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A Hard Place to Leave
- Stories from a Restless Life
- Narrated by: Marcia DeSanctis
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
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Publisher's summary
Restless to leave, eager to return: this memoir in essays captures the unrelenting pull between the past and the present, between traveling the world and staying home.
Starting in a dreary Moscow hotel room in 1983, weaving back and forth to rural New England, and ending on a West Texas trail in 2020, Marcia DeSanctis tells stories that span the globe and half a lifetime. With intimacy and depth, over quicksand in France, insomnia in Cambodia, up a volcano in Rwanda, spinning through the eye of a snowstorm in Bismarck, and atop a dumpster in her own backyard, this New York Times best-selling author, award-winning essayist, and journalist for Vogue and Travel + Leisure immerses us in places waiting to be experienced and some that may be more than we’re up for.
She encounters spies, angels, leopards, shoes, the odd rattlesnake, a random head of state, and many times over, the ghosts of her past. Each subsequent voyage leads to revelations about her search for solitude, a capacity for adventure, and as always, a longing for home.
Critic reviews
“Intrepid and empathetic, gifted with the dispassionate gaze of a born observer…a harmonious collage of worldview and character, a wunderkammer of experiences in a life fully lived.” (Melissa Febos, The New York Times)
“DeSanctis encounters spies and love interests, but it’s her lushly polished writing that makes this book a joy to read.” (The Washington Post)
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Pnin
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
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Why not leave their private sorrows to people?
- By Darwin8u on 01-13-20
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Exile and the Kingdom
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man's perpetual search for an inner kingdom.
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Short Stories
- By Sergen on 08-28-24
By: Albert Camus
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Who Is Vera Kelly?
- By: Rosalie Knecht
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA. Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns the Cold War makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows.
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not a whole lot of spycraft just a good story
- By Kirra Krussman on 01-19-19
By: Rosalie Knecht
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Beautiful Animals
- A Novel
- By: Lawrence Osborne
- Narrated by: Tim Campbell
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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On a hike during a white-hot summer break on the Greek island of Hydra, Naomi and Samantha make a startling discovery: a man named Faoud, sleeping heavily, exposed to the elements, but still alive. As the two women learn more about the man, a migrant from Syria and a casualty of the crisis raging across the Aegean Sea, their own burgeoning friendship intensifies. But when their seemingly simple plan to help Faoud unravels, all must face the horrific consequences they have set in motion.
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please offer more of this author's books
- By S. Liskey on 07-20-17
By: Lawrence Osborne
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The Vineyards of Champagne
- By: Juliet Blackwell
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Deep within the labyrinth of caves that lies below the lush, rolling vineyards of the Champagne region, an underground city of women and children hums with life. Forced to take shelter from the unrelenting onslaught of German shellfire above, the bravest and most defiant women venture out to pluck sweet grapes for the harvest. But wine is not the only secret preserved in the cool, dark cellars... In present day, Rosalyn Acosta travels to Champagne to select vintages for her Napa-based employer. Rosalyn doesn't much care for champagne - or France, for that matter.
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Very Depressing
- By Miranda on 03-08-20
By: Juliet Blackwell
What listeners say about A Hard Place to Leave
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kory
- 07-19-24
Lyrical writing but flawed topic
In the introduction to her book, Marcia DeSanctis admits there is a world worth exploring in the four walls of her home. She admirably navigates the territory of a long marriage. She shows courage in writing about the complex emotions experienced when she fell in love with another man, an almost taboo subject. This would be a very compelling topic for a book.
Instead, she pivots to writing about her travels, her way of easing a midlife crisis by her own admission. She speaks of global inequalities, the privilege she enjoys traveling when and where she wants, compared to the massive disruptions caused by climate change affecting people and ecosystems in less fortunate corners of the world. She travels for fun, viewing the world as her playground. People in developing countries are forced to travel, to leave their homes, just to survive. I found it very hard to enjoy the book given her clear understanding of the implications of her actions but continuing her almost absurdly excessive travel in spite of the consequences.
I wish she had found a way to live the second half of her life without such a gigantic carbon footprint. She writes from the security of a happy home, a place where she can rest and recharge with no threat to her personal safety. But the more she flies, the more the climate changes. If everyone makes the choices she makes, the planet will not remain habitable for very long.
I found this book well-written, and thought she did a good job with the narration. She is a lyrical writer, and able to convey a wide range of emotions. But in this day and age, it is irresponsible to glorify a lifestyle that creates so much suffering for the people and wildlife least able to adapt.
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