
All Things Are Too Small
Essays in Praise of Excess
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Narrated by:
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Ruth Crawford
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By:
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Becca Rothfeld
About this listen
A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as decluttering, mindfulness, David Cronenberg, sadomasochism, and women who wait.
All Things Are Too Small is brilliant cultural and literary critic Becca Rothfeld’s plea for derangement: imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment in all domains of life, from literature to romance. In a healthy culture, Rothfeld argues, economic security allows for wild aesthetic experimentation and excess, yet in our contemporary world, we’ve got it flipped. The gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, while we compensate with misguided attempts to effect equality in love and art, where it does not belong.
Rothfeld shows how our culture’s embrace of minimalism has left us spiritually impoverished: how decluttering has reduced our living spaces to vacant non-places; how the mindfulness trend has emptied our minds of the musings, thoughts, and obsessions that make us who we are; how the regularization of sex has drained it of unpredictability and therefore true eroticism; and how our craze for balance has yielded fictions with protagonists who aspire, stylistically and substantively, to excise their appetites.
With uncompromising intellect, exuberance, and sly humor, Rothfeld insists that in culture, imbalance functions as a catapult, transforming our stagnant beliefs and identities. For culture to change, she says, it must bulge and binge.
©2024 Becca Rothfeld (P)2024 Dreamscape MediaListeners also enjoyed...
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Wish I Hadn't Cliff Noted This in High School
- By Joel on 03-27-17
By: Ray Bradbury
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He Who Fights with Monsters 2
- A LitRPG Adventure (He Who Fights with Monsters, Book 2)
- By: Shirtaloon, Travis Deverell
- Narrated by: Heath Miller
- Length: 22 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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But Jason Asano is settling into his new life. Now, a contest draws young elites to the city of Greenstone to compete for a grand prize. Jason must gather a band of companions if he is to stand a chance against the best the world has to offer. While the young adventurers are caught up in competition, the city leaders deal with revelations of betrayal as a vast and terrible enemy is revealed. Although Jason seems uninvolved, he has unknowingly crossed the enemy’s path before.
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Contrary to common reviews
- By Karen on 05-21-21
By: Shirtaloon, and others
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Brain Damage
- By: Freida McFadden
- Narrated by: Megan Tusing
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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As Charly struggles to recover from her brain injury, she begins to realize that the events of that fateful night are trapped in the damaged right side of her brain. Now, she must put the jigsaw pieces together to discover the identity of the man who tried to kill her...before he finishes the job he started.
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Who Else Laughed, Cried, and Shuddered?
- By Jennifer Chichester on 09-16-22
By: Freida McFadden
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The Pearl and the Onion
- By: Brittany K. Allen
- Narrated by: Anna Chlumsky, Jasmine Cephas-Jones
- Length: 3 hrs and 43 mins
- Original Recording
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When our story begins, Julia Child is an eager but inexperienced codebreaker longing to prove herself in the male-dominated world of intelligence, and Josephine Baker is, well, Josephine Baker—a world-famous entertainer who is now leading a double life as a spy for the French Resistance. When a golden opportunity arises to infiltrate a high-stakes Nazi gala in Vichy France, Julia must put aside her by-the-book mentality to assist her unorthodox new partner.
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Very enjoyable story
- By C. Wilson on 03-23-25
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The House on the Water
- A Novella
- By: Margot Hunt
- Narrated by: Taylor Schilling
- Length: 2 hrs and 47 mins
- Original Recording
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Every year, Caroline Reed takes a trip with her best friend, Esme Lamont. They’re usually accompanied by their spouses - but this year, everything’s changed. Esme has just gone through a bitter divorce, and Caroline's wondering if her own marriage is reaching its breaking point as she and her husband, John, cope with the discovery that their son has been abusing drugs. Still, the inseparable duo books a weeklong stay at a beach-front home in Shoreham, Florida, inviting Esme’s brother, Nick, and his new husband. After a blissful first night in the vacation home, tragedy strikes.
