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Freedom
- A Novel
- Narrated by: David LeDoux
- Length: 24 hrs and 9 mins
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Publisher's Summary
From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a darkly comedic novel about family.
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outré rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,” an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?
In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's intensely realized characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.
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Overall
- L. Kerr
- 09-07-10
Believe the Hype
With so much maudlin advance-hype of the printed novel, I looked for reasons to criticize this audiobook. Alas, it lived up to, and in my opinion, exceeded expectations.
David LeDoux does a masterful job in performing the many voices in Freedom. I’ve watched several YouTube interviews of Fanzen. LeDoux’s voice and presentation are similar. He captures Franzen’s manner of speaking which is consistent with the tone and themes of this book. Whether this was intended by the producers is an open question since the narrator of the audiobook The Corrections had a smoky, older voice (though he did a good job).
Fanzen has been criticized for his sarcastic and cynical interviews, but to me he is entertaining, sincere, and very, very smart. Many great authors such as Joyce, Hemmingway, and Fitzgerald had big egos. They took their writing seriously and expected the same from their readers. This is not a bad thing.
I have listened to a little over 300 unabridged audiobooks, many of them recordings of classics such as Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce, etc. I don’t give inflated reviews. Offhand, the only performance that meets or exceeds LeDoux’s performance is Jeremy Iron’s reading of Lolita. This audiobook is worth the time and money, and then some. It’s that good.
173 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Annie M.
- 09-17-10
Brilliant writing, difficult to like
I couldn't wait for Jonathan Franzen's new book to come out. And I have to say...I kinda sorta hated it. And I liked it. A lot. I did not, however, LOVE it.
I like difficult books with difficult characters. But, with the exception of one or two characters, this is a book filled with intensely selfish, deeply unlikeable people. Would that I could create characters so clearly defined! I mean, Franzen is brilliant in this regard. You know EXACTLY who these people are...and you would never want to invite them to dinner.
I had to struggle to get through it. I'm conflicted. Great writing, great story line. But really hard people to spend time with.
I will say, the ending was very satisfying, so I'm glad I hung in there. Getting to the final sentences, though, was a struggle for this voracious reader of comtemporary and classic literature.
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Overall
- loix
- 09-08-10
Well worth sticking it out
Many good books, even from my favorite writers, often fizzle out; this is one of those rare and welcome exceptions. I did find the middle part a little bloated, the contemporary cultural references a bit too numerous for my taste, and the rantings somewhat tiresome, indulgent, and cheap, but was ready to forget and "forgive" all those weaknesses when I was on the last chapter. Definitely among the top ten downloads, both in content and narration, in my collection of 382.
69 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Kat
- 09-14-10
An American Classic
I spent a wonderful 24 hours listening to "Freedom", examining my own political leanings and marital history and consumerist tendencies as Franzen's characters displayed theirs. I am roughly the same age as Walter and Patty Berglund, so the subject matter - a beautiful and complex story of a modern American family - was as familiar to me as my own personal history.
The narration was excellent (except for the female Indian character, who tended to sound like a caricature at times). I found myself rapt with attention, stopped in my driveway, unable to bring in the groceries and unwilling to tend to my email and cell phone messages.
Highly recommended.
67 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Peregrine
- 09-19-10
Not up to the hype; annoying reader, too
There are beautiful and heartbreaking passages in this novel, but far too many wasted pages (or wasted listening hours) on cardboard characters in banal situations. The section on the main characters' college years rang true, but I couldn't for one minute believe the passages about their son, or the young Indian woman, or the quixotic career one of them takes up about 2/3 through. The adulation this book is getting seems well out of proportion.
The reader deserves special criticism for the sing-song, whiny voice he adopts, especially when in the voice of the female lead.
51 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Griffin
- 09-15-10
Just OK
The last book I listened to was "The Thousand Autums of Jacob de Zoet.", so I'm not writing this because I like happy endings. Although this novel is written using contemporary characters and issues, it was just a story about some people and their problems. Nothing new here, wealthy people have issues, ambitious people get in over their heads, all kinds of people have affairs and disappointing relationships. Wendy Wasserstein's "Elements of Style" was a much better book about the curse of wealth, and Ruth Ozeki's "All Over Creation" hit current issues with better insight than Franzen.
Sorry, but this one tries too hard (24 hours worth!) to be the great American novel, and it shows.
41 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Marlen
- 09-15-10
What a stinker!
Only reason I keep listening is that I paid good money for it. I'm ashamed of myself every time I turn it on.
