-
There Are No Children Here
- The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $15.56
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
An American Summer
- Love and Death in Chicago
- By: Alex Kotlowitz
- Narrated by: Alex Kotlowitz
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The numbers are staggering: Over the past 20 years in Chicago, 14,033 people have been killed and another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire. What does that do to the spirit of individuals and community? Drawing on his decades of experience, Alex Kotlowitz set out to chronicle one summer in the city, writing about individuals who have emerged from the violence and whose stories capture the capacity - and the breaking point - of the human heart and soul. The result is a spellbinding collection of deeply intimate profiles that upend what we think we know about gun violence in America.
-
-
A must read!
- By carol utsunomiya on 03-20-19
By: Alex Kotlowitz
-
Invisible Child
- Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City
- By: Andrea Elliott
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 21 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Andrea Elliott follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani, a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter. In this sweeping narrative, Elliott weaves the story of Dasani’s childhood with the history of her ancestors, tracing their passage from slavery to the Great Migration north. As Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis has exploded, deepening the chasm between rich and poor. She must guide her siblings through a world riddled by hunger, violence, racism, drug addiction, and the threat of foster care.
-
-
Narration is completely over the top
- By Heather on 10-14-21
By: Andrea Elliott
-
The Souls of Black Folk
- By: W. E. B. Du Bois
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” writes Du Bois, in one of the most prophetic works in all of American literature. First published in 1903, this collection of 15 essays dared to describe the racism that prevailed at that time in America—and to demand an end to it. Du Bois’ writing draws on his early experiences, from teaching in the hills of Tennessee, to the death of his infant son, to his historic break with the conciliatory position of Booker T. Washington.
-
-
Essays of 'life and love and strife and failure'
- By ESK on 02-08-13
By: W. E. B. Du Bois
-
The Other Side of the River
- A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma
- By: Alex Kotlowitz
- Narrated by: Stanley Tucci
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Other Side of the River, his eagerly awaited new book, Kotlowitz takes us to southern Michigan. Here, separated by the St. Joseph River, are two towns, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. Geographically close, they are worlds apart, a living metaphor for America's racial divisions: St. Joseph is a prosperous lakeshore community and 95 percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and 92 percent black. When the body of a black teenaged boy from Benton Harbor is found in the river, unhealed wounds and suspicions between the two towns' populations surface as well.
-
-
Thought Provoking Book
- By Patrick on 02-03-18
By: Alex Kotlowitz
-
Savage Inequalities
- Children in America's Schools
- By: Jonathan Kozol
- Narrated by: Mark Winston
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jonathan Kozol traveled from the most blighted neighborhoods of Chicago to the urban wreckage of Camden, New Jersey; from the ghetto suburbs of Detroit to inner-city San Antonio; East St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. Everywhere, he discovered separate systems of public schools, with the children of America's poor condemned to schools that are underfunded, understaffed, physically crumbling, and imbued with despair.
-
-
Excellent book for budding education professionals
- By Amazon Customer on 10-25-17
By: Jonathan Kozol
-
Evicted
- Poverty and Profit in the American City
- By: Matthew Desmond
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.
-
-
Former Property Manager
- By Charla on 05-18-16
By: Matthew Desmond
-
An American Summer
- Love and Death in Chicago
- By: Alex Kotlowitz
- Narrated by: Alex Kotlowitz
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The numbers are staggering: Over the past 20 years in Chicago, 14,033 people have been killed and another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire. What does that do to the spirit of individuals and community? Drawing on his decades of experience, Alex Kotlowitz set out to chronicle one summer in the city, writing about individuals who have emerged from the violence and whose stories capture the capacity - and the breaking point - of the human heart and soul. The result is a spellbinding collection of deeply intimate profiles that upend what we think we know about gun violence in America.
-
-
A must read!
- By carol utsunomiya on 03-20-19
By: Alex Kotlowitz
-
Invisible Child
- Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City
- By: Andrea Elliott
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 21 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Andrea Elliott follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani, a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter. In this sweeping narrative, Elliott weaves the story of Dasani’s childhood with the history of her ancestors, tracing their passage from slavery to the Great Migration north. As Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis has exploded, deepening the chasm between rich and poor. She must guide her siblings through a world riddled by hunger, violence, racism, drug addiction, and the threat of foster care.
-
-
Narration is completely over the top
- By Heather on 10-14-21
By: Andrea Elliott
-
The Souls of Black Folk
- By: W. E. B. Du Bois
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” writes Du Bois, in one of the most prophetic works in all of American literature. First published in 1903, this collection of 15 essays dared to describe the racism that prevailed at that time in America—and to demand an end to it. Du Bois’ writing draws on his early experiences, from teaching in the hills of Tennessee, to the death of his infant son, to his historic break with the conciliatory position of Booker T. Washington.
-
-
Essays of 'life and love and strife and failure'
- By ESK on 02-08-13
By: W. E. B. Du Bois
-
The Other Side of the River
- A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma
- By: Alex Kotlowitz
- Narrated by: Stanley Tucci
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Other Side of the River, his eagerly awaited new book, Kotlowitz takes us to southern Michigan. Here, separated by the St. Joseph River, are two towns, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. Geographically close, they are worlds apart, a living metaphor for America's racial divisions: St. Joseph is a prosperous lakeshore community and 95 percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and 92 percent black. When the body of a black teenaged boy from Benton Harbor is found in the river, unhealed wounds and suspicions between the two towns' populations surface as well.
