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Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen
- An Ordinary Family's Extraordinary Tale of Love, Loss, and Survival in Congo
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 5 hrs and 45 mins
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Publisher's Summary
International human rights activist Lisa Shannon spent many afternoons at the kitchen table having tea with her friend Francisca Thelin, who often spoke of her childhood in Congo. Thelin would conjure vivid images of lush flower gardens, fish the size of small children, and of children running barefoot through her family's coffee plantation, gorging themselves on fruit from the robust and plentiful mango trees. She urged Shannon to visit her family in Dungu to get a taste of real Congo, peaceful Congo, a place so different from the conflict-ravaged lands Shannon knew from her work as an activist.
But then the nightly phone calls from Congo began: hasty, static-filled reports from Francisca's mother of gunmen from Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, which had infested Dungu and began launching attacks. Night after night for a year, "Mama Koko" delivered the devastating news of Francisca's cousins, nieces, nephews, friends, and neighbors, who had been killed, abducted, burned alive on Christmas Day.
In an unlikely journey, Shannon and Thelin decided to travel from Portland, Oregon, to Dungu to witness firsthand the devastation unfolding at Kony's hands. Masquerading as Francisca's American sister-in-law, Shannon tucked herself into Mama Koko's raw cement living room and listened to the stories of Mama Koko and her husband, Papa Alexander, as well as those from dozens of other friends and neighbors - "Mama Koko's War Tribunal" - who lined up outside the house and waited for hours, eager to offer their testimony.
In Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen, Shannon weaves together the family's tragic stories of LRA encounters with tales from the family's history: Mama Koko's early life as a gap-toothed beauty plotting to escape her inevitable fate of wife and motherhood; Papa Alexander's empire of wives he married because they cooked and cleaned and made good coffee.
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What listeners say about Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Performance
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- Jeremy
- 02-13-15
A real Congo story.
Many books are written about Congo and its horrors. I have read many books about Congo DR and they never really tell the story of the Congolese themselves.
This book is different. It takes the reader so close into the fabric of Congo and its beautiful people . The author doesn't hide the terrible horrors that are happening there in the north eastern corner of DRC. But she makes the people human. She pulls you into their world and takes you on a journey that is full of sadness and pain but also full of love and detail about the lives they lived and how war is destroying their normal lives. This book doesn't focus on the politics or on the plundering of Congo. It focuses on the people of Congo.
1 person found this helpful
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Story
- DocKnitter
- 01-29-20
Heart wrenching.
I had to stop listening many times because it was too painful to continue. I'm not squeamish; I'm a physician. It was too painful because it was home. I was raised on the other side of the DR Congo in the 1970s. So many things of everyday life sound so familiar; the food, words in Lingala, descriptions of little things, little snippets that would make me homesick. Then the descriptions of the inhumane atrocities that just make my blood boil. My emotions are on a roller coaster right now, so I'm not able to write all that is swirling through me.
Mama Koko was well written. I appreciate the recommendations of how to get involved at the end. Thank you for writing this family's story.
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Story
Based on the Los Angeles Times newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for feature writing and another for feature photography, Enrique's Journey is the timeless story of families torn apart, the yearning to be together again, and a boy who will risk his life to find the mother he loves.
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Missing Chapter 8 and Epilogue!
- By Bobby Reed on 07-01-14
By: Sonia Nazario
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The Bite of the Mango
- By: Mariatu Kamara, Susan McClelland
- Narrated by: Jessica Almasy
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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The astounding story of one girl's journey from war victim to UNICEF Special Representative. As a child in a small rural village in Sierra Leone, Mariatu Kamara lived peacefully surrounded by family and friends. Rumors of rebel attacks were no more than a distant worry. But when 12-year-old Mariatu set out for a neighboring village, she never arrived. Heavily armed rebel soldiers attacked and tortured Mariatu. During this brutal act of senseless violence they cut off both of her hands.
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Sweet Story of Survival, but...
- By Jan on 06-28-12
By: Mariatu Kamara, and others
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Guernica
- A Novel
- By: Dave Boling
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 13 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Calling to mind such timeless war-and-love classics as Corelli's Mandolin and The English Patient, Guernica is a transporting novel that thrums with the power of storytelling and is peopled with characters driven by grit and heart.
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Guernica a good historical novel
- By ARLEENE on 04-26-11
By: Dave Boling
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The Dew Breaker
- By: Edwidge Danticat
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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From the universally acclaimed author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!, a brilliant, deeply moving work of fiction that explores the world of a "dew breaker", a torturer, a man whose brutal crimes in the country of his birth lie hidden beneath his new American reality.
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Almost, but not quite
- By Patricia on 06-15-04
By: Edwidge Danticat
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Monique and the Mango Rains
- Two Years With a Midwife in Mali
- By: Kris Holloway
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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What is it like to live and work in a remote corner of the world and befriend a courageous midwife who breaks traditional roles? Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Mali Midwife is the inspiring story of Monique Dembele, an accidental midwife who became a legend, and Kris Holloway, the young Peace Corps volunteer who became her closest confidante. In a small village in Mali, West Africa, Monique saved lives and dispensed hope every day in a place where childbirth is a life-and-death matter and where many children are buried before they cut a tooth.
