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The Good Times Are All Gone Now
- Life, Death, and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town
- Narrated by: Cindy Piller
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
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For nearly a century, Kellogg, Idaho, was home to America's richest silver mine, Sunshine Mine. Mining there, as everywhere, was not an easy life, but regardless of the risk, there was something about being underground, the lure of hitting a deep vein of silver. The promise of good money and the intense bonds of friendship brought men back year after year. Mining is about being a man and a fighter in a job where tomorrow always brings the hope of a big score.
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Publisher's Summary
Julie Whitesel Weston left her hometown of Kellogg, Idaho, but eventually it pulled her back.
Kellogg in the late 1940s and 50s was a typical American small town complete with high school football and basketball teams, marching band, and anti-Communist clubs; yet its bars, gambling dens, and brothels were entrenched holdovers from a rowdier frontier past. The Bunker Hill Mining Company, the largest employer, paid miners good wages for difficult, dangerous work, while the quest for lead, silver, and zinc denuded the mountainsides and laced the soil and water with contaminants.
Much of this memoir of place set during the Cold War and post-McCarthyism is told through their voices. But Weston also considers how certain people made a difference in her life, especially her band director, her ski coach, and an attorney she worked for during a major strike. She also explores her charged relationship with her father, a hardworking doctor revered in the community for his dedication but feared at home for his drinking and rages.
The Good Times Are All Gone Now begins the day the smokestacks came down, and it reaches far back into collective and personal memory to understand a way of life now gone.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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- Susan
- 01-24-16
Memories & History: a Compelling Story
What did you like best about this story?
The author strikes a good balance of her personal history with a history of the town and its people.
Which character – as performed by Cindy Piller – was your favorite?
This is a non fiction book.
Any additional comments?
This is the first non-fiction book I've heard Ms Piller read and I think it's her best. From time to time, I forgot that I was not listening to the author herself as a character in her own story. Ms Piller embodied the author and made the story personal, entertaining, and unexpectedly entertaining.
2 people found this helpful
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-
Story4 out of 5 stars 129
A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard’s poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Very Disappointing
- By woody on 01-30-11
By: Annie Dillard
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The Glass Castle
- A Memoir
- By: Jeannette Walls
- Narrated by: Jeannette Walls
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 16,826
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 14,630
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 14,636
Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination. Rose Mary painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family; she called herself an "excitement addict."
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4 out of 5 stars
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What's normal?
- By Kmrsy on 11-30-13
By: Jeannette Walls
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Lake Wobegon Days
- By: Garrison Keillor
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 4 hrs and 44 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 506
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 333
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 326
Garrison Keillor is the consummate storyteller, gifted with the rare ability, both in print and in performance, to hold an audience spellbound with his tales of ordinary people whose lives contain extraordinary moments of humor, tenderness, and grace. This exclusive recording of Garrison Keillor reading a carefully edited abridgement of the book also includes a few segments taken from live performances recorded during a fundraising tour for public radio stations in 1985.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A great shot of Garrison Keillor...
- By MrGee on 08-28-05
By: Garrison Keillor
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Full Body Burden
- Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
- By: Kristen Iversen
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter, Kristen Iversen
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 209
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 186
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 188
Full Body Burden is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction about a young woman, Kristen Iversen, growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." It's the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and - unknown to those who lived there - tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A story that no one else wanted to tell.
- By Carol on 01-28-13
By: Kristen Iversen
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Glad Farm
- A Memoir
- By: Catherine Marenghi
- Narrated by: Catherine Marenghi
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 64
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 63
Raised in a primitive one-room farmhouse with no indoor plumbing, the fourth of five children, Catherine Marenghi begins her life in poverty and isolation. She leaves home at the age of 17. A decade later, she is a successful journalist with the means to buy her family their first decent house. But the past will not be put to rest so easily. Catherine unravels a web of long-buried family secrets, and a terrible betrayal that robbed her family of the home that was rightfully theirs. And she finally uncovers the story her parents never shared: the gladiolus farm that was once their dream.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Reading book as I’m in Milford visiting
- By Amazon Customer on 09-25-22
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Dimestore
- A Writer's Life
- By: Lee Smith
- Narrated by: Linda Stephens
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 99
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 86
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Story4 out of 5 stars 87
For the inimitable Lee Smith, place is paramount. For 45 years, her fiction has lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story. Set deep in the rugged Appalachian Mountains, the Grundy of Lee Smith's youth was a place of coal miners, mountain music, and her daddy's dimestore. It was in that dimestore - listening to customers and inventing life histories for the store's dolls - that she began to learn the craft of storytelling.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Pronunciation matters!
