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Mud and Stars
- Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age
- Narrated by: Sara Wheeler
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
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Publisher's summary
With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides - Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Turgenev, among others - Sara Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news, traveling from rinsed northwestern beet fields and the Far Eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of nationalities, religions, and languages in the Caucasus. Bypassing major cities as much as possible, she goes instead to the places associated with the country’s literary masters. With her, we see the fabled Trigorskoye (“three hills”) estate that Pushkin frequented during his exile, now preserved in his honor. We look for Dostoevsky along the waters of Lake Ilmen, site of the only house the restless writer ever owned. We pay tribute to the single stone that remains of Tolstoy’s birthplace. Wheeler weaves these writers’ lives and works around their historical homes, giving us rich portraits of the many diverse Russias from which these writers spoke.
As she travels, Wheeler follows local guides, boards with families in modest homestays, eats roe and pelmeni and cabbage soup, invokes recipes from Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, learns the language, and observes the pattern of outcry and silence that characterizes life under Vladimir Putin. Mud and Stars gives us timely, witty, and deeply personal insights into Russia, then and now.
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Balkan Ghosts
- A Journey Through History
- By: Robert D. Kaplan
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 12 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the 20th century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy. Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, and greeted with critical acclaim as "the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date" (The Boston Globe), Kaplan's prescient, enthralling, and often chilling political travelogue is already a modern classic.
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Anti religious/anti catholic hit piece
- By Daniel Calvert on 05-04-21
By: Robert D. Kaplan
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Jacob's Room
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Nadia May
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Jacob's Room was the first of Virginia Woolf's novels to be published by the Hogarth Press, founded with her husband, Leonard Woolf, in their home at Hogarth House in Richmond in 1917. It is an episodic tale that attempts to evoke the inner life of Jacob Flanders and his social milieu during the first decade-and-a-half of the 20th century.
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A good listen
- By Cecilie Malling on 03-21-05
By: Virginia Woolf
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Eat the Buddha
- Life and Death in a Tibetan Town
- By: Barbara Demick
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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A gripping portrait of modern Tibet told through the lives of its people, from the best-selling author of Nothing to Envy.
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TIBET
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 08-24-21
By: Barbara Demick
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On the Plain of Snakes
- By: Paul Theroux
- Narrated by: Joseph Balderrama
- Length: 19 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Nogales is a border town caught between Mexico and the United States of America. A 40-foot steel fence runs through its centre, separating the prosperous US side from the impoverished Mexican side. It is a fascinating site of tension, now more than ever, as the town fills with hopeful border crossers and the deportees who have been caught and brought back. And it is here that Paul Theroux will begin his journey into the culturally rich but troubled heart of modern Mexico.
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A pedantic, poorly narrated, 20 hour lecture
- By Birdshot on 11-16-19
By: Paul Theroux
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The First Man
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In The First Man, Albert Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds, and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. The result is a moving journey through the lost landscape of youth that also discloses the wellsprings of Camus's aesthetic powers and moral vision.
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Great Narration by Jefferson Mays
- By Sean Patrick Stevens on 07-31-21
By: Albert Camus
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The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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The Glossy Years
- Magazines, Museums and Selective Memoirs
- By: Nicholas Coleridge
- Narrated by: Nicholas Coleridge
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Over his 30-year career at Condé Nast, Nicholas Coleridge has witnessed it all. From the anxieties of the Princess of Wales to the blazing fury of Mohamed Al-Fayed, his story is also the story of the people who populate the glamorous world of glossy magazines. With relish and astonishing candour, he offers the inside scoop on Tina Brown and Anna Wintour, David Bowie and Philip Green, Kate Moss and Beyonce and a surreal weekend away with Bob Geldof and William Hague.
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A superfun inside look @ world of magazine editors
- By AminaRuhle on 10-05-20
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The Possessed
- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Possessed we watch Elif Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed.
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Dear Russian Literary Diary...
- By Darwin8u on 08-29-17
By: Elif Batuman
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All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days
- The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
- By: Rebecca Donner
- Narrated by: Rebecca Donner
- Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment—a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution.