-
-
Thought Provoking Book
- By Patrick on 02-03-18
By: Alex Kotlowitz
-
Savage Inequalities
- Children in America's Schools
- By: Jonathan Kozol
- Narrated by: Mark Winston
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jonathan Kozol traveled from the most blighted neighborhoods of Chicago to the urban wreckage of Camden, New Jersey; from the ghetto suburbs of Detroit to inner-city San Antonio; East St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. Everywhere, he discovered separate systems of public schools, with the children of America's poor condemned to schools that are underfunded, understaffed, physically crumbling, and imbued with despair.
-
-
Excellent book for budding education professionals
- By Amazon Customer on 10-25-17
By: Jonathan Kozol
-
Evicted
- Poverty and Profit in the American City
- By: Matthew Desmond
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.
-
-
Former Property Manager
- By Charla on 05-18-16
By: Matthew Desmond
-
The Fire Next Time
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Jesse L. Martin
- Length: 2 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic, James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement with this eloquent manifesto. The Fire Next Time stands as one of the essential works of our literature.
-
-
Sad and moving and powerful and beautiful
- By Darwin8u on 09-17-15
By: James Baldwin
-
The Corner
- A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
- By: David Simon, Edward Burns
- Narrated by: Dion Graham, David Simon
- Length: 25 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The crime-infested intersection of West Fayette and Monroe Streets is well-known - and cautiously avoided - by most of Baltimore. But this notorious corner's 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighborhood. David Simon, an award-winning author and crime reporter, and Edward Burns, a 20-year veteran of the urban drug war, tell the chilling story of this desolate crossroad.
-
-
Insightful. A Must Read For Suburban Americans.
- By WitchCrafter on 06-01-21
By: David Simon, and others
-
Homegrown
- Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism
- By: Jeffrey Toobin
- Narrated by: Jeffrey Toobin
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Timothy McVeigh wanted to start a movement. Speaking to his lawyers days after the Oklahoma City bombing, the Gulf War veteran expressed no regrets: killing 168 people was his patriotic duty. New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin traces the dramatic history and profound legacy of Timothy McVeigh, who once declared, “I believe there is an army out there, ready to rise up, even though I never found it.” But that doesn’t mean his army wasn’t there. With news-breaking reportage, Toobin details how McVeigh’s principles and tactics have flourished in the decades since his death in 2001.
-
-
Not a great book I’m sorry to say
- By H. Winslow on 05-10-23
By: Jeffrey Toobin
-
How to Raise Successful People
- Simple Lessons for Radical Results
- By: Esther Wojcicki
- Narrated by: Andrea Gallo
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The godmother of Silicon Valley, legendary teacher, and mother of a super family shares her tried-and-tested methods for raising happy, healthy, successful children using trust, respect, independence, collaboration, and kindness: TRICK. How to Raise Successful People offers essential lessons for raising, educating, and managing people to their highest potential. Change your parenting, change the world.
-
-
Rushed, no depth, very disappointed
- By Bobby Canedy on 05-16-19
By: Esther Wojcicki
-
Dear Martin
- By: Nic Stone
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After a traffic stop turns violent at the hands of the police, a young Black teen grapples with racism—and what it means for his future. Critically acclaimed author Nic Stone boldly tackles America’s troubled history with race relations in her gripping debut novel. Justyce is a good kid, an honor student, and always there to help a friend—but none of that matters to the police officer who just put him in handcuffs without cause. When faced with injustice, Justyce looks to the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for answers. But do they hold up anymore?
-
-
Emotional, Moving, and Necessary!
- By tarafarah7: Tara Brown on 09-29-18
By: Nic Stone
-
At the Dark End of the Street
- Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
- By: Danielle L. McGuire
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a 24-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks.
-
-
Difficult topic, trigger warnings apply
- By Adam Shields on 08-03-22
-
The Other Wes Moore
- One Name, Two Fates
- By: Wes Moore, Tavis Smiley - afterword
- Narrated by: Wes Moore
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his. In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore.
-
-
Insightful lesson in self-determination
- By Aneesah on 02-04-13
By: Wes Moore, and others
-
Between the World and Me
- By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race”, a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of Black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a Black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son.
-
-
A Heartfelt Self-aware Literary Masterpiece
- By T Spencer on 07-30-15
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
-
The Warmth of Other Suns
- The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
- By: Isabel Wilkerson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 22 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
-
-
Superior non-fiction
- By Lila on 05-20-11
By: Isabel Wilkerson
-
The Bluest Eye
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
-
-
Amazing
- By psiegler on 07-25-18
By: Toni Morrison
-
Gang Leader for a Day
- A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
- By: Sudhir Venkatesh
- Narrated by: Reg Rogers, Sudhir Venkatesh, Stephen J. Dubner
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world's attention when it was first described in Freakonomics. Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatest managed to gain entree into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment.
-
-
Listen to this one first
- By DanO on 01-15-08
By: Sudhir Venkatesh
-
Angela's Ashes
- By: Frank McCourt, Jeannette Walls - introduction
- Narrated by: Frank McCourt, Jeannette Walls - introduction
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why we think it’s a great listen: There’s no gentle way to put this – Frank McCourt’s performance of Angela’s Ashes is just better than the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Frank McCourt shares his sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking story of growing up poor, Irish, and Catholic in the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes.
-
-
A classic book *and* a classic audiobook
- By Karen on 01-30-03
By: Frank McCourt, and others
Publisher's summary
This New York Public Library selection, as one of the 150 most important books of the 20th century, is a true-life portrait of growing up in the Chicago projects.
