
- By: Christina Haag
- Narrated by: Christina Haag
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Christina Haag was growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was just one of the boys in her circle of prep-school friends. A decade later, after they had both graduated from Brown University and were living in New York City, Christina and John were cast in an off-Broadway play together. It was then that John confessed his long-standing crush on her, and they embarked on a five-year love affair.
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Thoroughly enjoyed Come to the Edge
- By CapeCodLady on 11-15-19
By: Christina Haag
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Sunny's Nights
- Lost and Found at the Bar at the End of the World
- By: Tim Sultan
- Narrated by: Robert Malloch
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Imagine that Alice had walked into a bar instead of falling down the rabbit hole. In the tradition of J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar and the classic reportage of Joseph Mitchell, here is an indelible portrait of what is quite possibly the greatest bar in the world—and the mercurial, magnificent man behind it. The first time he saw Sunny’s Bar, in 1995, Tim Sultan was lost, thirsty for a drink, and intrigued by the single bar sign among the forlorn warehouses lining the Brooklyn waterfront.
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Visiting an Era
- By Carolyn on 03-01-16
By: Tim Sultan
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Your Voice in My Head
- A Memoir
- By: Emma Forrest
- Narrated by: Emma Forrest
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Emma Forrest, a British journalist, was just 22 and living the fast life in New York City when she realized that her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity. In a cycle of loneliness, damaging relationships, and destructive behavior, she found herself in the chair of a slim, balding, and effortlessly optimistic psychiatrist--a man whose wisdom and humanity would wrench her from the dangerous tide after she tried to end her life.
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Great, quick read
- By Amazon Customer on 02-12-21
By: Emma Forrest
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Light Years
- By: James Salter
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach.
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Unfathomable Font of Blue: Life's Serial Goodbyes
- By W Perry Hall on 04-18-19
By: James Salter
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Kiss Carlo
- By: Adriana Trigiani
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 16 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It's 1949, and South Philadelphia bursts with opportunity during the postwar boom. The Palazzini Cab Company & Western Union Telegraph Office, owned and operated by Dominic Palazzini and his three sons, is flourishing: Business is good, and they're surrounded by sympathetic wives and daughters-in-law, with grandchildren on the way. But a decades-long feud that split Dominic and his brother, Mike, and their once-close families sets the stage for a rematch.
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Wow!!
- By MCMAK on 07-16-17
By: Adriana Trigiani
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The Blind Assassin
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Whitney on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
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Dropped Names
- Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them
- By: Frank Langella
- Narrated by: Frank Langella
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Captured forever in a unique memoir, Frank Langella's myriad encounters with some of the past century's most famous human beings are profoundly affecting, funny, wicked, sometimes shocking, and utterly irresistible. With sharp wit and a perceptive eye, Mr. Langella takes us with him into the private worlds and privileged lives of movie stars, presidents, royalty, literary lions, the social elite, and the greats of the Broadway stage.
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Delightful
- By Kathy on 04-03-12
By: Frank Langella
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Drawing Blood
- By: Molly Crabapple
- Narrated by: Jorjeana Marie
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From a young age, Molly Crabapple had the eye of an artist and the spirit of a radical. After a restless childhood on New York's Long Island, she left America to see Europe and the Near East, a young artist plunging into unfamiliar cultures, notebook always in hand, drawing what she observed. Returning to New York City after 9/11 to study art, she posed nude for sketch artists and sketchy photographers, danced burlesque, and modeled for the world-famous Suicide Girls.
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Excellent!
- By # 1 Listener on 01-06-16
By: Molly Crabapple
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The Wife
- A Novel
- By: Meg Wolitzer
- Narrated by: Dawn Harvey
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The moment Joan Castleman decides to leave her husband, they are 35,000 feet above the ocean on a flight to Helsinki. Joan's husband, Joseph, is one of America's preeminent novelists, about to receive a prestigious international award, and Joan, who has spent 40 years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, has finally decided to stop.
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A bit of a downer
- By Jody Cox on 08-01-18
By: Meg Wolitzer
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Just Kids
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Patti Smith führt uns in das New York der frühen Siebzigerjahre, in eine Ära, die für sie vor allem von der tiefen Freundschaft zu einem Menschen geprägt wird: dem später zu Weltruhm gelangten Fotografen Robert Mapplethorpe. "Just Kids" erzählt die bewegende Geschichte zweier Seelenverwandter, die für und durch die Kunst leben, und entwirft zugleich ein betörendes Bild einer revolutionären Epoche. Als Patti Smith und Robert Mapplethorpe sich im Sommer 1967 in New York kennen lernen, sind sie beide 23 und ohne einen Pfennig in der Tasche auf der Suche nach einem freien Leben als Künstler.
