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The Cold Millions
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Gary Farmer, Marin Ireland, Cassandra Campbell, MacLeod Andrews, Tim Gerard Reynolds, Mike Ortego, Rex Anderson, Charlie Thurston, Frankie Corzo
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
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Publisher's summary
A Most Anticipated Book by:
- The New York Times Book Review
- Wall Street Journal
- Time
- Esquire
- The Millions
- Vogue
- People
- New York Post
- USA Today
- Medium
- The Philadelphia Inquirer
- Newsday
From the number-one New York Times best-selling author of Beautiful Ruins comes another “literary miracle” (NPR) - a propulsive, richly entertaining novel about two brothers swept up in the turbulent class warfare of the early 20th century.
An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early 20th century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams.
The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While 16-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula.
Dubious of Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless 19-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands. Is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you cannot win the war?
Featuring an unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers, The Cold Millions is a tour de force from a “writer who has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors” (Boston Globe).
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Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- zman
- 11-13-20
Good Story ....Hard to follow on Audio
Enjoyed the story. Learned some interesting history about the labor movement in the 1900s. The problem was trying to follow all of the characters on audio. Interesting story, but didn’t flow on audio. The use of different narrators was distracting as they were of various quality.
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24 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Kindle Customer
- 11-11-20
An extraordinary work of historical fiction
If you are looking for a window into a time when the rule of law was used to suppress workers and also used to support a clueless wealthy class, look no further.
Like all great works of historical fiction, The Cool Millions illuminates a forgotten world and shines a bright spotlight on our own. Its themes and characters are as relevant today as the daily news feeds. Replace Wobblies with Antifa and Black Lives Matter and you get the sense that the struggle for justice never ends.
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24 people found this helpful
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- SW Clemens
- 11-16-20
A Worthy Successor to Wallace Stegner
One Amazon reviewer was reminded of Steinbeck. I found The Cold Millions even more reminiscent of Wallace Stegner's Joe Hill or Angle of Repose. The events in 1909 Spokane, Washington read like contemporary life — an oligarchy of wealthy industrialists, a huge divide between the rich and poor, civil unrest, the fight for equality and free speech, police corruption, even a wildfire that burns 3 million acres and wipes whole towns off the map. Some things apparently never change. The struggle seems perpetual.
Some readers will be put off by the number of points-of-view (including narration by the dead), and that does slow the pace substantially. But I thought that it was a bold artistic choice and added to the richness of the story. My only complaint is the almost complete lack of humor. Of course, the events weren't funny, but a good sense of the absurd would have helped.
Finally, a shout-out to the narrators of the audiobook, who helped bring the characters to life.
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16 people found this helpful
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- Babs
- 11-12-20
Another tumultuous time
This is an engaging story of another era of political turmoil, haves and have nots. The narration was excellent. The characters were somewhat melodramatic but became more engaging as the story unfolds. I found myself comparing the situations in the book to current day politics, social upheavals, and economic realities. Highly recommend
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11 people found this helpful
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- Sara
- 11-19-20
Beautifully written story, wonderful performance
This is one of the few books that I probably enjoyed more listening to on audio instead of reading the book directly. The performances were wonderful, and I enjoyed the occasional change of performer with the changes of character point-of-view. Each performer had an authentic voice, as if they were truly telling you their story, not reading it from a page. The story was beautifully written and unique, and unfolded in its own time. The themes were thought-provoking, yet very subtle. Enjoyable!
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8 people found this helpful
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- Sue Heinz
- 11-17-20
Meh
Weak storyline. After 10 hours of listening I couldn’t root for any character. I was expecting more and received way less.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Mark
- 02-25-21
Never got into this
After listening for a couple of hours, I realized that my mind kept drifting and I could not follow the plot. In addition, I did not care about any of the characters. The author seemed more interested in getting historic accuracy than building characters and a plot. It seemed to do a decent job of capturing the times, the early 20th century. Maybe had I continued, this might have come alive, but there needs to be some spark of interest to earn my patience. There was none to me.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Barbara S
- 01-05-21
Fantastic narration
I chose to listen to Jess Walter’s “The Cold Millions” narrated by an amazing cast: Edoardo Ballerini, Gary Farmer, Marin Ireland, Cassandra Campbell, MacLeod Andrews, Tim Gerard Reynolds, Mike Ortego, Rex Anderson, Charlie Thurston, and Frankie Corzo. It is the cast that provided this historical fiction story with the depth and richness of the saga of a turbulent time in America’s history. Walter embeds historical figures in his creative story which lends the reader to research the figures and events highlighted in the story.