This national best-seller chronicles the true story of two brothers coming of age in the Henry Horner public housing complex in Chicago. Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers are 11 and nine years old when the story begins in the summer of 1987. Living with their mother and six siblings, they struggle against grinding poverty, gun violence, gang influences, overzealous police officers, and overburdened and neglectful bureaucracies. Immersed in their lives for two years, Kotlowitz brings us this classic rendering of growing up poor in America’s cities.
Critic reviews
More from the same
Related to this topic
-
All Souls
- A Family Story from Southie
- By: Michael Patrick MacDonald
- Narrated by: Michael Patrick MacDonald
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's working-class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child. But the threats - poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world - were real. All Souls is heartbreaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be "the best place in the world".
-
-
this book broke me in the best way
- By anon on 02-14-23
-
The Other Side of the River
- A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma
- By: Alex Kotlowitz
- Narrated by: Stanley Tucci
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Other Side of the River, his eagerly awaited new book, Kotlowitz takes us to southern Michigan. Here, separated by the St. Joseph River, are two towns, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. Geographically close, they are worlds apart, a living metaphor for America's racial divisions: St. Joseph is a prosperous lakeshore community and 95 percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and 92 percent black. When the body of a black teenaged boy from Benton Harbor is found in the river, unhealed wounds and suspicions between the two towns' populations surface as well.
-
-
Thought Provoking Book
- By Patrick on 02-03-18
By: Alex Kotlowitz
-
Born Bright
- A Young Girl's Journey from Nothing to Something in America
- By: C. Nicole Mason
- Narrated by: Robin Eller
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born Bright, C. Nicole Mason's powerful memoir, is a story of reconciliation, constrained choices, and life on the other side of the tracks. Born in the 1970s in Los Angeles, California, Mason was raised by a beautiful but volatile 16-year-old single mother. Early on, she learned to navigate between an unpredictable home life and school, where she excelled. By high school, Mason was seamlessly straddling two worlds.
-
-
Solid Book
- By Daryl on 11-06-16
By: C. Nicole Mason
-
Bluegrass
- A True Story of Murder in Kentucky
- By: William Van Meter
- Narrated by: Ed Sala
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Widely published journalist William Van Meter returned to his hometown of Bowling Green, Kentucky to research this harrowing account of a horrifying crime that occurred at Western Kentucky University. In 2003, attractive college student Katie Autry was found dead in her dorm room after being raped, stabbed, and set on fire. As Van Meter delves into the facts of the case, further disturbing information surfaces.
-
-
Excellent!
- By brooke whitehead on 01-09-23
-
Sex Money Murder
- A Story of Crack, Blood, and Betrayal
- By: Jonathan Green
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 14 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Based on years of research and extraordinary access to former gang members, reporter Jonthan Green creates an epic character-driven narrative, drawing on first-person interviews, police reports, and court transcripts to offer a unique and engrossing work of gritty urban reportage. Magisterial in its scope, Sex Money Murder offers an extraordinary perspective on modern-day America.
-
-
Narrator using the N word was cringe worthy
- By Bmac on 09-07-18
By: Jonathan Green
-
Always Running
- La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.
- By: Luis J. Rodriguez
- Narrated by: Luis J. Rodriguez
- Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
By age 12, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East L.A. gang warfare. Lured by a seemingly invincible gang culture, he witnessed countless shootings, beatings, and arrests, then watched with increasing fear as that culture claimed friends and family members. Before long, Rodriguez saw a way out of the barrio through education and successfully broke free from years of violence and desperation.
-
-
Book for all educators
- By Heather M. Vitz on 03-15-15
-
All Souls
- A Family Story from Southie
- By: Michael Patrick MacDonald
- Narrated by: Michael Patrick MacDonald
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's working-class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child. But the threats - poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world - were real. All Souls is heartbreaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be "the best place in the world".
-
-
this book broke me in the best way
- By anon on 02-14-23
-
The Other Side of the River
- A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma
- By: Alex Kotlowitz
- Narrated by: Stanley Tucci
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Other Side of the River, his eagerly awaited new book, Kotlowitz takes us to southern Michigan. Here, separated by the St. Joseph River, are two towns, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. Geographically close, they are worlds apart, a living metaphor for America's racial divisions: St. Joseph is a prosperous lakeshore community and 95 percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and 92 percent black. When the body of a black teenaged boy from Benton Harbor is found in the river, unhealed wounds and suspicions between the two towns' populations surface as well.
-
-
Thought Provoking Book
- By Patrick on 02-03-18
By: Alex Kotlowitz
-
Born Bright
- A Young Girl's Journey from Nothing to Something in America
- By: C. Nicole Mason
- Narrated by: Robin Eller
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born Bright, C. Nicole Mason's powerful memoir, is a story of reconciliation, constrained choices, and life on the other side of the tracks. Born in the 1970s in Los Angeles, California, Mason was raised by a beautiful but volatile 16-year-old single mother. Early on, she learned to navigate between an unpredictable home life and school, where she excelled. By high school, Mason was seamlessly straddling two worlds.
-
-
Solid Book
- By Daryl on 11-06-16
By: C. Nicole Mason
-
Bluegrass
- A True Story of Murder in Kentucky
- By: William Van Meter
- Narrated by: Ed Sala
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Widely published journalist William Van Meter returned to his hometown of Bowling Green, Kentucky to research this harrowing account of a horrifying crime that occurred at Western Kentucky University. In 2003, attractive college student Katie Autry was found dead in her dorm room after being raped, stabbed, and set on fire. As Van Meter delves into the facts of the case, further disturbing information surfaces.