By: Patti Smith
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Mrs. Wickham
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Imagine if you made one little mistake when you were young and were punished for it for the rest of your life. Well, that’s what happened to Lydia (yes, that Lydia, the youngest Bennet sister from Pride and Prejudice), and she’s here to set the record straight. Hold on to your teacups and get ready for sophisticated (and a little bit naughty) hot takes and witty banter that’ll make you laugh—and think. We meet Lydia just as she is denounced by her family, exiled miles from home, and married to the rogue George Wickham, who seems to love all women...except his own wife.
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Bellies
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It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. But shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.
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Surprisingly Sexiest
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The Idiot
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Overall
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A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary.
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Fascinating point of view
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The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
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Opal is a fiercely independent young woman pushing against the grain in her style and attitude, Afro-punk before that term existed. Coming of age in Detroit, she can’t imagine settling for a 9-to-5 job—despite her unusual looks, Opal believes she can be a star. So when the aspiring British singer/songwriter Neville Charles discovers her at a bar’s amateur night, she takes him up on his offer to make rock music together for the fledgling Rivington Records.
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Outstanding and timely
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Chronicles
- Volume One
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Overall
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Performance
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Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One explores the critical junctions in his life and career. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities: smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough.
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Understanding
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Calypso
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
If you've ever laughed your way through David Sedaris's cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you're getting with Calypso. You'd be wrong. When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And it's as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself. With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation - and dark humor - toward middle age and mortality.
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Excellent, as always
- By Ruthie on 05-31-18
By: David Sedaris
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The Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.
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Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
- By Michael on 05-08-15
By: Joan Didion
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Iggy Pop
- Open Up and Bleed
- By: Paul Trynka
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Iggy Pop's legendary career has been tumultuous, reaching great heights with mega-hits and then hitting rock-bottom lows in jail and mental institutions. Along the way, he's become a cult-rock hero, an inspiration for dozens of other famous rockers, and has had a pretty good time of it, too. But the image of Iggy Pop versus the man behind that image, James Newell Osterberg, Jr., is surprisingly contradictory.
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Banal and Boring
- By Michael on 12-03-08
By: Paul Trynka
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Invisible Man
- A Novel
- By: Ralph Ellison
- Narrated by: Joe Morton
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching—yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places. It is a book that has a great deal to say and which is destined to have a great deal said about it.
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How Did This Escape Me?
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By: Ralph Ellison
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The Price of Illusion
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From Joan Juliet Buck, former editor-in-chief of Paris Vogue, comes a dazzling memoir: a fabulous account of four decades spent in the creative heart of London, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, chronicling Buck's quest to discover the difference between glitter and gold, illusion and reality, and what looks like happiness from the thing itself.
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Narcissistic name dropper
- By Marlette on 12-03-19
By: Joan Juliet Buck
What listeners say about Just Kids
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- CrzGzr
- 01-01-12
the memoir of an innocent time, a love letter
I was a freshman at the Corcoran in 1978, Patti Smith was cool. Ten years later, I was a widow working as a lab technician in an AIDS lab, and a year later Robert Maplethorpe died. By that time, I was shell-shocked by death, homophobia and the terror of becoming single in a world of AIDS. It took me over a decade to pay off the enormous medical bills my husband left me and finding my way back to painting and writing.
At 2:30am this morning, New Year's Day 2012, in bed with my iPod, I downloaded this book and entered a time machine. Everything I assumed I knew about these two people via their mythology was wrong.
This book had a profound effect on me and yet, I wonder how it will be received by those outside the solar systems of art and AIDS in that timeframe, hopefully with an open mind. These two people whose lives in the rearview mirror are legendary. It may come as a surprise that most people in those days were so so naive and innocent. We were not drowning in the world wide web of data... growing up Catholic and confused by a world outside our limited view, all the while living on the edge...
I love this book and it will find a permanent home on my iPod. A reminder of a place and time that formed many who are now graying and even more confused.
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53 people found this helpful
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- danielle distefano
- 12-01-15
Just Beautiful
This is my first patti smith book, but not the last. Her words and voice are so beautiful. Being a fan of her music inspired listening to this book, but I feel like I didn't know anything about her till now. This book shares and creates such an amazing image of her life you can just picture it all. Just finished and just cried.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Woman
- 08-25-15
Wonderful!
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes!
