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Spectacle
- The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
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Publisher's Summary
In 1904 Ota Benga, a young Congolese "pygmy" - a person of petite stature - arrived from central Africa and was featured in an anthropology exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair. Two years later the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging the slight 103-pound, 4-foot 11-inch tall man with an orangutan. The attraction became an international sensation, drawing thousands of New Yorkers and commanding headlines across the nation and in Europe.
Spectacle explores the circumstances of Ota Benga's captivity, the international controversy it inspired, and his efforts to adjust to American life. It also reveals why, decades later, the man most responsible for his exploitation would be hailed as his friend and savior while those who truly fought for Ota have been banished to the shadows of history.
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What listeners say about Spectacle
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Performance
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- savvy shopper
- 02-26-19
hard pass
the story, the truth, is very interesting... and absolutely disgusting, but the narrator is grating and the story is barely about benga. and you can tell the author is a professor because the book reads like a textbook and not a novel.
1 person found this helpful
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- AKB
- 08-28-18
A fascinating story but...
This is a comprehensive social, "scientific", political, psychological account that illuminates the minds of thinkers and divines in the late 19th century. Well researched and well written, it is worth the time. However, the voice of the narrator (pitch, timbre) nearly made me send the book back. She is not easy to listen to. I am glad I did not return it because the experience was both educational and intriguing, but the voice nearly did me in.
1 person found this helpful
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- Kenneth Denman
- 04-22-21
Dark History uncovered
We again experience sadness from true facts exposed. Thanks for your research well done book.
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- vyioprah
- 08-09-20
sign-up. view
this was more on the people around him, and what little info you could find on him very sad, life exam to dig-up.
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- 1car69
- 08-05-20
It's Bengal :: One of the good ones...
This is one of the good ones. Read it! What a shameful history that still part of our present. Pamela Newkirk has done a phenomenal job in documenting and bringing to life... Ota Benga a young man that should be remembered.
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- Essam Rajab
- 12-10-19
Spectacle
A very touching story. Well researched and written. It definitively paves the way for similar books to be written to more highlight the tragic life of Ota Benga.
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- By Roy on 03-22-10
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100 Amazing Facts About the Negro
- By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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With élan and erudition - and with winning enthusiasm - Henry Louis Gates Jr. gives us a corrective yet loving homage to Rogers' work. Relying on the latest scholarship, Gates leads us on a romp through African, diasporic, and African American history in question-and-answer format. Among the 100 questions: Who were Africa's first ambassadors to Europe? Who was the first black president in North America? Did Lincoln really free the slaves? Who was history's wealthiest person? What percentage of white Americans have recent African ancestry?
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great book
- By Anthony Costello on 06-14-18
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Gandhi Before India
- By: Ramachandra Guha
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 23 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Ramachandra Guha takes us from Gandhi's birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, his two years as a student in London, and his two decades as a lawyer and community organizer in South Africa. Guha has uncovered myriad previously untapped documents, including private papers of Gandhi's contemporaries. Using this wealth of material in an exuberant, brilliantly nuanced and detailed narrative, Guha describes the social, political, and personal worlds inside of which Gandhi began the journey that would earn him the honorific Mahatma: "Great Soul".
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A magisterial work
- By Urval Goradia on 01-21-23
By: Ramachandra Guha
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Denmark Vesey's Garden
- Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy
- By: Ethan J. Kytle, Blain Roberts
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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A book that strikes at the heart of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Denmark Vesey's Garden reveals the deep roots of these controversies and traces them to the heart of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the US slave population stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof shot nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, the congregation of Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection.
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Timely, well-written and enlightening.
- By DG on 06-05-18
By: Ethan J. Kytle, and others
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Frontier Grit
- The Unlikely True Stories of Daring Pioneer Women
- By: Marianne Monson
- Narrated by: Caroline Shaffer
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Discover the stories of 12 women who heard the call to settle the West and who came from all points of the globe to begin their journeys. As a slave Clara watched helplessly as her husband and children were sold, only to be reunited with her youngest daughter as a free woman six decades later. As a young girl, Charlotte hid her gender to escape a life of poverty and became the greatest stagecoach driver who ever lived. As a Native American, Gertrude fought to give her people a voice and to educate leaders about the ways and importance of America's native people.
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only ok
- By Jane Orr on 06-14-21
By: Marianne Monson
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Harriet Tubman
- The Road to Freedom
- By: Catherine Clinton
- Narrated by: Shayna Small
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Celebrated for her courageous exploits as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman has entered history as one of 19th-century America's most enduring and important figures. But just who was this remarkable woman?
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Returning this book
- By KMS on 07-11-18
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The Road to Dawn: Josiah Henson and the Story That Sparked the Civil War
- By: Jared A. Brock
- Narrated by: Ryan Vincent Anderson
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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This sweeping biography about the man who was the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is an epic tale of courage and bravery in the face of unimaginable trials. The Road to Dawn tells the improbable story of Josiah Henson - a dynamic, driven man with exceptional intelligence and unyielding principles, who overcame incredible odds to escape from slavery and improve the lives of hundreds of freedmen throughout his long life. He was immortalized by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.
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Great book and very informative
- By plcd22 on 07-04-18
By: Jared A. Brock
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The Imperial Cruise
- A Secret History of Empire and War
- By: James Bradley
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft on the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. Roosevelt's glamorous 21 year old daughter Alice served as mistress of the cruise, which included senators and congressmen. On this trip, Taft concluded secret agreements in Roosevelt's name.
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Over the Top - Why did I waste my time?
- By Kent on 01-25-10
By: James Bradley
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Bound for the Promised Land
- Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero
- By: Kate Clifford Larson
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Harriet Tubman is one of the giants of American history - a fearless visionary who led scores of her fellow slaves to freedom and battled courageously behind enemy lines during the Civil War. And yet in the century since her death, next to nothing has been written about this extraordinary woman aside from juvenile biographies. The truth about Harriet Tubman has become lost inside a legend woven of racial and gender stereotypes.
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Narration is problematic
- By Amazon Customer on 08-15-18
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Genius of Place
- The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted
- By: Justin Martin
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 18 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Frederick Law Olmsted is arguably the most important historical figure that the average American knows the least about. Best remembered for his landscape architecture, from New York's Central Park to Boston's Emerald Necklace to Stanford University's campus, Olmsted was also an influential journalist, early voice for the environment, and abolitionist credited with helping dissuade England from joining the South in the Civil War. This momentous career was shadowed by a tragic personal life, also fully portrayed here.
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Ponderous yet incomplete
- By John F. Caffrey on 01-23-19
By: Justin Martin
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City of Dreams
- The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York
- By: Tyler Anbinder
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 24 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Tyler Anbinder's story is one of innovators and artists, revolutionaries and rioters, staggering deprivation and soaring triumphs, all playing out against the powerful backdrop of New York City, at once ever changing and profoundly, permanently itself. City of Dreams provides a vivid sense of what New York looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and felt like over the centuries of its development and maturation into the city we know today.
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Even as a history, not engaging
- By Patrick Kelly on 12-03-16
By: Tyler Anbinder