-
-
Excellent!
- By brooke whitehead on 01-09-23
-
Sex Money Murder
- A Story of Crack, Blood, and Betrayal
- By: Jonathan Green
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 14 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Based on years of research and extraordinary access to former gang members, reporter Jonthan Green creates an epic character-driven narrative, drawing on first-person interviews, police reports, and court transcripts to offer a unique and engrossing work of gritty urban reportage. Magisterial in its scope, Sex Money Murder offers an extraordinary perspective on modern-day America.
-
-
Narrator using the N word was cringe worthy
- By Bmac on 09-07-18
By: Jonathan Green
-
Always Running
- La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.
- By: Luis J. Rodriguez
- Narrated by: Luis J. Rodriguez
- Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
By age 12, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East L.A. gang warfare. Lured by a seemingly invincible gang culture, he witnessed countless shootings, beatings, and arrests, then watched with increasing fear as that culture claimed friends and family members. Before long, Rodriguez saw a way out of the barrio through education and successfully broke free from years of violence and desperation.
-
-
Book for all educators
- By Heather M. Vitz on 03-15-15
-
Wasted
- Inside the Robert Chambers-Jennifer Levin Murder
- By: Linda Wolfe
- Narrated by: Pete Cross
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On an August night in 1986, Jennifer Levin left a Manhattan bar with Robert Chambers. The next morning, her strangled, battered body was found in Central Park. Linda Wolfe goes beyond the headlines and media hype to recreate a story of a teenager whose immigrant mother was determined to make a better life for her son, a petty thief and drug user who'd been expelled from the best schools. Wasted powerfully depicts the freewheeling 1980s society that spawned a generation steeped in violence and the fatal impulses that drove Robert Chambers to kill.
-
-
A very thorough reporting for the time
- By Amazon Customer on 12-28-16
By: Linda Wolfe
-
The Pact
- Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a Dream
- By: Drs. Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, Rameck Hunt
- Narrated by: Drs. Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, Rameck Hunt
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
All too often, we hear about the dangers of male friendships in which peer pressure prevails over common sense. But for George Jenkins, Sampson Davis, and Rameck Hunt, strong and supportive male friendship was a powerful antidote to the temptations and pitfalls of street life. It led three boys to make a vow to be there for one another, to encourage one another every step of the way, until they overcame the odds and became doctors.
-
-
Very Inspirational
- By Heather on 04-10-09
By: Drs. Sampson Davis, and others
-
Finding Fish
- A Memoir
- By: Antwone Q. Fisher
- Narrated by: Thomas Penny
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Baby Boy Fisher was raised in institutions from the moment of his birth in prison to a single mother. He ultimately came to live with a foster family, where he endured near-constant verbal and physical abuse. In his midteens he escaped and enlisted in the navy, where he became a man of the world, raised by the family he created for himself. Finding Fish shows how, out of this unlikely mix of deprivation and hope, an artist was born.
-
-
This book will not disappoint you.
- By Joseph on 10-16-16
-
A Mighty Long Way
- My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
- By: Carlotta Walls LaNier, Lisa Frazier Page, Bill Clinton - foreword
- Narrated by: Carlotta Walls LaNier
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When 14-year-old Carlotta Walls walked up the stairs of Little Rock Central High School on September 25, 1957, she and eight other Black students only wanted to make it to class. But the journey of the “Little Rock Nine”, as they came to be known, would lead the nation on an even longer and much more turbulent path, one that would challenge prevailing attitudes, break down barriers, and forever change the landscape of America.
-
-
must be told
- By Marilyn Peters on 03-15-24
By: Carlotta Walls LaNier, and others
-
Gang Leader for a Day
- A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
- By: Sudhir Venkatesh
- Narrated by: Reg Rogers, Sudhir Venkatesh, Stephen J. Dubner
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world's attention when it was first described in Freakonomics. Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatest managed to gain entree into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment.
-
-
Listen to this one first
- By DanO on 01-15-08
By: Sudhir Venkatesh
-
In Contempt
- By: Christopher A. Darden, Jess Walter - contributor
- Narrated by: Christopher Darden
- Length: 2 hrs and 45 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This number-one New York Times best seller is an unflinching look at what the television cameras could not show: behind-the-scenes meetings, the deteriorating relationships between the defense and prosecution teams, the taunting, baiting, and pushing matches between Darden and Simpson, the intimate relationship between Darden and Marcia Clark, and the candid factors behind Darden's controversial decision for Simpson to try on the infamous glove, and much more.
-
-
Author-narrated/well-written - yet abridged
- By J.Chin on 06-28-16
By: Christopher A. Darden, and others
-
Twentynine Palms
- A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave
- By: Deanne Stillman
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
August 2, 1991, Twentynine Palms, California: a troubled Marine who has recently returned from the Gulf War savagely murders two young girls. One was about to turn 16, the other 21. Exquisitely and inexorably, Deanne Stillman uses this tragedy as a prism through which she examines a rootless culture of fatherless families, shattered dreams, and relentless violence. She also traces the family histories of each murder victim back for generations, in one case to the Donner Party and the other to a shack in the Philippines.
-
-
Ugh...
- By Ashley on 11-03-20
By: Deanne Stillman
-
Picking Cotton
- Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption
- By: Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, Erin Torneo, Ronald Cotton
- Narrated by: Richard Allen, Karen White
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. She was able to escape and eventually identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken - but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After 11 years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed.
