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Short Life in a Strange World
- Birth to Death in 42 Panels
- Narrated by: Jot Davies
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
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Short Life in a Strange World
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Publisher's Summary
Sure to be hailed alongside H is for Hawk and The Hare with Amber Eyes, an exceptional work that is at once an astonishing journey across countries and continents, an immersive examination of a great artist’s work, and a moving and intimate memoir.
In 2012, facing the death of his father and impending fatherhood, Toby Ferris set off on a seemingly quixotic mission to track down and look at - in situ - every painting still in existence by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the most influential and important artist of Northern Renaissance painting.
The result of that pursuit is a remarkable journey through major European cities and across continents. As Ferris takes a keen analytical eye to the paintings, each piece brings new revelations about Bruegel’s art, and gives way to meditations on mortality, fatherhood, and life. Ferris conjures a whole world to which most of us have probably lost the key, and in the process teaches us how to look, patiently and curiously, at the world.
Short Life in a Strange World is a dazzlingly original and assured debut - a strange and bewitching hybrid of art criticism, philosophical reflection, and poignant memoir that subtly alters the way we see the world and ourselves.
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
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- By: W. G. Sebald
- Narrated by: Richard Matthews
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 183
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 161
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Story4 out of 5 stars 160
Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by "one of the most gripping writers imaginable" ( The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man's search for the answer to his life's central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him.
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2 out of 5 stars
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To each their own
- By Sebastian Romero on 04-23-20
By: W. G. Sebald
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The Art of Travel
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 170
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 149
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Story4 out of 5 stars 149
Aside from love, few actvities seem to promise us as much happiness as going traveling: taking off for somewhere else, somewhere far from home, a place with more interesting weather, customs, and landscapes. But although we are inundated with advice on where to travel, few people seem to talk about why we should go and how we can become more fulfilled by doing so.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Dull, suggestions for better alternatives
- By J. Natael on 08-07-13
By: Alain de Botton
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The Enigma of Arrival
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 101
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 84
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 84
The story of a writer's singular journey - from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another - is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.
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3 out of 5 stars
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A noveau novel
- By Chike M Nzerue on 05-02-20
By: V. S. Naipaul
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Iberia
- By: James A. Michener
- Narrated by: Larry McKeever
- Length: 37 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 255
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 219
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Story4 out of 5 stars 221
Spain is an immemorial land like no other, one that James A. Michener, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and celebrated citizen of the world, came to love as his own. Iberia is Michener's enduring nonfiction tribute to his cherished second home. In the fresh and vivid prose that is his trademark, he not only reveals the celebrated history of bullfighters and warrior kings, painters and processions, cathedrals and olive orchards; he also shares the intimate, often hidden country he came to know.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Outdated and no storyline.
- By john lundberg on 08-05-17
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The White Road
- Journey into an Obsession
- By: Edmund de Waal
- Narrated by: Michael Maloney
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 101
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 88
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 89
Extraordinary new nonfiction, a gripping blend of history and memoir, by the author of the award-winning and best-selling international sensation The Hare with the Amber Eyes. In The White Road, best-selling author and artist Edmund de Waal gives us an intimate narrative history of his lifelong obsession with porcelain, or "white gold".
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5 out of 5 stars
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Marvelous and addictive
- By Elizabeth on 09-27-17
By: Edmund de Waal
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So Much Longing in So Little Space
- The Art of Edvard Munch
- By: Karl Ove Knausgaard
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard sets out to understand the enduring and awesome power of Edvard Munch's work by training his gaze on the landscapes that inspired Munch and speaking firsthand with other contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, for whom Munch's legacy looms large. Bringing together art history, biography, and memoir, Knausgaard tells a passionate, freewheeling, and pensive story about not just one of history's most significant painters, but the very meaning of choosing the artist's life, as he himself has done.