The story is anchored by two vagrant brothers, Rye and Gig Dolan. Gig is twenty-three and idealistic, wanting a better world for the working man. Rye is only sixteen and wants a steady life since he’s living a life of poverty and uncertainty. The boys get mixed up in a “new” workers union, the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) and the 1909 Spokane Washington free speech fight. Both men end up jailed, and Rye gets sprung as a result of (the true historical figure) feminist Elizabeth Gurly Flynn’s influence.
Walter must have enjoyed writing his creative depiction of Gurly Flynn. He used actual events to moor his story and added very colorful events and speeches. Gurly figures prominently in this story. After listening to the story, I researched Flynn, and didn’t realize what an historical impact she had on our country. She was born in 1890, and at the tender age of 16 she gave her first speech to a Harlem Socialist Club entitled “What Socialism Will Do for Women” (she was expelled after her speech). That little historical bit is not in the novel, although after reading how Walter used her character in his story, I am not surprised.
Walter captures the time in American history well. He adds burlesque shows highlighting the women of such shows and how they survived the male dominated world. The police, who are both corrupt and some ethical are featured. The injustices to the working class and the brutality that was allowed at the time create a mesmerizing read.
Innocent Rye is the story’s mainstay. He just wants to get his brother out of jail, and he wants to live a life of stability. Poor Rye is used as a pawn and stooge. He is earnest in his desire to be good. He is drawn to the politics of the IWW, but only in that it will help him get his brother out of jail.
I highly recommend listening to the audible production of this fine novel. With all the various character voices, it allows the listener to create his/her own visual with the help of fine voices.
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4 people found this helpful
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- eagles fan
- 12-19-20
Another tour de force from Jess Walter
We waited for the next work from Jess Walter, and The Cold Millions does not disappoint. In short, a period piece with lessons for today. Like Mr. Walter’s other books, suspenseful and engaging. Beautifully written and performed.
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- Debra starr
- 11-11-20
Fascinating and well told historical fiction
The book started out slowly and dark but as the characters became more developed I found myself with a vested interest in their well-being. This period of time in history is fascinating and Well represented in the story.
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Story
A few years ago, small-time finance journalist Matthew Prior quit his day job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse. When his big idea - and his wife's eBay resale business - ends with a whimper (and a garage full of unwanted figurines), they borrow and borrow, whistling past the graveyard of their uncertain dreams.
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I Want What They're Having.
- By Amanda on 06-21-12
By: Jess Walter
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The Angel of Rome
- And Other Stories
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Julia Whelan
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this riveting collection of stories, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place to care for the old man. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the romantic title story, a shy 21-year-old studying Latin in Rome during “the year of my reinvention” finds himself face-to-face with the Italian actress of his adolescent dreams.
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Great writing and narration
- By Robyn on 09-30-22
By: Jess Walter
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Beautiful Ruins
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying. And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot - searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.
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My mind wandered
- By Ella on 11-25-12
By: Jess Walter
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The Zero
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Christopher Graybill
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From its opening scene, when hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head, novelist Jess Walter takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering through the aftershocks of a devastating terrorist attack. As the smoke slowly clears, Remy finds that his memory is skipping, lurching between moments of lucidity and days when he doesn't seem to be living his own life at all.
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Wow ...
- By Dawn J on 08-01-07
By: Jess Walter
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The Bridge
- By: Bill Konigsberg
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Aaron and Tillie don't know each other, but they are both feeling suicidal, and arrive at the George Washington Bridge at the same time, intending to jump. Aaron is a gay misfit struggling with depression and loneliness. Tillie isn't sure what her problem is - only that she will never be good enough. On the bridge, there are four things that could happen: Aaron jumps and Tillie doesn't. Tillie jumps and Aaron doesn't. They both jump. Neither of them jumps. Or maybe all four things happen....
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A life saver
- By Maura on 05-28-22
By: Bill Konigsberg
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We Live in Water
- Stories
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Jess Walter
- Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
These 12 stories - published over the last five years in Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney's, Playboy, and other publications - veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.
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Outrageously funny and inventive.
- By Richard Delman on 02-25-13
By: Jess Walter
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The Financial Lives of the Poets
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Jess Walter
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A few years ago, small-time finance journalist Matthew Prior quit his day job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse. When his big idea - and his wife's eBay resale business - ends with a whimper (and a garage full of unwanted figurines), they borrow and borrow, whistling past the graveyard of their uncertain dreams.
-
-
I Want What They're Having.
- By Amanda on 06-21-12
By: Jess Walter
-
The Angel of Rome
- And Other Stories
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Julia Whelan
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this riveting collection of stories, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place to care for the old man. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the romantic title story, a shy 21-year-old studying Latin in Rome during “the year of my reinvention” finds himself face-to-face with the Italian actress of his adolescent dreams.