-
-
Listen for the story not the writing
- By Professor Sombrero on 06-13-09
By: Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, and others
-
S Street Rising
- Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C.
- By: Ruben Castaneda
- Narrated by: Stephen Bel Davies
- Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
During the height of the crack epidemic that decimated the streets of D.C., Ruben Castaneda covered the crime beat for the Washington Post. The first in his family to graduate from college, he had landed a job at one of the country’s premier newspapers. But his apparent success masked a devastating secret: he was a crack addict. Even as he covered the drug-fueled violence that was destroying the city, he was prowling S Street, a 24/7 open-air crack market, during his off hours, looking for his next fix.
-
-
Some good DC history & time travel
- By Marie on 07-12-16
By: Ruben Castaneda
-
Detroit
- An American Autopsy
- By: Charlie LeDuff
- Narrated by: Eric Martin
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the heart of America, a metropolis is quietly destroying itself. Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age - mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs - Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation that only a native son can possess, journalist Charlie LeDuff sets out to uncover what has brought low this once-vibrant city, his city.
-
-
WOW
- By Avid Reader and Listener on 07-09-13
By: Charlie LeDuff
-
High-Risers
- Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing
- By: Ben Austen
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to 23 towers and a population of 20,000 - all of it packed onto just 70 acres a few blocks from Chicago's ritzy Gold Coast. Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the failure of government. For the many who lived there, it was also a much-needed resource - it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, the island of black poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, the families dispersed.
-
-
Cabrini was my home
- By George Dorsey on 10-13-20
By: Ben Austen
-
A Chance in the World
- An Orphan Boy, a Mysterious Past, and How He Found a Place Called Home
- By: Steve Pemberton
- Narrated by: Steve Pemberton
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A Chance in the World is the unbelievably true story of a wounded and broken boy destined to become a man of resilience, determination, and vision. Through it all, Steve's story teaches us that no matter how broken our past, no matter how great our misfortunes, we have it in us to create a new beginning and to build a place where love awaits.
-
-
Good Book
- By Amazon Customer on 08-19-20
By: Steve Pemberton
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
An American Summer
- Love and Death in Chicago
- By: Alex Kotlowitz
- Narrated by: Alex Kotlowitz
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The numbers are staggering: Over the past 20 years in Chicago, 14,033 people have been killed and another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire. What does that do to the spirit of individuals and community? Drawing on his decades of experience, Alex Kotlowitz set out to chronicle one summer in the city, writing about individuals who have emerged from the violence and whose stories capture the capacity - and the breaking point - of the human heart and soul. The result is a spellbinding collection of deeply intimate profiles that upend what we think we know about gun violence in America.
-
-
A must read!
- By carol utsunomiya on 03-20-19
By: Alex Kotlowitz
-
Common Ground
- A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
- By: J. Anthony Lukas
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 35 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the best-selling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities."
-
-
Don’t Bother
- By LoftyQuilts on 07-09-21
By: J. Anthony Lukas
-
High-Risers
- Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing
- By: Ben Austen
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to 23 towers and a population of 20,000 - all of it packed onto just 70 acres a few blocks from Chicago's ritzy Gold Coast. Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the failure of government. For the many who lived there, it was also a much-needed resource - it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, the island of black poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, the families dispersed.
-
-
Cabrini was my home
- By George Dorsey on 10-13-20
By: Ben Austen
-
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace
- A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League
- By: Jeff Hobbs
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When author Jeff Hobbs arrived at Yale University, he became fast friends with the man who would be his college roommate for four years, Robert Peace. Robert's life was rough from the beginning in the crime-ridden streets of Newark in the 1980s, with his father in jail and his mother earning less than $15,000 a year. But Robert was a brilliant student, and it was supposed to get easier when he was accepted to Yale, where he studied molecular biochemistry and biophysics.
-
-
I've Heard This Before
- By Jami on 07-27-16
By: Jeff Hobbs
-
The Other Side of the River
- A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma
- By: Alex Kotlowitz
- Narrated by: Stanley Tucci
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Other Side of the River, his eagerly awaited new book, Kotlowitz takes us to southern Michigan. Here, separated by the St. Joseph River, are two towns, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. Geographically close, they are worlds apart, a living metaphor for America's racial divisions: St. Joseph is a prosperous lakeshore community and 95 percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and 92 percent black. When the body of a black teenaged boy from Benton Harbor is found in the river, unhealed wounds and suspicions between the two towns' populations surface as well.
-
-
Thought Provoking Book
- By Patrick on 02-03-18
By: Alex Kotlowitz
-
Disillusioned
- Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs
- By: Benjamin Herold
- Narrated by: Benjamin Herold, Bethany Smith
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Outside Atlanta, a middle-class Black family faces off with a school system seemingly bent on punishing their teenage son. North of Dallas, a conservative white family relocates to an affluent suburban enclave, but can’t escape the changes sweeping the country. On Chicago’s North Shore, a multiracial mom joins an ultraprogressive challenge to the town’s liberal status quo. In Compton, California, whose suburban roots are now barely recognizable, undocumented Hispanic parents place their gifted son’s future in the hands of educators at a remarkable elementary school.
-
-
Enlightening
- By Melinda on 01-28-24
By: Benjamin Herold
-
An American Summer
- Love and Death in Chicago
- By: Alex Kotlowitz
- Narrated by: Alex Kotlowitz
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The numbers are staggering: Over the past 20 years in Chicago, 14,033 people have been killed and another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire. What does that do to the spirit of individuals and community? Drawing on his decades of experience, Alex Kotlowitz set out to chronicle one summer in the city, writing about individuals who have emerged from the violence and whose stories capture the capacity - and the breaking point - of the human heart and soul. The result is a spellbinding collection of deeply intimate profiles that upend what we think we know about gun violence in America.
