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Knowing Jesse
- A Mother's Story of Grief, Grace, and Everyday Bliss
- Narrated by: Marianne Leone
- Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Jesse Cooper was an honor-roll student who loved to windsurf and write poetry. He also had severe cerebral palsy and was quadriplegic, unable to speak, and wracked by seizures. He died suddenly at age 17. In fiercely honest, surprisingly funny, and sometimes heartbreaking prose, Jesse's mother, Marianne Leone, chronicles her transformation by the remarkable life and untimely death of her child.
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Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Erin Murphy
- 12-21-20
Emotional and Honest
Beautifully told story. Ms. Leone is sharp and funny as she tells her son’s story. Highly recommend.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- John
- 05-10-19
Phenomenal!!
Wonderful book! Being a father of 2 kids on the autism spectrum and a wife who is a special education teacher with a general education license as well. She has been able to go to her district to implement an all inclusive class where she has kids on IEP’s in her classroom. This book talks about what many parents and educators deal with. Money and budgets and how the individual gets lost in the big picture. Marianne does an excellent job telling her tale of her son Jesse and how she as a parent had to fight for him to be inclusive in the classroom. She explains how both her and her husband Chris Cooper struggle with what to do when you have what you feel experts giving you advice on what to do with your child. And the struggle of knowing what a parent feels is what is right for their kid. She uses humor and her Italian heritage with that wise guy flair. I loved this book and am so glad she shared their story.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Martini
- 09-25-15
Never would have picked this title
If it wasn't for my wife making the recommendation. Spend a few hours listing to Jesse's mom tell her story. You will be pleased to know her and get a feeling about how she knows her son. Lucky woman.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Don
- 04-26-15
Inspiring
I lost my 17 year old son, Beau, eight months ago, however, under very different circumstances. But the one thing we do have in common as mothers is an undying love for our sons. I appreciated every word. What resonated with me is Marianne's love for Jesse. Just like my love for my son, Beau. Thank you, Marianne.
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Story
Sarah Polley’s work as an actor, screenwriter, and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity, and deep humanity. She brings all those qualities, along with her exquisite storytelling chops, to these six essays. Each one captures a piece of Polley’s life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a “reciprocal pressure dance.”
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Really Just a Book About Her Diffcult Moments
- By Andrew on 03-11-22
By: Sarah Polley
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Tragedy Plus Time
- By: Adam Cayton-Holland
- Narrated by: Adam Cayton-Holland
- Length: 5 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Adam chose to meet life’s tough breaks and cruel realities with stand-up comedy; his older sister, Anna, chose law; while their youngest sister, Lydia, struggled to find her place in the world. Beautiful and whip-smart, Lydia was witty, extremely sensitive, fiercely stubborn, and always somewhat haunted. She and Adam bonded over comedy from a young age, running skits in their basement and obsessing over episodes of The Simpsons.
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Powerful.... Just WOW!
- By Kindle Customer on 08-22-18
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Now Everyone Will Know
- The Perfect Husband, His Shattering Secret, My Rediscovered Life
- By: Maggie Kneip
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 3 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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After a fairy-tale courtship in 1980s New York City, Maggie's young marriage shatters when her "perfect" husband - a star editor at the Wall Street Journal - is diagnosed with and dies of AIDS, leaving her with two young children in a city electrified by paranoia about the new epidemic. Devastated by his betrayal, Maggie struggles to protect herself and her children from stigma, keeping the circumstances of her husband's death a secret for nearly 25 years.
By: Maggie Kneip
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Lessons in Becoming Myself
- By: Ellen Burstyn
- Narrated by: Ellen Burstyn
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Abridged
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Ellen Burstyn has always defied expectations. Born in Detroit during the Depression, she left home at 18 and became a model for J. L. Hudson, Detroit's largest department store. After a failed marriage and a string of unsatisfying relationships and jobs, Burstyn settled in New York, where she began her career as an actress. Burstyn describes the personal missteps, toxic relationships, and private demons she has battled, and how confronting them prompted her to find a different life path. Lessons in Becoming Myself is the extraordinary story of her quest for the examined life.
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haphazardly thrown together
- By Issa on 01-30-19
By: Ellen Burstyn
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Chosen
- A Memoir of Stolen Boyhood
- By: Stephen Mills
- Narrated by: Adam Barr, Stephen Mills
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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At 13 years old, Stephen Mills is chosen for special attention by the director of his Jewish summer camp, a charismatic social worker. Stephen, whose father had died when he was four, places his trust in this authority figure, who then grooms and molests him for two years. The boy tells no one, but the aftershocks rip through his life: self-loathing, drugs, petty crime, and horrific nightmares, all made worse by the discovery that his abuser is moving from camp to camp, state to state, molesting countless other boys.
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A must-read
- By Carol Midboe on 02-02-23
By: Stephen Mills
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Schuyler's Monster
- A Father's Journey with His Wordless Daughter
- By: Robert Rummel-Hudson
- Narrated by: Johnathan McClain
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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When Schuyler Rummel-Hudson was 18 months old, a question about her lack of speech by her pediatrician set in motion a journey that continues today. When she was diagnosed with bilateral perisylvian polymicrogyria (an extremely rare neurological disorder), her parents were given a name for the monster that had been stalking them from doctor to doctor, and from despair to hope, and back again.
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Must-read for medical parents & those who ❤them
- By Kelly A. Wolske on 05-23-18
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Finding Me
- A Memoir
- By: Viola Davis
- Narrated by: Viola Davis
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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In my book, you will meet a little girl named Viola who ran from her past until she made a life-changing decision to stop running forever. This is my story, from a crumbling apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the stage in New York City, and beyond. This is the path I took to finding my purpose but also my voice in a world that didn’t always see me.
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Absolutely beautifully Written❤️
- By Aprilsims93 on 05-02-22
By: Viola Davis
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Expecting Adam
- A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic
- By: Martha Beck
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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From the moment Martha and her husband, John, conceived their second child, all hell broke loose. They were a couple obsessed with success. After years of matching IQs and test scores with less driven peers, they had two Harvard degrees apiece and were gunning for more. But the dream had begun to disintegrate. Then, when their unborn son, Adam, was diagnosed with Down syndrome, doctors, advisers, and friends in the Harvard community warned them not to keep the baby.
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True Life Fairy Tale
- By Desarae on 11-27-13
By: Martha Beck
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What My Bones Know
- A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
- By: Stephanie Foo
- Narrated by: Stephanie Foo
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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By age 30, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.
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Helped me immensely in better understanding my CPTSD
- By Lauren B. on 03-10-22
By: Stephanie Foo
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Bomb Shelter
- By: Mary Laura Philpott
- Narrated by: Mary Laura Philpott
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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A lifelong worrier, Philpott always kept an eye out for danger, a habit that only intensified when she became a parent. But she looked on the bright side, too, believing that as long as she cared enough, she could keep her loved ones safe.
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New favorite book.
- By Anonymous User on 12-04-22
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This Boy We Made
- A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown
- By: Taylor Harris
- Narrated by: Iesha Nyree
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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One morning, Tophs, Taylor Harris’ round-cheeked, lively 22-month-old, wakes up listless, only lifting his head to gulp down water. She rushes Tophs to the doctor, ignoring the part of herself, trained by years of therapy for generalized anxiety disorder, that tries to whisper that she’s overreacting. But at the hospital, her maternal instincts are confirmed: something is wrong with her boy, and Taylor’s life will never be the same.