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We listened to this on a road trip from Texas to California and it was absolutely perfect. So atmospheric and tender and romantic. I can't recommend it more highly.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Brian R
- 09-30-15
A Beautiful Journey of Love, Art and Fame in NYC
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As an admirer more than a fan of Patti Smith and Mapplethorpe, I was continuously struck by the chance crossings, first of their lives, and then with others over years that linked so many heroes of music, art and literature. Just Kids is a beautiful book made more touching by her voice, retracing a charmed journey that seems too improbable to be true. It is a powerful love letter as well as a stark history of what NYC took and gave in ways that, for good and for bad, it no longer does.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Joe Kraus
- 10-15-15
Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Good Kid
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Patti Smith gets it all wrong. Edgy rock and rollers are supposed to be narcissists and angry at the world. They’re supposed to resent their parents and childhood, and they’re supposed to see betrayal in all their relationships. They’re supposed to be heading toward some kind of nihilism, taking whatever gifts they might have along with them, consciously squandering their potential greatness behind love and self-destruction.
Instead, Smith actually likes the people she knows. She values her family and friends, and she sees a constant – if slightly moving – target in her art. She is after, always, some sense of poetry that isn’t absent from her America (because that would be easy) but is rather always present but almost over-looked. She believes there’s an audience for the difficult, and she believes there are reasons to find most people she meets interesting.
So, with that, her memoir is worth it just to get a glimpse of her. I’d class myself a B+ fan of her work. I love, very much, her “big” songs – “Because the Night,” “Frederick,” or “Dancing Barefoot,” – and I once spent a summer wearing out the grooves of one side of Horses, but I tire quickly of the more purely poetry cuts. I like some of her images, but find her work undisciplined. But never mind that; if you want a guide through the sometimes cruel, almost always too-cool-for-you world of the 1970s New York City art world, it’s hard to imagine a better guide. Certainly no one this inside it all could care as much about revealing it to the squares like us.
But, of course, the heart of this memoir – which seems to me deserving of its National Book Award – is her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s a strange story, sometimes magical, since she met him on the first day she landed in Brooklyn. I knew him as the famous chronicler of the homosexual underworld of his day, and I knew he’d died of AIDS, so part of me wanted to shout at her from the start, “Don’t fall in love with him – he’s gay even if he doesn’t know it yet.”
It’s a good thing she couldn’t hear me, though, because their relationship is so beautiful. They’re two “kids” who believe in one another, two talented people on the brink of discovering their art, and they discover it in one another before each does in him or herself. They go different ways, but they never stop loving each other. Sex is a curious after-thought in all this. Smith may sleep with half a dozen people, but so what? She chronicles the way she cares about Mapplethorpe, and the way he cares about her. I find him a lot less interesting than her, but he becomes interesting to me for the way he loves her so steadily. (I listened to Smith reading the audio version, and I came to love the way she’d imitate his drawn out, semi-exasperated way of saying her name, “Patttiiii…”)
There are a lot of other fascinating things that happen to Smith along the way. She gets picked up by Allen Ginsberg who thinks she’s just a pretty boy. She has an affair with Sam Shepard and the two casually write a play to kill the time. She takes up with a young Allan Lanier, a member of the just-becoming huge Blue Oyster Cult. And she and Lenny Kaye invent a new way to play rock and roll.
But through all that, the story that ties it together is her affection for Mapplethorpe, and the lens that makes it worthwhile is her own, deeply human one. The version I read includes an appendix with some excerpts of her poetry and songs in memory of Mapplethorpe – and there are moments in all of them to admire – but nothing we see from Smith rivals the simple and beautiful story she tells throughout this memoir.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Ellen
- 11-18-13
Beautiful
What about Patti Smith’s performance did you like?
Patti Smith's performance matches her poetic telling of her very personal story. I never appreciated her more than I do now having just finished Just Kids.
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- Kaya Wartinger
- 08-10-20
One of my all time favorites
I'm just simply in love with this beautiful book.
Thank you so much, Patti Smith ❤️
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- leslie gomez
- 11-14-20
interesting life story
Narrator was passionate in telling her story. The book has a good note of humor.
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- debbie ortiz
- 09-19-16
A love story about friends, art, and literature.
If you could sum up Just Kids in three words, what would they be?
Love, friendships, culture,and success.
What did you like best about this story?
The growth of Robert and Patti's friendship/love story in the 60s,in NYC.
Any additional comments?
There were so many interesting people that shaped their journey.
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- msarteacher
- 11-15-16
Inspiring, riveting cannot quit!
Where does Just Kids rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
This is the best audio book I have ever listened to. I listen to a lot...I want to purchase the actual book, and reread some of the passages and peruse the photos.
Who was your favorite character and why?
Patti Smith's vulnerability, intelligence and honesty make everything she writes about fascinating, tangible and tantalizing. She is the sort of person with whom you would love to have a coffee, see a film, sleep in the park. She is a treasure and a joy.
What about Patti Smith’s performance did you like?
Her poignant honesty.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
Just kids...just real...just stranger than fiction.
Any additional comments?
This is an amazing story...so real and so true.
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