
A Few Words in Defense of Our Country
The Biography of Randy Newman
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Narrated by:
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Rob Hilburn Jr.
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By:
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Robert Hilburn
About this listen
The definitive biography of songwriter Randy Newman, told with his full cooperation, by acclaimed biographer and longtime Los Angeles Times music critic, Robert Hilburn
Randy Newman is widely hailed as one of America’s all-time greatest songwriters, equally skilled in the sophisticated melodies and lyrics of the Gershwin-Porter era and the cultural commentary of his own generation, with Bob Dylan and Paul Simon among his most ardent admirers. While tens of millions around the world can hum “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” his disarming centerpiece for Toy Story, most of them would be astonished to learn that the heart of Newman’s legacy is in the dozens of brilliant songs that detail the injustices, from racism to class inequality, that have contributed to the division of our nation. Rolling Stone declared that a single Newman song, “Sail Away,” tells us more about America than “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And yet, his legacy remains largely undocumented in book form—until now.
In A FEW WORDS IN DEFENSE OF OUR COUNTRY, veteran music journalist Robert Hilburn presents the definitive portrait of an American legend. Hilburn has known Newman since his club debut at the Troubadour in 1970, and the two have maintained a connection in the decades since, conversing over the course of times good and bad. Though Newman has long refused to talk with potential biographers, he now gives Hilburn unprecedented access not only to himself but also to his archives, as well as his family, friends, and collaborators. Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, John Williams, Linda Ronstadt, Don Henley, Bonnie Raitt, Chuck D, James Taylor, and New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning columnists, Thomas Friedman and Wesley Morris, among others, contributed to the book. In addition to exploring Newman’s prolific career and the evolution of his songwriting, A FEW WORDS IN DEFENSE OF OUR COUNTRY also dives into his childhood and early influences, his musical family that ruled Hollywood movie scores for decades, the relationships that have provided inspiration for his songs, and so much more.
As thought-provoking and thorough as it is tender, this book is an overdue tribute to the legendary songwriter whose music has long reflected and challenged the America we know today.
©2024 Robert Hilburn (P)2024 Hachette BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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“At last, the biography that Randy Newman has long deserved. The emotional precision, the humor and sweep, the truths and secrets behind his remarkable body of work . . . it’s all here in Robert Hilburn’s heartfelt and indispensable account of America’s finest songwriter. Leave it to Hilburn to pull back the curtain on the incredible life of Newman, a shy genius who clearly trusted him enough to point him in all the right directions. It’s more than a great read, it’s an invitation to re-visit Randy Newman’s work with renewed appreciation for the man who uniquely defined the American Experience just when we needed it most.”
—Cameron CroweRobert Hilburn’s book makes a very good case for Newman being the composer of two or three songs that might serve as the national anthem of a more curious and a less vainglorious America. Some of those songs are heartbreaking and chilling, others are just flat out funny.”—Elvis Costello
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Phil Mickelson is one of the most compelling figures in sports. For more than three decades he has been among the best golfers in the world, and his unmatched longevity was exemplified at the 2021 PGA Championship, when Mickelson, on the cusp of turning fifty-one, became the oldest player in history to win a major championship. In this raw, uncensored, and unauthorized biography, Alan Shipnuck captures a singular life defined by thrilling victories, crushing defeats, and countless controversies.
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Not what I’d hoped for.
- By Chad Smed on 07-04-22
By: Alan Shipnuck
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Come as You Are
- The Story of Nirvana
- By: Michael Azerrad
- Narrated by: Kurt Loder, Michael Azerrad
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Nirvana came out of nowhere in 1991 to sell nearly five million copies of their landmark album Nevermind, whose thunderous sound and indelible melodies embodied all the confusion, frustration, and passion of the emerging Generation X.