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Absolutely loved it!!
- By Kent Crews on 01-24-23
By: Kris Holloway
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When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
- A Memoir of Africa
- By: Peter Godwin
- Narrated by: Peter Godwin
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downward into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in their allegiance to the failed state that has been their adopted home for 50 years.
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Worth the listen.
- By SEE on 09-06-21
By: Peter Godwin
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When Heaven and Earth Changed Places
- A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace
- By: Le Ly Hayslip, Jay Wurts
- Narrated by: Nancy Kwan
- Length: 3 hrs and 3 mins
- Abridged
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This haunting memoir tells the brutal story of the Vietnam War from the perspective of an innocent victim whose childhood was dominated by violence, devastation, and conflicts between the teachings of her culture and the realities of war. The youngest in a close-knit Buddhist family, Le Ly Hayslip was 12 years old when U.S. helicopters landed in her village. She was raped and "ruined" for marriage by Viet Cong soldiers, imprisoned and tortured by the South Vietnamese, and sentenced to death by the Viet Cong. Ultimately fleeing to the U.S. with her children, she finally found peace, and in 1986, she was reunited with her family in Vietnam. The story of her homecoming, interwoven with her memories of the war years, paints a vivid picture of a noble, optimistic woman and her native country.
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Difficult to listen to
- By heatherhg on 07-01-07
By: Le Ly Hayslip, and others
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Small Country
- A Novel
- By: Gaël Faye
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Already an international sensation and prize-winning best seller in France, an evocative coming-of-age story of a young boy, a lost childhood, and a shattered homeland. Burundi, 1992. For 10-year-old Gabriel, life in his comfortable expatriate neighborhood of Bujumbura with his French father, Rwandan mother and little sister Ana, is something close to paradise. These are carefree days of laughter and adventure - sneaking Supermatch cigarettes and gorging on stolen mangoes - as he and his mischievous gang of friends transform their tiny cul-de-sac into their kingdom.
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Amazing prose
- By Anonymous User on 01-19-23
By: Gaël Faye
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A Long Way Gone
- Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
- By: Ishmael Beah
- Narrated by: Ishmael Beah
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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This is how wars are fought now by children, hopped up on drugs, and wielding AK-47s. In the more than 50 violent conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But it is rare to find a first-person account from someone who endured this hell and survived.
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Author's voice
- By B. Bunt on 11-01-13
By: Ishmael Beah
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Farewell to Manzanar
- By: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, James D. Houston
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 5 hrs
- Unabridged
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During World War II a community called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California, east of the Sierras. Its purpose was to house thousands of Japanese-American internees. One of the first families to arrive was the Wakatsukis, who were ordered to leave their fishing business in Long Beach and take with them only the belongings they could carry. For Jeanne Wakatsuki, a seven-year-old child, Manzanar became a way of life in which she struggled and adapted, observed and grew. For her father it was essentially the end of his life.
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Powerful story
- By Bridget on 04-23-21
By: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, and others
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Between the Mountain and the Sky
- A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss, Healing, and Hope
- By: Maggie Doyne
- Narrated by: Maggie Doyne
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Maggie’s story begins in suburban New Jersey, in a comfortable middle-class family that supports her decision to travel the world during a gap year before starting college. During her travels, the trajectory of her life alters when she has a surprise encounter with a Nepali girl breaking rocks in a quarry. Maggie decides to invest her life savings of 5,000 dollars to buy a piece of land and open a children’s home in Nepal.
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Inspiring story, very articulately written!
- By Donna Reagan Schenkel on 02-25-23
By: Maggie Doyne
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The Last Girl
- My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State
- By: Nadia Murad
- Narrated by: Ilyana Kadushin
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Nadia Murad was born and raised in Kocho, a small village of farmers and shepherds in Northern Iraq. A member of the Yazidi community, she and her brothers and sisters lived a quiet life. Nadia had dreams of becoming a history teacher or opening her own beauty salon. On August 15, 2014, when Nadia was just 21 years old, this life ended. Islamic State militants massacred the people of her village, executing men who refused to convert to Islam and women too old to become sex slaves.
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A Heartbreaking Tale of Survival and Hope
- By Leahmgordon on 11-08-17
By: Nadia Murad
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A House in the Sky
- A Memoir
- By: Amanda Lindhout, Sara Corbett
- Narrated by: Amanda Lindhout
- Length: 13 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Amanda Lindhout reads her spectacularly dramatic memoir of a woman whose curiosity about the world led her from rural Canada to imperiled and dangerous countries on every continent, and then into 15 months of harrowing captivity in Somalia - a story of courage, resilience, and extraordinary grace. In August 2008, she traveled to Mogadishu, Somalia - "the most dangerous place on Earth." On her fourth day in the country, she and her photojournalist companion were abducted.
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Drawing Strength from an Empty Well
- By Mel on 09-12-13
By: Amanda Lindhout, and others