-
-
A must read!
- By carol utsunomiya on 03-20-19
By: Alex Kotlowitz
-
Common Ground
- A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
- By: J. Anthony Lukas
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 35 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the best-selling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities."
-
-
Don’t Bother
- By LoftyQuilts on 07-09-21
By: J. Anthony Lukas
-
High-Risers
- Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing
- By: Ben Austen
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to 23 towers and a population of 20,000 - all of it packed onto just 70 acres a few blocks from Chicago's ritzy Gold Coast. Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the failure of government. For the many who lived there, it was also a much-needed resource - it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, the island of black poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, the families dispersed.
-
-
Cabrini was my home
- By George Dorsey on 10-13-20
By: Ben Austen
-
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace
- A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League
- By: Jeff Hobbs
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When author Jeff Hobbs arrived at Yale University, he became fast friends with the man who would be his college roommate for four years, Robert Peace. Robert's life was rough from the beginning in the crime-ridden streets of Newark in the 1980s, with his father in jail and his mother earning less than $15,000 a year. But Robert was a brilliant student, and it was supposed to get easier when he was accepted to Yale, where he studied molecular biochemistry and biophysics.
-
-
I've Heard This Before
- By Jami on 07-27-16
By: Jeff Hobbs
-
The Other Side of the River
- A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma
- By: Alex Kotlowitz
- Narrated by: Stanley Tucci
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Other Side of the River, his eagerly awaited new book, Kotlowitz takes us to southern Michigan. Here, separated by the St. Joseph River, are two towns, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. Geographically close, they are worlds apart, a living metaphor for America's racial divisions: St. Joseph is a prosperous lakeshore community and 95 percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and 92 percent black. When the body of a black teenaged boy from Benton Harbor is found in the river, unhealed wounds and suspicions between the two towns' populations surface as well.
-
-
Thought Provoking Book
- By Patrick on 02-03-18
By: Alex Kotlowitz
-
Disillusioned
- Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs
- By: Benjamin Herold
- Narrated by: Benjamin Herold, Bethany Smith
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Outside Atlanta, a middle-class Black family faces off with a school system seemingly bent on punishing their teenage son. North of Dallas, a conservative white family relocates to an affluent suburban enclave, but can’t escape the changes sweeping the country. On Chicago’s North Shore, a multiracial mom joins an ultraprogressive challenge to the town’s liberal status quo. In Compton, California, whose suburban roots are now barely recognizable, undocumented Hispanic parents place their gifted son’s future in the hands of educators at a remarkable elementary school.
-
-
Enlightening
- By Melinda on 01-28-24
By: Benjamin Herold
-
From Here to Equality
- Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century
- By: William A. Darity Jr., A. Kirsten Mullen
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 14 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. Perhaps no moment was more opportune than the early days of Reconstruction, when the US government temporarily implemented a major redistribution of land from former slaveholders to the newly emancipated enslaved.
-
-
Must Read for Reparation Advocates
- By Ernest Immanuel Russell on 07-15-20
By: William A. Darity Jr., and others
-
After the Last Border
- Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America
- By: Jessica Goudeau
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The welcoming and acceptance of immigrants and refugees have been central to America's identity for centuries - yet America has periodically turned its back in times of the greatest humanitarian need. After the Last Border is an intimate look at the lives of two women as they struggle for the 21st-century American dream, having won the "golden ticket" to settle as refugees in Austin, Texas.
-
-
Great Content. Odd Structure.
- By Susan Stillings on 02-10-21
By: Jessica Goudeau
-
Ratification
- The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788
- By: Pauline Maier
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 23 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia adjourned late in the summer of 1787, the delegates returned to their states to report on the new Constitution, which had to be ratified by specially elected conventions in at least nine states. Pauline Maier recounts the dramatic events of the ensuing debate in homes, taverns, and convention halls, drawing generously on the speeches and letters of founding fathers, both familiar and forgotten, on all sides.
-
-
History Always Repeats
- By Howard on 08-27-11
By: Pauline Maier
-
The Sojourn
- By: Andrew Krivak
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Sojourn is the story of Jozef Vinich, who was uprooted from a 19th-century mining town in Colorado by a family tragedy and returns with his father to an impoverished shepherd’s life in rural Austria-Hungary. When World War One comes, Jozef joins his adopted brother as a sharpshooter in the Kaiser’s army, surviving a perilous trek across the frozen Italian Alps and capture by a victorious enemy. A stirring tale of brotherhood, coming-of-age, and survival, this novel evokes a time when Czechs, Slovaks, Austrians, and Germans fought on the same side while divided by language, ethnicity, and social class.
-
-
Interesting but somehow less than satisfying
- By Kathy on 03-13-13
By: Andrew Krivak
-
Slavery's Capitalism
- A New History of American Economic Development
- By: Sven Beckert - editor, Seth Rockman - editor
- Narrated by: William Hughes, Kevin Kenerly, Bahni Turpin, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
During the 19th century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War.
-
-
The volume is so low I can't hear it.
- By Anonymous User on 01-30-18
By: Sven Beckert - editor, and others
-
On Juneteenth
- By: Annette Gordon-Reed
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 3 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.