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Time Capsule
- By Keith on 06-10-19
By: Michael Azerrad
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It's What I Do
- A Photographer's Life of Love and War
- By: Lynsey Addario
- Narrated by: Lynsey Addario
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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War photographer Lynsey Addario’s memoir It’s What I Do is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life. What she does, with clarity, beauty, and candor, is to document, often in their most extreme moments, the complex lives of others. It’s her work, but it’s much more than that: it’s her singular calling.
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I think I cried four times
- By Ian on 06-29-24
By: Lynsey Addario
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The Trip to Echo Spring
- On Writers and Drinking
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.
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Great Narration!!!!!! Great story about 20 Century make writer who suffer with alcoholism. If you like this topic and want more
- By Pamela Abbey on 04-25-21
By: Olivia Laing
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Run Towards the Danger
- Confrontations with a Body of Memory
- By: Sarah Polley
- Narrated by: Sarah Polley
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In this extraordinary book, Sarah Polley explores what it is to live in one’s body, in a constant state of becoming, learning, and changing. Each of these six essays captures a piece of Polley’s life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a “reciprocal pressure dance.”
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Really Just a Book About Her Diffcult Moments
- By Andrew on 03-11-22
By: Sarah Polley
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The Deep Places
- A Memoir of Illness and Discovery
- By: Ross Douthat
- Narrated by: Ross Douthat
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 2015, Ross Douthat was moving his family, with two young daughters and a pregnant wife, from Washington, DC, to a sprawling farmhouse in a picturesque Connecticut town when he acquired a mysterious and devastating sickness. It left him sleepless, crippled, wracked with pain - a shell of himself. After months of seeing doctors and descending deeper into a physical inferno, he discovered that he had a disease which, according to CDC definitions, does not actually exist.
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Excellent!!
- By D on 11-09-21
By: Ross Douthat
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Breaking Through
- My Life in Science
- By: Katalin Karikó
- Narrated by: Eva Magyar
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Katalin Karikó has had an unlikely journey. The daughter of a butcher in postwar communist Hungary, Karikó grew up in an adobe home that lacked running water, and her family grew their own vegetables. She saw the wonders of nature all around her and was determined to become a scientist. That determination eventually brought her to the United States, where she arrived as a postdoctoral fellow in 1985 with $1,200 sewn into her toddler’s teddy bear and a dream to remake medicine.
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The heartfelt story of a resilient scientist
- By Anonymous User on 04-01-25
By: Katalin Karikó
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Eat a Peach
- A Memoir
- By: David Chang, Gabe Ulla
- Narrated by: David Chang
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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From the chef behind Momofuku and star of Netflix’s Ugly Delicious—an intimate account of the making of a chef, the story of the modern restaurant world that he helped shape, and how he discovered that success can be much harder to understand than failure. Full of grace, candor, grit, and humor, Eat a Peach chronicles David Chang’s switchback path. Along the way, Chang gives us a penetrating look at restaurant life, in which he balances his deep love for the kitchen with unflinching honesty about the industry’s history of brutishness and its uncertain future.
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So many threads coming into a wonderful tapstery.
- By Suzie on 09-12-20
By: David Chang, and others
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The Lucky Ones
- A Memoir
- By: Zara Chowdhary
- Narrated by: Zara Chowdhary
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2002, Zara Chowdhary is sixteen years old and living with her family in Ahmedabad, one of India’s fastest-growing cities, when a gruesome train fire claims the lives of sixty Hindu right-wing volunteers and upends the life of five million Muslims. Instead of taking her school exams that week, Zara is put under a three-month siege, with her family and thousands of others fearing for their lives as Hindu neighbors, friends, and members of civil society transform overnight into bloodthirsty mobs, hunting and massacring their fellow citizens.
