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Futureface
- A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging
- Narrated by: Alex Wagner
- Length: 9 hrs
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Publisher's Summary
An acclaimed journalist travels the globe to solve the mystery of her ancestry, confronting the question at the heart of the American experience of immigration, race, and identity: Who are my people?
"A thoughtful, beautiful meditation on what makes us who we are...and the values and ideals that bind us together as Americans." (Barack Obama)
"A rich and revealing memoir... Futureface raises urgent questions having to do with history and complicity." (The New York Times)
The daughter of a Burmese mother and a white American father, Alex Wagner grew up thinking of herself as a "futureface" - an avatar of a mixed-race future when all races would merge into a brown singularity. But when one family mystery leads to another, Wagner's postracial ideals fray as she becomes obsessed with the specifics of her own family's racial and ethnic history. Drawn into the wild world of ancestry, she embarks upon a quest around the world - and into her own DNA - to answer the ultimate questions of who she really is and where she belongs.
The journey takes her from Burma to Luxembourg, from ruined colonial capitals with records written on banana leaves to Mormon databases, genetic labs, and the rest of the 21st-century genealogy complex. But soon she begins to grapple with a deeper question: Does it matter? Is our enduring obsession with blood and land, race and identity, worth all the trouble it's caused us?
Wagner weaves together fascinating history, genetic science, and sociology but is really after deeper stuff than her own ancestry: In a time of conflict over who we are as a country, she tries to find the story where we all belong.
Praise for Futureface:
"Smart, searching... Meditating on our ancestors, as Wagner's own story shows, can suggest better ways of being ourselves." (Maud Newton, The New York Times Book Review)
"Sincere and instructive... This timely reflection on American identity, with a bonus expose of DNA ancestry testing, deserves a wide audience." (Library Journal)
"The narrative is part Mary Roach-style participation-heavy research, part family history, and part exploration of existential loneliness.... The journey is worth taking." (Kirkus Reviews)
Critic Reviews
“[A] ruminative exploration of ethnicity and identity.... Wagner’s odyssey is an effective riposte to anti-immigrant politics.” (Publishers Weekly)
“Alex Wagner is brilliant and hilarious. Futureface is a magic trick: She starts with the humble story of a third-culture kid’s existential loneliness and ends with a smart, timely, and moving exploration of family lies, exile and immigration, genetics, and the mystery of human belonging.” (Eddie Huang, best-selling author of Fresh off the Boat)
“Futureface is an important contribution to the American conversation - Alex Wagner’s story is insightful, moving, informative, and searing. I have deeply admired Alex for a long time as an original thinker, a keenly observant journalist, and a funny, empathetic human being. Read this book and you’ll understand why.” (Wes Moore, best-selling author of The Other Wes Moore)
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What listeners say about Futureface
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Performance
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- Michael Cook
- 06-10-18
fun story
I thoroughly enjoyed this book she's very funny and I could relate to all of the twist turns and miss- steps tracing my own family history. however I will say I didn't always agree with her assessments and conclusions. I found my own 23and Me DNA testing quite satisfying it even busted a family myth regarding a certain great-great grandmother's being half-indian.
1 person found this helpful
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- Saba
- 02-07-23
Disappointing
I thought this was going to be more of an autobiography, a story of someone’s life who seemingly has a similar background like me, but unfortunately, there are only small sprinkles of some events in the author’s life, Otherwise it’s more listening to her general thought process on what identity / belonging means and run down of all the available DNA kits on the market and their potential uselessness. Not sure I liked this book at all. Didn’t want to finish it after I realized this book was not going to be about the author’s life, but the author’s opinion and where she got them from.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-12-22
Excellent read: history & search for meaning
This is Alex's personal story, but in a distant way, it is everyone's search for meaning. We are all mutts - all mixed breeds - and simultaneously all the same breed. Thank you for sharing your life with us, to free us to contemplate our own and how we view it. It was fun to see your dogged pursuit of truth & detail. You would've been a good engineer.
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- Fred C Rasmason III
- 03-13-22
A wonderful book on Alex's heritage
I love it. Alex was terrific at narration. Couldn't put it down. Very interesting.
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- Michele
- 03-17-20
Author is an idiot
She is a self obsessed twit who labels herself but is enraged if anyone else asks her about her heritage. I pity her parents. Only wish I could return this superficial waste of money
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- Jailan elsarha
- 03-03-19
Belonging
Very interesting true story about Alex Wagner the biracial , American Burmese , journalist lady searching for the answer “where do I belong ? Where is home”. The journey of self searching is driven by her own curiosity , and less by her mother or father who seems to be comfortable with their own “I Am ...” . Alex research found different avenues to dig deep into trying to discover truth behind masks . Regardless of who she is, what blood runs in her veins , all said the same thing the source is one for all , and all made it to the dream land that is Home . The belonging is here , even if she was made of many diverse races . Isn’t our diversity and belonging feelings what made America ? Then why we accepted who divided us because of our diversity?