-
-
A short but compelling combination of history and
- By BK on 05-18-21
-
Savage Inequalities
- Children in America's Schools
- By: Jonathan Kozol
- Narrated by: Mark Winston
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jonathan Kozol traveled from the most blighted neighborhoods of Chicago to the urban wreckage of Camden, New Jersey; from the ghetto suburbs of Detroit to inner-city San Antonio; East St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. Everywhere, he discovered separate systems of public schools, with the children of America's poor condemned to schools that are underfunded, understaffed, physically crumbling, and imbued with despair.
-
-
Excellent book for budding education professionals
- By Amazon Customer on 10-25-17
By: Jonathan Kozol
-
Correction
- Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change
- By: Ben Austen
- Narrated by: Brett Barry
- Length: 12 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The United States, alone, locks up a quarter of the world’s incarcerated people. And yet apart from clichés—paying a debt to society; you do the crime, you do the time—there is little sense collectively in America what constitutes retribution or atonement. We don’t actually know why we punish.
By: Ben Austen
-
Random Family
- Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
- By: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
- Narrated by: Roxana Ortega
- Length: 20 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her extraordinary best seller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses listeners in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George; and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies.
-
-
The narrator ruined this book.
- By Ryan Martin on 10-21-18
-
Nickel and Dimed
- On (Not) Getting By in America
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrated by: Cristine McMurdo-Wallis
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This engrossing piece of undercover reportage has been a fixture on the New York Times best seller list since its publication. With nearly a million copies in print, Nickel and Dimed is a modern classic that deftly portrays the plight of America's working-class poor.
-
-
Good concept, but poor execution.
- By Marco Forcone on 08-24-04
-
The Black and the Blue
- By: Matthew Horace, Ron Harris
- Narrated by: Matthew Horace
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
During his 28-year career, Matthew Horace rose through the ranks from a police officer working the beat to a federal agent working criminal cases in some of the toughest communities in America to a highly decorated federal law enforcement executive managing high-profile investigations nationwide. Yet it was not until seven years into his service - when Horace found himself face down on the ground with a gun pointed at his head by a white fellow officer - that he fully understood the racism seething within America's police departments.
-
-
Not for the faint of heart!
- By Amazon Customer on 07-14-19
By: Matthew Horace, and others
-
The Corner
- A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
- By: David Simon, Edward Burns
- Narrated by: Dion Graham, David Simon
- Length: 25 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The crime-infested intersection of West Fayette and Monroe Streets is well-known - and cautiously avoided - by most of Baltimore. But this notorious corner's 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighborhood. David Simon, an award-winning author and crime reporter, and Edward Burns, a 20-year veteran of the urban drug war, tell the chilling story of this desolate crossroad.
-
-
Insightful. A Must Read For Suburban Americans.
- By WitchCrafter on 06-01-21
By: David Simon, and others
What listeners say about There Are No Children Here
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- The Louligan
- 03-04-15
A DEPRESSING ACCOUNT OF REAL LIFE IN THE U.S.
Here is yet another really depressing story about black people in this country who are doomed from birth. Alex Kotlowitz tells a compelling tale of 2 young children, Lafayette and Pharoah Rivers, trying to survive with their parents, siblings and peers in one of the worse project in the country - Chicago's Henry Horner public housing.
My parents also moved into the projects in Washington DC in the 1950s, the same time as the family of the mother of these boys. LaJoe Rivers and I are about the same age. However, I wasn't subjected to becoming the second generation of my family living in the projects after the country stopped caring about the inner city war zones created by the government. At the age of 8, my mother and father were able to move us into a single-family home in an upper middle class neighborhood, where I went to school with the children of DC's "black aristocracy" such as the late Dr. Earle Matory, high profile criminal defense attorney Theodore V. Wells, and Dr. Drew Tuckson. As a result, I went on to college and law school. But my parents were in a city where black people could find work - my mother as a civil servant in the federal government and my father in maintenance at Howard University. We weren't well off but we had food, clothing, and a clean home owned by my parents. My father's tenure at Howard enabled me to get a first class education, tuition free.
However, the young children in this book didn't have a chance, growing up in a complex controlled by rival gangs and abandoned by the city. Children were subjected to seeing their young friends shot down during open air gun fights in the wretched playground or killed in cold blood by over-zealous police officers. By the age of 14, the children of the Henry Horner projects had been to more funerals than weddings. Narrator Dion Graham is his usual magnificent self, giving us a great sense of the hopelessness and helplessness felt by young Lafayette and Pharoah, both really bright young children.
This book was made into a film in 1993 by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Studios. While I appreciate Ms. Winfrey's short-term interest in the appalling living conditions in her home town of Chicago, I'm question her motivation since she took the role of LaJoe Rivers, the boys' extremely beautiful and tiny but overwhelmed mother. With Winfrey looking just like a stereotypical "Madea" welfare mother with 8 children, I didn't really get LaJoe's frustration in having to raise her kids in such an awful environment. With her looks, in another situation, she might have been able to break the cycle of poverty. Unfortunately, like the critically acclaimed HBO series "The Wire" (which depicted a drug infested project in Baltimore MD - just 45 minutes away from the nation's capital - in which young black children were just thrown away like garbage, neither this book nor the film got much exposure. They are just too real and too embarrassing. These stories make white people uncomfortable. Accordingly, they would rather watch fantasy Mafia shows like "The Sopranos" rather than accept that our children are being raised in war conditions similar Iraq or Afghanistan.