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Riveting narrative non fiction
- By Sarah Q on 10-22-21
By: Rebecca Donner
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The Wapshot Chronicle
- By: John Cheever
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Based in part on Cheever's adolescence in New England, the novel follows the destinies of the impecunious and wildly eccentric Wapshots of St. Botolphs, a quintessential Massachusetts fishing village. Here are the stories of Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea dog and would-be suicide; of his licentious older son, Moses; and of Moses' adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly.
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Beautiful 1950s Great Expectations-like Novel
- By Darwin8u on 05-31-13
By: John Cheever
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Inge's War
- A German Woman's Story of Family, Secrets, and Survival Under Hitler
- By: Svenja O'Donnell
- Narrated by: Kristin Atherton
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up in Paris, the daughter of a German mother and an Irish father, Svenja O'Donnell knew little of her family's German past. In this transporting and illuminating audiobook, the award-winning journalist vividly reconstructs the story of her grandmother Inge's life from the rise of the Nazis through the brutal postwar years, from falling in love with a man who was sent to the Eastern Front just after she became pregnant with his child, to spearheading her family's flight as the Red Army closed in, her young daughter in tow.
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Ordinary German Citizens Caught Up
- By Hinterlander on 08-22-23
By: Svenja O'Donnell
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Black Dog of Fate
- A Memoir
- By: Peter Balakian
- Narrated by: Peter Balakian
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia. He was immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced: the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians.
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Great book!
- By Lm on 06-27-13
By: Peter Balakian
What listeners say about Mud and Stars
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Trish
- 11-08-23
Traveling through the golden age, and now
Picked this title up because I loved Wheeler’s Antarctica book. The form is similar: part travelogue, part history, part literary appreciation, part autobiography—all with Wheeler’s wit and, this time, melancholy. Something has happened—we are not told what, and that’s fine, and her business—but whatever it is, it mixes with the sadnesses and strange humor of the lives of Russian writers of the golden age and more contemporary citizens of both the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia. New notes here are culinary history, struggles with language(s), and Wheeler’s family. I love the writers she visits, and had quite forgotten how much, but now I’m going to read Chekhov again. Thank you Sara Wheeler. I am too old and decrepit to go myself, but I can think of no better guide to the lives of these writers.
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- DJ
- 01-25-20
Great Overview
Great overview of 19th century Russian writers, their works, their lives, their country homes in the past and now. Ms Wheeler also provides insight into contemporary Russia and Russians and their relationships to the great Russian writers. Literary review, travel book and memoir wrapped up together. Engaging and witty.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Al Operative
- 04-11-22
Lovely reading, funny and interesting
Wry humour, details and descriptions. I loved the history-cum-travelogue-cum-memoir style, which weaves together the stories of the authors with their time periods and the present day. I personally think it’s much nicer and more honest for an historian to include themselves in their work, because it immediately addresses something integral to the genre: bias and point of view are, either implicitly and explicitly, irrevocably entwined with the recounting of facts. I feel you get a much more honest perspective of the subject if the author is up front about their own opinions and experiences—for example, the author tells us explicitly that she loves Dostoevsky, and also that he was a bigoted xenophobe in real life and in his work often gets lost in his own psychological miasma, which to me allows the reader to more honestly consider their own opinion than if they were reading a drier biography that presents the author’s interpretation as objective fact. Ultimately I liked the circuitousness of this book, and learned wide-ranging information both about the authors and contemporary Russia. The author’s performance has a nice cadence, clarity and sense of humour.
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1 person found this helpful
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- GogolGirl
- 01-21-20
Great idea for a book!
Really liked how this book was set up. Started it on audible but was just too much detail for me (to listen to at work) so ended up reading it instead. Would have been so much better in my opinion without all the personal/family background of author and instead kept to relevant observations during her travels in Russia. Would have liked more discussion of Russian authors themselves.
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3 people found this helpful
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- secchawk
- 11-16-23
tarnished by author's personal political views
It would have been so much better if the author had not felt the need to constantly inject her own biased, hayseed political opinions into the narrative at every other paragraph.
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