40 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Michael
- 09-12-10
Perfection
Franzen peels back the the American psyche with the same empathy for flaws as Updike and all of the pathos of Roth. Each character is at war with themselves in a battle to be the excessive American role model. The conflicts are both rich and subtle and every word is like a scalpel. This is a story for the ages.
40 people found this helpful
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Overall
- J
- 09-26-10
Franzen invents emote-a-man, droning ensues
How stupid, really. On and on and on. The first chapter is magical, spare and transcendent with not a word out of place. I recalled reading this select piece as a short story back in 2009 in The New Yorker as "Good Neighbors" and loved it then as now. What follows is 20-hours of pointless and relentless nattering of men getting in touch with their real feelings and "finding themselves". Shut up already. And the over-baked political and social justice commentary that infuses the novel everywhere is so over-done it comes across as pantomime, almost The Colbert Report for liberals. [I'm a committed tree-hugger and could not stand it myself]. Content-wise either society in general has spent so much time these past 10 years exposing the dark side of previously private lives; or maybe my own life has become so particularly disturbing that the twisted family issues that were so shocking back in The Corrections here just seem par for the course. Throw in as extra bonuses an ending that out of nowhere gives minor and tiny characters full wrap-up appearances; a bizarre caricature of a south eastern Indian young woman and a tidy everything-wrapped-up-in-a-bow ending. I found the narration and sound perfectly fine. Go ahead and buy Freedom, it is worth reading just to be able to talk about it. At the end though you will be rooting for Bobby the killer cat rather than the songbirds. I certainly was.
34 people found this helpful
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Overall
- R. Spangler
- 12-13-10
Enjoyable book. Really liked the narration.
I am a non-fiction guy. I read (listen to) a lot of business books, history books and opinion based on fact (!) books, so it was rather odd that I purchased this nove. I had seen a very glowing review of it in National Review, so it caught my interest. I had just finished Ayn Rand's 51 hour epic, Atlas Shrugged, so I wasn't sure I was up for another stemwinder.
Some of the reviews of this audiobook disparaged David LeDoux's reading of it, especially his rendition of Lalitha, the Bengali girlfriend of Walter. Her voice was a bit contrived, but it was actually not a bad version of a man's Indian accent (albeit a man with a tenor voice.) Seriously, I thought his manner of speaking was soooooooo totally well-done. Some narrators just speak the words, others attempt to bring life to the words while not attempting to actually sound like the character, but LeDoux does it all and it really helped me make it through a 24 hour book.
Rather than review the substance of the book, which has already been well covered, I wanted to comment on the form. As an audiobook, I found it a bit tough to follow the timeline as well as some of the characters of the novel. Franzen's use of time shifting, sometimes in remembrances, sometimes in just seemingly random storyline movements were confusing to this listener. Also, in one chapter near the end when Patty was dealing with her family, the names became almost overwhelming to place without having a visual marker by which to sort them, but such is a hazard of audiobooks.
My hearty recommendation is to get this book. Don't be swayed by a few naysayers about the narration. Plus when you are done with it, you will feel soooooooo much better about your own situation in life. Reeeeally...
32 people found this helpful
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-
Story
Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads. A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen’s gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.
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How do narrators still do clownish stuff like this in 2021?
- By Hotrodimus on 10-30-21
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Discomfort Zone
- A Personal History
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Jonathan Franzen
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his development from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person", through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions.
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Good narration, like some essays more than others
- By Doggy Bird on 05-30-08
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Strong Motion
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Scott Aiello
- Length: 20 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
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Compelling Story, Ridiculous Narrator
- By DianeReads on 02-28-16
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Corrections
- A BBC Radio 4 Full-Cast Dramatisation
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Kelly Burke, Colin Stinton, Richard Schiff, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This dramatisation of Jonathan Franzen's acclaimed, epic, award-winning novel revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-20th century to 'one last Christmas' together near the turn of the millennium. A family saga, that sits against the backdrop of this century's changing face of America, the novel was published 10 days before 9/11 but is widely considered an observation of what happened to the American psyche after 9/11.
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Don't use your valuable audible credit on this!!
- By Linda M. Gulyn on 09-30-21
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Corrections
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 21 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
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"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
- By Georgia Burns on 10-08-13
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Purity
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Jenna Lamia, Dylan Baker, Robert Petkoff
- Length: 25 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
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Not a case of Franzenfreude
- By Mel on 09-13-15
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Crossroads
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: David Pittu
- Length: 24 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads. A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen’s gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.
-
-
How do narrators still do clownish stuff like this in 2021?