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Life under Modi
- By C. C. Kissinger on 08-09-24
By: Zara Chowdhary
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Roctogenarians
- Late in Life Debuts, Comebacks, and Triumphs
- By: Mo Rocca, Jonathan Greenberg
- Narrated by: Mo Rocca
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Eighty has been the new sixty for about twenty years now. In fact, there have always been late-in-life achievers, those who declined to go into decline just because they were eligible for social security. Journalist, humorist, and history buff Mo Rocca and coauthor Jonathan Greenberg introduce us to the people past and present who peaked when they could have been puttering—breaking out as writers, selling out concert halls, attempting to set land-speed records—and in the case of one ninety-year tortoise, becoming a first-time father. (Take that, Al Pacino!)
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Another Home Run
- By Tony on 02-15-25
By: Mo Rocca, and others
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Maestros and Their Music
- The Art and Alchemy of Conducting
- By: John Mauceri
- Narrated by: John Mauceri
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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John Mauceri brings a lifetime of experience to bear in an unprecedented, hugely informative, consistently entertaining exploration of his profession, rich with anecdotes from decades of working alongside the greatest names of the music world. With candor and humor, Mauceri makes clear that conducting is itself a composition: of legacy and tradition, techniques handed down from master to apprentice - and more than a trace of ineffable magic.
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Disappointing. Dry.
- By Jane on 12-30-17
By: John Mauceri
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Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
- A Memoir
- By: Carrie Brownstein
- Narrated by: Carrie Brownstein
- Length: 7 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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From the guitarist of the pioneering band Sleater-Kinney, the book Kim Gordon says "everyone has been waiting for" and a New York Times Notable Book of 2015 - a candid, funny, and deeply personal look at making a life - and finding yourself - in music. Before Carrie Brownstein became a music icon, she was a young girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest just as it was becoming the setting for one the most important movements in rock history.
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fussy
- By Ex on 01-09-16
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Opposable Thumbs
- How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever
- By: Matt Singer
- Narrated by: Matt Singer
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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On a cold Saturday afternoon in 1975, two men (who had known each other for eight years before they’d ever exchanged a word) met for lunch in a Chicago pub. Gene Siskel was the film critic for the Chicago Tribune. Roger Ebert had recently won the Pulitzer Prize—the first ever awarded to a film critic—for his work at the Chicago Sun-Times. To say they despised each other was an understatement.
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Good book. But unless you are a standup comedian, or an actor, you shouldn’t read a book you wrote
- By Jerry Thompson on 03-14-24
By: Matt Singer
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You're on an Airplane
- A Self-Mythologizing Memoir
- By: Parker Posey
- Narrated by: Parker Posey
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Have you ever wondered what it would be like talk to Parker Posey? On an airplane, with Parker as your seat companion, perhaps? Parker’s irreverent, hilarious, and enchanting memoir gives you the incredible opportunity. Full of personal stories, whimsical how-tos, recipes, and beautiful handmade collages created by the author herself, You’re on an Airplane is a delight in every way.
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Sadly So Boring I Couldn't Finish
- By Bohemian on 08-04-18
By: Parker Posey
What listeners say about A Few Words in Defense of Our Country
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 10-30-24
Getting his due
Randy is a true American Master who deserves to be regarded more highly, and this book helps that happen!
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- Bruce Brown
- 11-01-24
Not my favorite narrator
Much respect for Hilburn Sr. But I wish I’d just read on Kindke. Rob’s voice is not unpleasant. But hours of him mimicking Newman’s accent while quoting lyrics got very tiresome.
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- Mike Sebastian
- 11-01-24
An Amazing Man, An Amazing Story
Randy Newman is the voice of many of us who love and admire him. There is so much to like about this book; I loved hearing the backstory of Mr. Newman's life and songs. I was surprised the Lafayette Louisiana concert was mentioned; I grew up there worked the venue, and passed him as he walked onto the stage. I loved this book.
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- illa
- 11-26-24
interesting content
I liked learning about Newman. The narrators tone kinda annoyed me at times. The story was cool, but not as intriguing as I was hoping for I feel like there was a more interesting detailed way to tell this story.
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