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Don’t Save Anything audiobook cover art

  • Don’t Save Anything

  • Uncollected Essays, Articles, and Profiles
  • By: James Salter, Kay Eldredge Salter - preface
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  • Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4.5 out of 5 stars 2
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars 2
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This collection gathers James Salter's thoughts on writing and profiles of famous writers, observations of the changing American military life, evocations of Aspen winters, musings on mountain climbing and skiing, and tales of travels to Europe and Asia which first appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, People magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, the Aspen Times, and many other publications.

The Overstory audiobook cover art

  • The Overstory

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  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4.5 out of 5 stars 301
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    4.5 out of 5 stars 275
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The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.

  • 4 out of 5 stars

  • eye opening

  • By Michael Stansberry on 05-23-18
The Emerald Mile audiobook cover art

  • The Emerald Mile

  • The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History through the Heart of the Grand Canyon
  • By: Kevin Fedarko
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  • Overall
    4.5 out of 5 stars 1,314
  • Performance
    4.5 out of 5 stars 1,212
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    4.5 out of 5 stars 1,214

From one of Outside magazine's "Literary All-Stars" comes the thrilling true tale of the fastest boat ride ever, down the entire length of the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon, during the legendary flood of 1983. In the spring of 1983, massive flooding along the length of the Colorado River confronted a team of engineers at the Glen Canyon Dam with an unprecedented emergency that may have resulted in the most catastrophic dam failure in history.

  • 5 out of 5 stars

  • Awesome story and history of the Grand Canyon!

  • By Mike on 04-11-15
Angle of Repose audiobook cover art

  • Angle of Repose

  • By: Wallace Stegner
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    4.5 out of 5 stars 1,122
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Wallace Stegner's uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, and husbands and wives.

  • 5 out of 5 stars

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The Long Haul audiobook cover art

  • The Long Haul

  • A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road
  • By: Finn Murphy
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More than 30 years ago, Finn Murphy dropped out of college to become a trucker. Since then he's covered hundreds of thousands of miles packing, loading, and hauling people's belongings all over America. Murphy whisks listeners down the I-95 Powerlane, across the Florida Everglades, in and out of the truck stops of the Midwest, and through the steep grades of the Rocky Mountains.

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Light Years audiobook cover art

  • Light Years

  • By: James Salter
  • Narrated by: Mark Boyett
  • Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 70
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This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach.

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Publisher's Summary

Vernon Rand is a charismatic figure whose great love - whose life, in fact - is climbing. He lives alone in California, where he combats the drudgery of a roofing job with the thrill of climbing in the nearby mountain ranges. Sure of only his talent and nerve, Rand decides to test himself in the French Alps, with their true mountaineering and famed, fearsome peaks. He soon learns that the most perilous moments are, for him, the moments when he feels truly alive.

One of the great novels of the outdoors, Solo Faces is as thrilling, beautiful, and immediate as the Alpine peaks that have enthralled climbers for centuries.
©1979 James Salter (P)2015 Audible Inc.

Critic Reviews

"Solo Faces contrasts a devotion to mountain climbing with the earthbound tugs of love and ordinary life... A beautifully composed book that will remind readers of Camus and Saint-Exupry. It exemplifies the purity it describes." (The Washington Post)

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Hemingway goes to the mountains and gets laid

Salter is usually so much better than this. The protagonist is flat, a wise man working at his craft. Credit is due in that he does change as the story winds on. There are some good climbing scenes among the trackless wastes of aimless wandering-both figuratively and literally.

You could take this as an existentialist descendent of The Stranger and Camus' flat and uninteresting protagonist, Marsault.

If this was Salter's aim, he could have done better with a more compelling plot and engaging characters.

Nothing says you must be tedious to be an existential hero.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Greg Stadler
  • 05-12-16

as a climber I was hoping for more reality

as a climber I was hoping for more reality about the challenge of true rock climbing in that part of the world.