Anyway, this book ends like all such stories of this kind. It is sad and disheartening to know that the most wealthy country in the world created, cultivated and perpetuated an environment where politicians made it impossible for these people to break free of a condition which is the same as slavery. Only now, black people are not making this country rich with the exportation of cotton, picked and baled on with the blood, sweat and tears of an enslaved, oppressed, raped, and murdered race. Even after freedom, blacks were denied the same rights as other citizens who came here more than 200 years after us. Now the United States has no use for us. Yet it refuses to accept the fact that it has bred a generation after generation of black men who either die before age 21 or who are incarcerated for life. This is a journey into the abyss for Lafayette and Pharoah.
I'm confident that many people won't like my review. But I always tell it like it is - from front to BLACK. However, as negative as my review may sound to the readers with selective liberalism, with intentional blinders on their eyes, and who want to hide with from the truth with their heads in the sand when it comes to what American is REALLY about, the end result is that this book is a keeper. Read it and weep....... I know I did.......
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
38 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Caro
- 05-24-13
Six stars
Don't know why I had not read this before. This book went on to become a nonfiction classic, often assigned in sociology classes. Written in the 1980s, it is -- sadly -- all still true. Not an easy reality. Told thru the eyes of children. Complicated. Unbiased. There is no better narrator than Dion Graham, who was especially able in bringing this story home.
Recommended for the same people who appreciate Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. You might also like Gangleader for a Day.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
31 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Dempsey
- 02-13-12
Sad disturbing tale of life in the projects.
Would you consider the audio edition of There Are No Children Here to be better than the print version?
It 's hard to say. I would imagine they would be much the same.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No. Pretty desperate and sad. Like watching a train wreck. disturbing.
Any additional comments?
The language is embarrassingly flowery. So many clichés and trite descriptions. Yet despite this the story is fantastic. So glad I perservered despite the terrible writing style. This true story of a family growing up in the projects: It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion. How can the brothers survive? and if they do survive will they ever get out of that place? Or are they doomed to be like everyone else?
How could this happen in America and who's responsible?
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
17 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- mc192
- 01-30-12
Heart wrenching!
Where does There Are No Children Here rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
Excellent book, realistic account, one of my top picks!
Who was your favorite character and why?
Lafeyette
What does Dion Graham bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
He has one of those classic voices that just brings the story alive!
If you could give There Are No Children Here a new subtitle, what would it be?
A realistic account of childhood or a lack of; in a ghetto of Chicago
Any additional comments?
This is a very realistic account of a problem many weren't aware of and everyone should read this at least once! We all here about gang activities, but this book brings that to life and gives an up close perspective.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
13 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Vulindlela
- 06-07-15
An astounding and revealing real life story
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
I seldom come across a tale this affecting and powerful. Again I listened to this via Audible.com and I was not at any moment disappointed. Dion Graham is a seasoned and expressive narrator. The story is one that cuts straight to the heart of Chicago's innercity housing problems through the eyes of two young boys Lafayette and Pharoah. Kotlowitz somehow manages to strip away the distance one might feel in a typical journo-based human interest piece and replaces that with something incredibly experiential. I am certainly going to look for more of his writing after this.
Who was your favorite character and why?
Pharoah was my favourite character. I think that his undying sense of love over senseless violence and injustice at first comes across as naiive but really when you look at it, he asks some very obvious and potent questions. I know that his life has been hard upto now... mi only hope he has maintained that spirit as a young man.
What does Dion Graham bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Graham's voice is superb. I cannot fault his insights as a narrator. he cerhtainly brought the book to life for me and Icould not, could not stop listening to him!
If you could give There Are No Children Here a new subtitle, what would it be?
I dont think the subtitle needs changing
Any additional comments?
Read this book!!!!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
11 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Pam
- 09-13-15
Tough but necessary read
I read this book based on its reviews and accolades. I'm glad that I did and would encourage everyone to do the same.....especially those like me who live in white suburbia. Move always heard about the projects but feel I have a much clearer, better understanding of the daily life and death battles that so many live with each day. It's horrific and heartbreaking and I'm grateful to have been enlightened.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
9 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Don
- 03-21-15
Incredible story magnificently performed!
Well crafted and performed. Makes me feel very thankful for the life I have. Gives me a heightened awareness of what it feels like to live on the other side of the tracks.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
8 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Daryl
- 10-18-15
Terrific book
Lately, I have been reading books along the lines of this one, complex and wonderful and painful books about living black and/or poor (usually both) in America. This book stands above many, as it is written and read extraordinarly well.
The boys and their large family, their friends, their hopes and fears, describe what it was like 25 years ago living in the Chicago projects. It is not so different now, as evidenced by more recent works.
I wish that there were an update on the boys and their lives, what has changed and what has remained the same. but this book on its own provides a complex look at life - the decisions that are made whether by necessity or by poor judgment - that would and should be required reading.
Warning: Conservatives might say that it is too liberal and lenient, excusing poor choices; hard-line liberals may say that there is no personal responsibility required by these economically depressed people.
If both hardliners are unhappy - and the complexity of this book would indicate that this might be the case - then the author has done his job well.
Great book!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
7 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Glenda TN
- 06-13-15
Reality in the Projects
Where does There Are No Children Here rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
This book is high on the list of non-fiction. It is a though provoking piece on public programs in this country and the bureaucracy that is one of the main reasons for its failure.
What about Dion Graham’s performance did you like?
Dion's reading of this book appeals to me because you are getting the story without the emotion that could cloud the facts.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
The book elicited feelings of hopelessness.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
6 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- samaber
- 04-21-15
Must-read for Chicagoans!
I experienced so many feelings listening to this book, and I learned so much about the failings of public housing and law enforcement. Do you like The Wire? Read this now.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
5 people found this helpful