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5 out of 5 stars
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if only
- By daniel on 05-03-23
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All the Beauty in the World
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
- By: Patrick Bringley
- Narrated by: Patrick Bringley
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 46
Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two-million-square-foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer, and he found himself needing to escape. So he quit and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An art lover’s love story
- By Lisa M. on 02-16-23
By: Patrick Bringley
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Sissinghurst, An Unfinished History
- The Quest to Restore a Working Farm at Vita Sackville-West's Legendary Garden
- By: Adam Nicolson
- Narrated by: Jon Caruth
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 21
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 19
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 18
From lavish palace for Elizabethan nobles to dreary jailhouse for 18th-century prisoners of war, from well-manicured country house for a string of landed families to weed-choked ruin, Sissinghurst, in Kent, has become one of the most illustrious estates in England - and its future may prove to be just as intriguing as its past. In the 1930s, English poet Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson, acquired land that had once been owned by Vita's ancestors.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A fascinating and profound work
- By Rosemary Wells on 04-07-17
By: Adam Nicolson
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The Marches
- A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland
- By: Rory Stewart
- Narrated by: Rory Stewart
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 64
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 58
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Story4 out of 5 stars 58
Ten years after the walk across Central Asia and Afghanistan that he memorialized in The Places in Between, Rory Stewart set out on a new journey, traversing a thousand miles between England and Scotland. Stewart was raised along the border of the two countries, the frontier taking on poignant significance in his understanding of what it means to be both Scottish and English, of his relationship with his father, who's lived on this land his whole life, and of his ties to the rich history and culture of the region.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Uneven and unexpected, still worth it.
- By Nassir on 04-29-17
By: Rory Stewart
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Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All
- A New Zealand Story
- By: Christina Thompson
- Narrated by: Sarah Mollo-Christensen
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 43
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Story4 out of 5 stars 35
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson's marriage to a Maori man.
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5 out of 5 stars
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a beautiful story
- By Pumpkin99 on 12-24-22
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Changing Planes
- By: Ursula K. Le Guin
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 153
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 76
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Story4 out of 5 stars 77
The misery of waiting for a connecting flight at an airport leads to the accidental discovery of alighting on other planes - not airplanes but planes of existence. Ursula Le Guin's deadpan premise frames a series of travel accounts by the tourist-narrator who describes bizarre societies and cultures that sometimes mirror our own, and sometimes open puzzling doors into the alien.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Social Fiction
- By C. Little on 03-23-06
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A Field Guide to Getting Lost
- By: Rebecca Solnit
- Narrated by: Rebecca Solnit
- Length: 4 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 551
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 494
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Story4 out of 5 stars 482
A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.
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5 out of 5 stars
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meditation on the 'other' side of life
- By Audy Meadow Davison LMT on 09-05-16
By: Rebecca Solnit
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Travels in Siberia
- By: Ian Frazier
- Narrated by: Ian Frazier
- Length: 20 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 414
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 302
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Story4 out of 5 stars 301
Ian Frazier trains his eye for unforgettable detail on Siberia, that vast expanse of Asiatic Russia. He explores many aspects of this storied, often grim region. He writes about the geography, the resources, the native peoples, the history, the 40-below midwinter afternoons, the bugs. The book brims with Mongols, half-crazed Orthodox archpriests, fur seekers, ambassadors of the czar bound for Peking, tea caravans, German scientists, American prospectors, intrepid English nurses, and prisoners and exiles of every kind....
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5 out of 5 stars
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I Loved This Book
- By Sara on 01-05-14
By: Ian Frazier
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Desert Notebooks
- A Road Map for the End of Time
- By: Ben Ehrenreich
- Narrated by: David Bendena
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 29
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 29
Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, Desert Notebooks offers a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present - perfect for fans of Robert Macfarlane and Elizabeth Rush - that’s unflinching, urgent, and yet timeless and profound.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Not about the desert, Not about Joshua Tree
- By Steve on 07-12-20
By: Ben Ehrenreich
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Vesper Flights
- By: Helen Macdonald
- Narrated by: Helen Macdonald
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 186
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 148
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 145
In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing the massive migration of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Pure delight
- By Secutor on 11-09-20
By: Helen Macdonald