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A Well-Read Woman
- The Life, Loves, and Legacy of Ruth Rappaport
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
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Publisher's Summary
The inspiring true story of an indomitable librarian’s journey from Nazi Germany to Seattle to Vietnam - all for the love of books.
Growing up under Fascist censorship in Nazi Germany, Ruth Rappaport absorbed a forbidden community of ideas in banned books. After fleeing her home in Leipzig at fifteen and losing both parents to the Holocaust, Ruth drifted between vocations, relationships, and countries, searching for belonging and purpose. When she found her calling in librarianship, Ruth became not only a witness to history but an agent for change as well.
Culled from decades of diaries, letters, and photographs, this epic true story reveals a driven woman who survived persecution, political unrest, and personal trauma through a love of books. It traces her activism from the Zionist movement to the Red Scare to bibliotherapy in Vietnam and finally to the Library of Congress, where Ruth made an indelible mark and found a home. Connecting it all, one constant thread: Ruth’s passion for the printed word, and the haven it provides - a haven that, as this singularly compelling biography proves, Ruth would spend her life making accessible to others. This wasn’t just a career for Ruth Rappaport. It was her purpose.
Critic Reviews
“Stewart is frank about Rappaport’s prickly personality…Those details, coupled with more admirable qualities like curiosity and drive, serve to make her an entertaining presence. A lively, chatty exploration of a life that veered in many intriguing directions.” --Kirkus Reviews
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What listeners say about A Well-Read Woman
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Thresea Dowell
- 03-27-20
Amazing story, incredible life
Loved the independent and adventurous spirit, no BS attitude, and unbelievable history of Ruth Rappaport. I wish the author had kept to Ruth's story instead of adding her own political opinion at the end. Otherwise, a good book about an extraordinary woman.
1 person found this helpful
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Story

- Hannahjanecomic
- 10-10-19
Adventure! Books! Romance! Nazis!
Ruth Rappaport is one of the most interesting women I'd never heard of. She escaped the Nazis, lived all over the world, worked as a journalist, slept around, smoked, threw wonderful parties, served in Vietnam and read many fabulous books. She was brave and flawed and fascinating.
Listen to this fabulous biography, poignantly and sensitively told by another fascinating female librarian. With themes of global displacement, sexual harassment and the place of real facts in a world of fake news - this book is very relevant and important.
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- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Barack Obama has written extensively about his father, but little is known about Stanley Ann Dunham, the fiercely independent woman who raised him, the person he credits for, as he says, "what is best in me." Here is the missing piece of the story.
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What a Woman!
- By darswords on 10-11-11
By: Janny Scott
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Barack Obama
- The Story
- By: David Maraniss
- Narrated by: David Maraniss
- Length: 24 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In a groundbreaking work based on hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama, and a trove of letters, journals, and other documents, one of our pre-eminent journalists presents a richly textured account of Barack Obama and the forces that shaped him. This book begins in Kansas and Kenya, decades before Obama was born, and ends as he prepares for a political life. The listener gains a deeper insight into the first black president of the United States, revealing as never before the arc of his history.
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Solid Work @ Debunking Fairy-Tales & Dark Fantasms
- By Darwin8u on 06-20-12
By: David Maraniss
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And So It Goes
- Kurt Vonnegut: A Life
- By: Charles J. Shields
- Narrated by: Fred Berman
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times best-selling author and biographer Charles J. Shields crafts this fascinating portrait of literary icon Kurt Vonnegut. The first authorized biography of the influential American writer, And So It Goes examines Vonnegut’s life, from his childhood to his death in 2007, and explores how the author changed the conversation of American literature.
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Probably only for die hard Vonnegut fans
- By Watery M on 12-22-12
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Paper Love
- Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind
- By: Sarah Wildman
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Years after her grandfather's death, journalist Sarah Wildman stumbled upon a cache of his letters in a file labeled "Correspondence: Patients A-G". What she found inside weren't dry medical histories; instead what was written opened a path into the destroyed world that was her family's prewar Vienna. One woman's letters stood out: those from Valy-Valerie Scheftel, her grandfather's lover who remained behind when he fled Europe six months after the Nazis annexed Austria.