- By Tricia on 03-26-16
By: Lee Smith
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World's Fair
- A Novel
- By: E.L. Doctorow
- Narrated by: John Rubinstein
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 72
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 66
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Story4 out of 5 stars 66
The astonishing novel of a young boy's life in the New York City of the 1930s, a stunning recreation of the sights, sounds, aromas and emotions of a time when the streets were safe, families stuck together through thick and thin, and all the promises of a generation culminate in a single great World's Fair.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Wonderful Trip To Another Time & Place
- By Nick G. on 12-17-18
By: E.L. Doctorow
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Heartland
- A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
- By: Sarah Smarsh
- Narrated by: Sarah Smarsh
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 924
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 820
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 817
During Sarah Smarsh’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country’s changing economic policies solidified her family’s place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less.
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5 out of 5 stars
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My favorite memoir of 2018
- By NMwritergal on 11-25-18
By: Sarah Smarsh
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The Deep Dark
- Disaster and Redemption in America's Richest Silver Mine
- By: Gregg Olsen
- Narrated by: Gary Roelofs
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 70
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 63
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 63
For nearly a century, Kellogg, Idaho, was home to America's richest silver mine, Sunshine Mine. Mining there, as everywhere, was not an easy life, but regardless of the risk, there was something about being underground, the lure of hitting a deep vein of silver. The promise of good money and the intense bonds of friendship brought men back year after year. Mining is about being a man and a fighter in a job where tomorrow always brings the hope of a big score.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent Book, Sad Story
- By Janet on 05-03-16
By: Gregg Olsen
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The Adventures of Herbie Cohen
- World's Greatest Negotiator
- By: Rich Cohen
- Narrated by: Paul Adelstein
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 49
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
Meet Herbie Cohen, World’s Greatest Negotiator, dealmaker, risk taker, raconteur, adviser to presidents and corporations, hostage and arms negotiator, lesson giver and justice seeker, author of the how-to business classic You Can Negotiate Anything. And, of course, Rich Cohen’s father.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fun funny entertaining audiobook
- By Amazon Customer on 09-10-22
By: Rich Cohen
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All Over But the Shoutin'
- By: Rick Bragg
- Narrated by: Rick Bragg
- Length: 2 hrs and 41 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 859
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 765
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 756
This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most.
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2 out of 5 stars
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ABRIDGED
- By Amazon Customer on 03-17-16
By: Rick Bragg
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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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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 82
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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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5 out of 5 stars
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Powerful story
- By Bridget on 04-23-21
By: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, and others
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Wobegon Boy
- By: Garrison Keillor
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 144
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 85
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 86
From the millions of listeners who follow the tales of Lake Wobegon and A Prairie Home Companion every Saturday night on public radio, and for fans of Garrison Keillor's literary take on life in our times, this audiobook will be most welcome.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This Book Makes you Think
- By Lynda on 02-06-05
By: Garrison Keillor
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King of the Mild Frontier
- An Ill-Advised Autobiography
- By: Chris Crutcher
- Narrated by: Chris Crutcher
- Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 27
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 25
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 25
Once you have read about Chris Crutcher's life as a dateless, broken-toothed, scabbed-over, God-fearing dweeb, and once you have contemplated his ascension to the buckskin-upholstered throne of the King of the Mild Frontier, you will close this book, close your eyes and hold it to your chest, and say, "I, too, can be an author." Hell, anyone can.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great story writing.
- By Amazon Customer on 07-21-17
By: Chris Crutcher
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Nothing Daunted
- The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West
- By: Dorothy Wickenden
- Narrated by: Dorothy Wickenden, Margaret Nichols
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 155
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 126
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Story4 out of 5 stars 127
In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, close friends from childhood and graduates of Smith College, left home in Auburn, New York, for the wilds of northwestern Colorado. Bored by their soci-ety luncheons, charity work, and the effete young men who courted them, they learned that two teach-ing jobs were available in a remote mountaintop schoolhouse and applied—shocking their families and friends.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Not as Described
- By Sara on 08-10-14
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Too Close to the Falls
- A Memoir
- By: Catherine Gildiner
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 109
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 96
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 99
Welcome to the childhood of Catherine McClure Gildiner. It is the middle of the 1950s in Lewiston, New York, a small and sleepy American town very near Niagara Falls. No one is divorced. Mothers wear high heels to the beauty salon and children pop Pez candy and swing from vines over a local gorge. But at the tender age of four, it becomes clear to her Cathy's parents that their rambunctious daughter is no ordinary child and they soon put her "to work" at her father's pharmacy.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Brilliant and funny and touching.
- By Kindle Customer on 11-07-19