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- Cristina
- 11-13-18
Self indulgent
Boring and repetitive. The author is trying to find her meaning in the history of her ancestors. I do not recommend this book. It is a waste of words
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- borgyborgy
- 05-18-18
Very interesting,personal and informative
Alex reading is expressive a great to listen to. She has an engaging kind of eloquence to her writing, using an elevated term in a sentence that uses street vernacular. For me it made listening fun and never dry. She give a great summary of the strengths (few) and shortcomings (many) of the genetic testing enterprise so popular today. I had a suspicion but hadn’t taken the time to look into it. I wish I could extract the written text to show to my top enthusiastic family members. Usually when any human construct is too simple, something is wrong and it’s always more complicated.
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By: Janny Scott
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In Search of Our Roots
- How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past
- By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 16 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Most African Americans, in tracing their family’s past, encounter a series of daunting obstacles. Slavery was a brutally efficient nullifier of identity, willfully denying Black men and women even their names. Here, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., backed by an elite team of geneticists and researchers, takes 19 extraordinary African Americans on a once unimaginable journey, tracing family sagas through US history and back to Africa.
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Amazing
- By LadyC Speaks on 04-17-19
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The Invisible History of the Human Race
- How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures
- By: Christine Kenneally
- Narrated by: Justine Eyre
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Invisible History of the Human Race, Christine Kenneally draws on cutting-edge research to reveal how both historical artifacts and DNA tell us where we come from and where we may be going. While some books explore our genetic inheritance and some popular television shows celebrate ancestry, this is the first book to explore how everything from DNA to emotions to names and the stories that form our lives are all part of our human legacy.
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Who are you really. Who am I?
- By Annie M. on 10-28-14
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Brit(ish)
- On Race, Identity and Belonging
- By: Afua Hirsch
- Narrated by: Afua Hirsch
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Afua Hirsch is British. Her parents are British. She was raised, educated and socialised in Britain. Her partner, her daughter, her sister and the vast majority of her friends are British. So why is her identity and sense of belonging a subject of debate? The reason is simply because of the colour of her skin. Blending history, memoir and individual experiences, Afua Hirsch reveals the identity crisis at the heart of Britain today. Far from affecting only minority people, Britain is a nation in denial about its past and its present.
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Important read
- By L. Ingarfield on 01-04-23
By: Afua Hirsch
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South to America
- A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: Imani Perry
- Length: 16 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life.
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A thoughtful book with a misleading description
- By Kathleen Oldford on 02-18-22
By: Imani Perry
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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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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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Delusion shattering
- By Matthew A. Burnett on 06-12-20
By: Jesmyn Ward
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A Singular Woman
- The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother
- By: Janny Scott
- 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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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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Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
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Ancestor Trouble
- A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
- By: Maud Newton
- Narrated by: Catherine Taber
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy - a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry - to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.
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Unique perspective
- By Debbie Broderick on 02-18-23
By: Maud Newton
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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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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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Interesting story.
- By Brad Bowles on 04-08-16
By: Ingrid von Oelhafen, and others
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Finding Samuel Lowe
- China, Jamaica, Harlem
- By: Paula Williams Madison
- Narrated by: Paula Williams Madison
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Thanks to her spiteful, jealous Jamaican mother, Nell Vera Lowe was cut off from her Chinese father, Samuel, when she was just a baby, after he announced that he was taking a Chinese bride. By the time Nell was old enough to travel to her father's shop in St. Anne's Bay, he'd taken his family back to China, never learning what became of his eldest daughter. Bereft, Nell left Jamaica for New York to start a new life.
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Fascinating
- By ayodele higgs on 01-27-16
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Sign My Name to Freedom
- A Memoir of a Pioneering Life
- By: Betty Reid Soskin
- Narrated by: Betty Reid Soskin
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Singular
- By Jen on 11-20-22
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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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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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Disappointed
- By Yoli on 06-06-18
By: Gail Lukasik PhD, and others
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Life Beyond Measure
- Letters to My Great-Granddaughter
- By: Sidney Poitier
- Narrated by: Sidney Poitier
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Abridged
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Sidney Poitier is one of the most revered actors in the history of Hollywood. He has overcome enormous obstacles in extraordinary times and is a role model for many Americans because of his convictions, bravery, and grace. Poitier reflects on his amazing life in Life Beyond Measure, offering inspirational advice and personal stories in the form of extended letters to his great-granddaughter.
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Mix of family history and life advice.