-
-
Great writing and narration
- By Robyn on 09-30-22
By: Jess Walter
-
Beautiful Ruins
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying. And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot - searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.
-
-
My mind wandered
- By Ella on 11-25-12
By: Jess Walter
-
The Zero
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Christopher Graybill
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From its opening scene, when hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head, novelist Jess Walter takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering through the aftershocks of a devastating terrorist attack. As the smoke slowly clears, Remy finds that his memory is skipping, lurching between moments of lucidity and days when he doesn't seem to be living his own life at all.
-
-
Wow ...
- By Dawn J on 08-01-07
By: Jess Walter
-
The Bridge
- By: Bill Konigsberg
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Aaron and Tillie don't know each other, but they are both feeling suicidal, and arrive at the George Washington Bridge at the same time, intending to jump. Aaron is a gay misfit struggling with depression and loneliness. Tillie isn't sure what her problem is - only that she will never be good enough. On the bridge, there are four things that could happen: Aaron jumps and Tillie doesn't. Tillie jumps and Aaron doesn't. They both jump. Neither of them jumps. Or maybe all four things happen....
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A life saver
- By Maura on 05-28-22
By: Bill Konigsberg
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Before Her
- The One, Book 1
- By: Jacqueline Woodson
- Narrated by: Jacqueline Woodson
- Length: 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Before Jacqueline Woodson met Juliet, before her own self-realization, there were decades of friends, lovers, and family who defined the woman she’d become. In this haunting story of memory and identity, Jacqueline shares the profound impact they had on bending the path of her life; how they informed the dreams of her future; and how each one - some lost, all loved - would bring her to Juliet, her one and only.
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Author is narrator
- By Original_Patricia on 05-10-22
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Tin Camp Road
- A Novel
- By: Ellen Airgood
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Laurel Hill and her precocious daughter, Skye, have always been each other's everything. The pair lives on Lake Superior, where the local school has classes of just four children and the nearest hospital is a helicopter ride away. Though they live frugally, eking out a living with Laurel's patchwork of jobs, their deep love for each other feels like it can warm them even on the coldest of nights. What more do they need? One otherwise normal afternoon, their landlord decides to evict them in favor of a more profitable summer rental, and they are pushed farther to the margins.
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Lovely story of a mother’s strength to overcome obstacles
- By Julianne P McGuirk on 04-28-23
By: Ellen Airgood
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Kings County
- By: David Goodwillie
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 14 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From the raucous heights of Occupy Wall Street to the comical lows of the publishing industry, from million-dollar art auctions to Bushwick drug dens, Kings County captures New York City at a moment of cultural reckoning. Grappling with the resonant issues and themes of our time - sex and violence, art and commerce, friendship and family - it is an epic coming-of-age tale about love, consequences, bravery, and fighting for one’s place in an ever-changing world.
By: David Goodwillie
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We Are Not Like Them
- A Novel
- By: Christine Pride, Jo Piazza
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland, Shayna Small, Kevin R. Free, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jen and Riley have been best friends since kindergarten. As adults, they remain as close as sisters, though their lives have taken different directions. Jen married young, and after years of trying, is finally pregnant. Riley pursued her childhood dream of becoming a television journalist and is poised to become one of the first Black female anchors of the top news channel in their hometown of Philadelphia. But the deep bond they share is severely tested when Jen’s husband, a city police officer, is involved in the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager.
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These Author’s UNDERSTOOD the assignment!
- By Queenwdg on 10-25-21
By: Christine Pride, and others
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The Way the World Ends
- Warmer collection
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 1 hr and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For three strangers whose paths will cross, the storm hasn’t even reached its peak. Two of them are the kind of climate scientists no one ever listens to in disaster movies. The third, against even icier opposition, has just moved to the Magnolia State to come out. Soon they’ll all be pushed closer to the edge, where the bracing winds of cataclysmic change can be so wildly liberating.
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Excuse for Political Rambling
- By Abby on 09-07-19
By: Jess Walter
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The Angel of Rome
- By: Jess Walter, Edoardo Ballerini
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 4 mins
- Original Recording
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this romantic and comic story about class, language, and the art of reinvention, “Nebraska Jack" Rigel is about to quit his Latin studies program at the Vatican when he suddenly finds himself face-to-face with the mysterious and ethereal Angelina Amadio, the famous Angel of Rome. Hired to translate the romantic feelings of the unpredictable former TV detective Ronnie Tower, Jack must navigate these two forces of nature in a Rome of late night bars and fancy villas, as he searches for his own role to play.