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Good book, mediocre narration
- By Grace M-T on 12-29-22
By: Sarah Wildman
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The Invitation-Only Zone
- The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project
- By: Robert S. Boynton
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout the late 1970s and early '80s, dozens of Japanese citizens were abducted from coastal Japanese towns by North Korean commandos. In what proved to be part of a global project, North Korea attempted to reeducate the abductees and train them to spy on the state's behalf. When the project faltered, the abductees were hidden in a series of guarded communities known as "Invitation-Only Zones" - the fiction being that these were exclusive enclaves, not prisons.
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Over enthusiastic reader!
- By AJW on 02-14-16
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The Good Girls Revolt
- How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace
- By: Lynn Povich
- Narrated by: Susan Larkin
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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It was the 1960s - a time of economic boom and social strife. Young women poured into the workplace, but the “Help Wanted” ads were segregated by gender and the “Mad Men” office culture was rife with sexual stereotyping and discrimination. Lynn Povich was one of the lucky ones, landing a job at Newsweek, renowned for its cutting-edge coverage of civil rights and the “Swinging Sixties.” Nora Ephron, Jane Bryant Quinn, Ellen Goodman, and Susan Brownmiller all started there as well. It was a top-notch job - for a girl - at an exciting place. But it was a dead end.
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Good book read by Ms Robot.
- By careuther on 09-17-16
By: Lynn Povich
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Astounding
- John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlen, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
- By: Alec Nevala-Lee
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Astounding is the landmark account of the extraordinary partnership between four controversial writers - John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard - who set off a revolution in science fiction and forever changed our world.
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Well researched and engaging bio of Campbell
- By Will on 10-31-18
By: Alec Nevala-Lee
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Stalin's Daughter
- The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
- By: Rosemary Sullivan
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 19 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators—her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.
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Insightful and thoroughly researched
- By Jean on 06-16-15
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Shirley Jackson
- A Rather Haunted Life
- By: Ruth Franklin
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 19 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Known to millions mainly as the author of the "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson has been curiously absent from the mainstream American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense and psychological horror, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America more deeply than anyone. Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
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An incredible writer; a courageous woman
- By Lesley on 10-08-16
By: Ruth Franklin
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The Unbreakable Miss Lovely
- How the Church of Scientology Tried to Destroy Paulette Cooper
- By: Tony Ortega
- Narrated by: Tony Ortega
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1971 Paulette Cooper wrote a scathing book about the Church of Scientology. Desperate to shut the book down, Scientology unleashed on her one of the most sinister personal campaigns the free world has ever known. The onslaught, which lasted years, ruined her life and drove her to the brink of suicide. The story of Paulette's terrifying ordeal is told in full for the first time in The Unbreakable Miss Lovely.
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A "CHURCH" THAT IS DESTRUCTIVE. INSIDE SCIENTOLOGY
- By Count B on 09-29-16
By: Tony Ortega
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Spies in the Family
- An American Spymaster, His Russian Crown Jewel, and the Friendship That Helped End the Cold War
- By: Eva Dillon
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1975, 17-year-old Eva Dillon's family was living in New Delhi when her father was exposed as a CIA spy. Eva had long believed that her father was a US State Department employee. She had no idea that he was handling the CIA's highest ranking double agent - Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, a Soviet general whose code name was TOPHAT. Dillon's father and Polyakov had a close friendship that went back years, to their first meeting in Burma in the mid-1960s.
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LOVED it!
- By SaraofDI on 11-06-17
By: Eva Dillon
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Road to Jonestown
- Jim Jones and Peoples Temple
- By: Jeff Guinn
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 1950s a young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jones preached a curious blend of the Gospel and Marxism. His congregation was racially integrated, and he was a much-lauded leader in the contemporary civil rights movement. Eventually Jones moved his church, Peoples Temple, to Northern California. He became involved in electoral politics and soon was a prominent Bay Area leader.
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An Important Accurate Historical Report
- By Julia on 08-24-17
By: Jeff Guinn
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John le Carré
- The Biography
- By: Adam Sisman
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 25 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In this definitive biography - blessed by John le Carré himself - Adam Sisman reveals the man behind the bestselling persona. In John le Carré, Sisman shines a spotlight on David Cornwell, an expert at hiding in plain sight - "born to lying," he wrote in 2002, "bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist."