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A Childhood
- The Biography of a Place
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
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Publisher's summary
“One of the Finest Memoirs Ever Written” –The New Yorker
The highly acclaimed memoir of one of the most original American storytellers of the rural South
A Penguin Classic
Harry Crews grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Georgia at a time when “the rest of the country was just beginning to feel the real hurt of the Great Depression but it had been living in Bacon County for years.” Yet what he conveys in this moving, brutal autobiography of his first six years of life is an elegiac sense of community and roots from a rural South that had rarely been represented in this way. Interweaving his own memories including his bout with polio and a fascination with the Sears, Roebuck catalog, with the tales of relatives and friends, he re-creates a childhood of tenderness and violence, comedy and tragedy.
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What listeners say about A Childhood
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- Greg B
- 07-26-22
Story rings true
Short of a few exaggerations this book describes farming in Bacon county in the 30’s to 60’s. I heard some great storytellers at Cartertown grocery. Although by late 50’s many farmers had a lot more machinery to help. My grandfather was Jesse Boatright but by 1962, when I started coming up each summer, he had no sharecroppers. Though an uncle sharecropper all his life I later learned.
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- Socialfit77
- 06-29-22
Thank god for Harry Crews
I absolutely love every book Mr. Crews has written. I never wanted this one to end. A sad, tough, humorous book that hits you in every spot human. It doesn’t get much better. RIP Mr Crews. Thank you for everything. JST-
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- Adam
- 05-16-22
Fantastic.
Even with only cursory knowledge of life growing up in the south, I found this fascinating and enjoyable.
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- Dominick Ly
- 08-10-23
The southern farm life
Read this if you’d like to hear about a childhood on a farm in the South.
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- Steve
- 07-11-23
Great read
If you want, an excellent walk, back in time, told in the first person, this is a great read. Well written, great story.
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- William Coppage
- 06-03-23
Amazing tale but wrong narrator
No big issues but Harry Crews reader deserves a tougher voice. More gruff and grit.
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- Beingreal
- 05-07-22
A True Walk Through the Past
Loved it. So many fond memories of the time and places in spite of the many sad events.
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- Autodidact
- 04-12-22
astonishing
in the very recent past, in the America I hubristically think I know, this stunning memoir, replete with unknown phrases and desperate humanity in it's beauty and terror, is recorded here. READ this!!!
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Story
In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the principal crux of female despair": the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of "urban peasants," Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother's romantic depression over the early death of her husband.
By: Vivian Gornick
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The Woman Warrior
- Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
- By: Maxine Hong Kingston
- Narrated by: Ming-Na
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Acclaimed author Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior broke new ground when it was first published 35 years ago, weaving autobiography, history, folklore, and fantasy in to a candid and revelatory story about the daughter of Chinese immigrants in mid-20th century California.
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Hilariously Vicious; Touchingly Empathetic
- By Horace on 08-28-11
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- By: Junot Diaz
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Staci Snell
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku: the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.
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Wondrous Book!!!
- By Robert on 06-22-12
By: Junot Diaz
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Men We Reaped
- A Memoir
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write, she realized the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships.
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Tough but important
- By Jermell Powell on 09-26-21
By: Jesmyn Ward
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Writing Down the Bones
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Original Recording
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Here is a new collector's edition of this modern classic as you have never heard it before, read by Natalie Goldberg herself and then infused with her most personal reflections about this "magic manual" for all writers. Try these ingenious, Zen-based exercises to expand your writing skills - or just for fun.
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The Substance
- By Krissy D. on 07-09-10
By: Natalie Goldberg
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Lit
- A Memoir
- By: Mary Karr
- Narrated by: Mary Karr
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Lit follows Mary Karr's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness - and her astonishing resurrection. Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in "The Mental Marriott" awakens her to the possibility of joy, and leads her to an unlikely faith.
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Finally! One for the "Win" column
- By Kim on 03-22-10
By: Mary Karr
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Ava's Man
- By: Rick Bragg
- Narrated by: Rick Bragg
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Abridged
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With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression
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Deeply moving
- By Kate on 08-12-03
By: Rick Bragg
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The Twelve-Mile Straight
- A Novel
- By: Eleanor Henderson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 17 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: In a house full of secrets, two babies - one light-skinned, the other dark - are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.