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Summary of the Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Includes Analysis
- Narrated by: Tamara Ryan
- Length: 27 mins
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Summary of the Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Includes Analysis
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Publisher's summary
Summary of The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Includes Analysis
Preview:
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a coming-of-age novel narrated by 14-year-old Lily Owens, a young white teen who runs away from home. In equal parts fleeing her abusive father and pursuing a lead on her late mother, whose final days are shrouded in mystery, Lily travels to a nearby town where she finds a new home with a black family.
In the racially charged milieu that is Sylvan, South Carolina, in 1964, Lily lives with her father near his peach orchard. She has a hard life. Having accidentally killed her own mother in a gun accident when she was four years old, Lily is being raised by her father, T. Ray, who can be physically abusive and emotionally cruel.
At night, bees have been swarming in Lily's room. According to her caretaker, a black woman named Rosaleen Daise, they're harbingers of death. One night, Lily....
Please note: This is summary and analysis of the book and not the original book.
Inside this Instaread summary of The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
- Summary of the book
- Important people
- Character analysis
- Analysis of the themes and author's style
- About the author
With Instaread, you can get the key takeaways, summary and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways, and analyze them for your convenience.
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-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 34
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Story5 out of 5 stars 33
In Betty Reid Soskin’s 96 years of living, she has been a witness to a grand sweep of American history. When she was born in 1921, the lynching of African-Americans was a national epidemic, blackface minstrel shows were the most popular American form of entertainment, white women had only just won the right to vote, and most African-Americans in the Deep South could not vote at all. From her great-grandmother, who had been enslaved until her mid-20s, Betty heard stories of slavery and the times of terror and struggle for Black folk that followed.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Everything Stood Out! It Left Me So Enlightened!
- By Judy H. on 01-31-24
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Manifesto
- On Never Giving Up
- By: Bernardine Evaristo
- Narrated by: Bernardine Evaristo
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 29
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 22
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 21
From the best-selling and Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifesto on unstoppability, creativity, and activism.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Glorious performance and inspiring story
- By Maggi Morehouse on 01-25-22
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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 54
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Story4 out of 5 stars 48
Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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The Real Lolita
- The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World
- By: Sarah Weinman
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 235
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 212
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Story4 out of 5 stars 213
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved novels ever. And yet, very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner. Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner’s full story for the first time. Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Meandering and tedious while never delivering the promised story.
- By Timothy McCarthy on 09-15-18
By: Sarah Weinman
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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 23
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 22
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 22
In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,048
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 922
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 916
Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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4 out of 5 stars
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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Things I've Been Silent About
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Naila Azad
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 83
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 46
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Story4 out of 5 stars 48
Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Family portrait in the frame of history
- By Galina COS on 07-02-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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The Gift of Adversity
- The Unexpected Benefits of Life's Difficulties, Setbacks, and Imperfections
- By: Norman E. Rosenthal M.D.
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 59
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Story4 out of 5 stars 58
The noted research psychiatrist explores how life's disappointments and difficulties provide us with the lessons we need to become better, bigger, and more resilient human beings. Adversity is an irreducible fact of life. Although we can and should learn from all experiences, both positive and negative best-selling author Dr. Norman E. Rosenthal believes that adversity is by far the best teacher most of us will ever encounter.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Book ruined by the narrator
- By David C. on 12-07-22
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Looking for Lorraine
- The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 164
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 139
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Story5 out of 5 stars 140
Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Radiant
- By Rose Brookins on 03-20-19
By: Imani Perry
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White like Her
- By: Gail Lukasik PhD, Kenyatta D. Berry - foreword
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 561
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 497
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 496
In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother's decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother's fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother's racial lineage, tracing her family back to 18th-century colonial Louisiana. In coming to terms with her decision to publicly out her mother, Gail changed how she looks at race and heritage.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Disappointed
- By Yoli on 06-06-18
By: Gail Lukasik PhD, and others
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Capture
- Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering
- By: David A. Kessler MD
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 89
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 80
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Story4 out of 5 stars 81
Why do we think, feel, and act in ways we wish we did not? For decades, New York Times best-selling author Dr. David A. Kessler has studied this question with regard to tobacco, food, and drugs. Over the course of these investigations, he identified one underlying mechanism common to a broad range of human suffering. This phenomenon - capture - is the process by which our attention is hijacked and our brains commandeered by forces outside our control.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Confused
- By TS on 05-17-16
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Frontier Grit
- The Unlikely True Stories of Daring Pioneer Women
- By: Marianne Monson
- Narrated by: Caroline Shaffer
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 600
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 549
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 545
Discover the stories of 12 women who heard the call to settle the West and who came from all points of the globe to begin their journeys. As a slave Clara watched helplessly as her husband and children were sold, only to be reunited with her youngest daughter as a free woman six decades later. As a young girl, Charlotte hid her gender to escape a life of poverty and became the greatest stagecoach driver who ever lived. As a Native American, Gertrude fought to give her people a voice and to educate leaders about the ways and importance of America's native people.
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2 out of 5 stars
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only ok
- By Jane Orr on 06-14-21
By: Marianne Monson
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Hitler's Forgotten Children
- A True Story of the Lebensborn Program and One Woman's Search for Her Real Identity
- By: Ingrid von Oelhafen, Tim Tate
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 167
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 157
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 158
Hitler’s Forgotten Children is both a harrowing personal memoir and a devastating investigation into the awful crimes and monstrous scope of the Lebensborn program in World War 2. Created by Heinrich Himmler, the Lebensborn program abducted as many as half a million children from across Europe. Through a process called Germanization, they were to become the next generation of the Aryan master race in the second phase of the Final Solution.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Interesting story.
- By Brad Bowles on 04-08-16
By: Ingrid von Oelhafen, and others
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The Fire This Time
- A New Generation Speaks About Race
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Michael Early, Kevin R. Free, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 241
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 204
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 202
National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Delusion shattering
- By Matthew A. Burnett on 06-12-20
By: Jesmyn Ward
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J. D. Salinger: A Life
- By: Kenneth Slawenski
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 19 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 31
One of the most popular and mysterious figures in American literary history, J. D. Salinger eluded fans and journalists for most of his life. Now comes a new biography that Peter Ackroyd in the Times of London calls "energetic and magnificently researched" - a book from which "a true picture of Salinger emerges". Filled with new information and revelations garnered from countless interviews, letters, and public records, J. D. Salinger: A Life presents an extraordinary life that spanned nearly the entire 20th century.
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Committed
- A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
- By: Elizabeth Gilbert
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Gilbert
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,478
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,713
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,704
At the end of her best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who'd been living in Indonesia when they met. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. But providence intervened one day in the form of the United States government....
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4 out of 5 stars
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Perfect timing
- By Nancy on 01-15-10