- By Hotrodimus on 10-30-21
By: Jonathan Franzen
-
The Discomfort Zone
- A Personal History
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Jonathan Franzen
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his development from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person", through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions.
-
-
Good narration, like some essays more than others
- By Doggy Bird on 05-30-08
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Strong Motion
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Scott Aiello
- Length: 20 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
-
-
Compelling Story, Ridiculous Narrator
- By DianeReads on 02-28-16
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Corrections
- A BBC Radio 4 Full-Cast Dramatisation
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Kelly Burke, Colin Stinton, Richard Schiff, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This dramatisation of Jonathan Franzen's acclaimed, epic, award-winning novel revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-20th century to 'one last Christmas' together near the turn of the millennium. A family saga, that sits against the backdrop of this century's changing face of America, the novel was published 10 days before 9/11 but is widely considered an observation of what happened to the American psyche after 9/11.
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Don't use your valuable audible credit on this!!
- By Linda M. Gulyn on 09-30-21
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Twenty-Seventh City
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Meetu Chilana
- Length: 20 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. A classic of contemporary fiction, The Twenty-Seventh City shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American dream unraveling into terror and dark comedy.
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A messy, ambitious, prognostic American novel
- By Darwin8u on 09-01-14
By: Jonathan Franzen
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While I Was Gone
- By: Sue Miller
- Narrated by: Blair Brown
- Length: 5 hrs
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the summer of 1968, Jo Becker ran out on the marriage and the life her parents wanted for her, and escaped - for one beautiful, idyllic year - into a life that was bohemian and romantic, living under an assumed name in a rambling group house in Cambridge. It was a time of limitless possibility, but it ended in a single instant when Jo returned home one night to find her best friend lying dead in a pool of blood on the living room floor. Now Jo has everything she's ever wanted. But when an old housemate settles in her small town, the fabric of Jo's life begins to unravel.
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Join the pity party.
- By Ann Barrette on 02-22-12
By: Sue Miller
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How to Be Alone
- Essays
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Jonathan Franzen, Brian d'Arcy James
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Passionate, strong-minded nonfiction from the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel.
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The first story is the best
- By Susan S. on 01-20-14
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The End of the End of the Earth
- Essays
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The way essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like “a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.” For the past 25 years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world. Franzen’s great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both.
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Many excellent essays.
- By Barbara S. Smith on 12-21-19
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Icy Sparks
- By: Gwyn Hyman Rubio
- Narrated by: Kate Miller
- Length: 7 hrs and 4 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A funny, sad, and transcendent story of a young girl growing up in Appalachia. The New York Times Book Review called this Oprah Book Club selection "vivid and unforgettable."
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Icy made me warm.
- By Alene on 03-28-03
By: Gwyn Hyman Rubio
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Say You're One of Them
- By: Uwem Akpan
- Narrated by: Robin Miles, Dion Graham, Kevin R. Free
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya scurries to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday. A Rwandan girl relates her family's struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. A young brother and sister cope with their uncle's attempt to sell them into slavery. Aboard a bus filled with refugees - a microcosm of today's Africa - a Muslim boy summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride across Nigeria.
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Save your Money!
- By Michal A. Joyner on 11-20-09
By: Uwem Akpan
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Drowning Ruth
- A Novel
- By: Christina Schwarz
- Narrated by: Blair Brown
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Deftly written and emotionally powerful, Drowning Ruth is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart, of the dangers of keeping secrets and the explosive repercussions when they are exposed. A mesmerizing and achingly beautiful debut.
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surprisingly good
- By lookingin2you on 07-31-03
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Farther Away
- Essays
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Jonathan Franzen, Scott Shepherd
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Farther Away, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. These pieces deliver on Franzen’s implicit promise to conceal nothing.
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Two different readers, two different experiences
- By Doggy Bird on 03-31-13
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Middlesex
- By: Jeffrey Eugenides
- Narrated by: Kristoffer Tabori
- Length: 21 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
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Anything but middle.
- By Michael on 05-04-03
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A Virtuous Woman
- By: Kaye Gibbons
- Narrated by: Ruth Ann Phimister, Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was 20 and he was 40. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.
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Reminder of How Beautiful a Simple Life Can Be
- By Carla Espinoza on 05-21-21
By: Kaye Gibbons
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The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
- By: David Wroblewski
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 21 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Filled with breathtaking scenes, the elemental north woods, the sweep of seasons, an iconic American barn, a fateful vision rendered in the falling rain. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a meditation on the limits of language and what lies beyond, a brilliantly inventive retelling of an ancient story, and an epic tale of devotion, betrayal, and courage in the American heartland.