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Wonderful Story
- By David M. Wilcox on 12-04-20
By: Margot Hunt
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Mary Jane
- By: Amy Herzog
- Narrated by: Rachel McAdams, April Matthis, Brenda Wehle, and others
- Length: 1 hr and 16 mins
- Original Recording
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Academy Award nominee Rachel McAdams stars in Mary Jane, a poignant and intimate drama following a single mother’s journey caring for her chronically ill young son. Set in New York City, the play unfolds in two parts—Mary Jane's small Queens apartment and a pediatric hospital. With unflinching honesty and unexpected humor, we witness Mary Jane's tireless devotion, her interactions with medical professionals, and her struggle to maintain her sense of self.
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Amazing performance
- By Andrew Reynolds on 12-28-24
By: Amy Herzog
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Creep is “sharp, conversational cultural criticism” (Bustle), a blistering and slyly informal sociology of creeps (the individuals who deceive, exploit, and oppress) and creep culture (the systems, tacit rules, and institutions that feed them and allow them to grow and thrive). In eleven bold, electrifying pieces, Gurba mines her own life and the lives of others—some famous, some infamous, some you’ve never heard of but will likely never forget—to unearth the toxic traditions that have long plagued our culture and enabled the abusers who haunt our books, schools, and homes.
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Important read by knowledgeable and credible journalist
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Reboot
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David Crader is a has-been. A former child actor from the hit teen drama Rev Beach, he now rotates between his new roles as deadbeat dad, part-time alcoholic, and occasional videogame voice actor. But when David is summoned to Los Angeles by Grace, his ex-wife and former co-star, he suddenly sees an opportunity for a reboot—not just of the show that made him famous, but also of his listless existence.
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Diminishing Rewards
- By Laurence R. Baker on 02-06-25
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Something in the Woods Loves You
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Bats can hear shapes, plants can eat light, and bees can dance maps. When his life took him to a painfully dark place, the poet behind The CryptoNaturalist, Jarod K. Anderson, found comfort and redemption in these facts and the shift in perspective that comes from paying a new kind of attention to nature. Something in the Woods Loves You tells the story of the darkest stretch of a young person’s life, and how deliberate and meditative encounters with plants and animals helped him see the light at every turn.
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Great book, great narrator
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There's Always This Year
- On Basketball and Ascension
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Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling.
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Love and Basketball
- By Mónica on 08-23-24
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The Rebel's Clinic
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In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon's shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon's stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller.
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Brilliant book, unbearable narration
- By Rachel Mihuta Grimm on 03-18-25
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Creep
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Creep is “sharp, conversational cultural criticism” (Bustle), a blistering and slyly informal sociology of creeps (the individuals who deceive, exploit, and oppress) and creep culture (the systems, tacit rules, and institutions that feed them and allow them to grow and thrive). In eleven bold, electrifying pieces, Gurba mines her own life and the lives of others—some famous, some infamous, some you’ve never heard of but will likely never forget—to unearth the toxic traditions that have long plagued our culture and enabled the abusers who haunt our books, schools, and homes.
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(Should Have Been) Great
- By Abstraction on 12-28-24
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The Palestine Laboratory
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Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of Disaster Capitalism, uncovers a largely hidden world in a global investigation with secret documents, revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting. This book shows in-depth, for the first time, how Palestine has become the perfect laboratory for the Israeli military-techno complex: surveillance, home demolitions, indefinite incarceration and brutality to the hi-tech tools that drive the 'Start-up Nation'.
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Important read by knowledgeable and credible journalist
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Reboot
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David Crader is a has-been. A former child actor from the hit teen drama Rev Beach, he now rotates between his new roles as deadbeat dad, part-time alcoholic, and occasional videogame voice actor. But when David is summoned to Los Angeles by Grace, his ex-wife and former co-star, he suddenly sees an opportunity for a reboot—not just of the show that made him famous, but also of his listless existence.
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Diminishing Rewards
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Something in the Woods Loves You
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Bats can hear shapes, plants can eat light, and bees can dance maps. When his life took him to a painfully dark place, the poet behind The CryptoNaturalist, Jarod K. Anderson, found comfort and redemption in these facts and the shift in perspective that comes from paying a new kind of attention to nature. Something in the Woods Loves You tells the story of the darkest stretch of a young person’s life, and how deliberate and meditative encounters with plants and animals helped him see the light at every turn.
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Great book, great narrator
- By Brandon on 09-13-24
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Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling.
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Love and Basketball
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Brilliant book, unbearable narration
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The Coin
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The Coin’s narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start. In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.
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Interview of author on podcast piqued interest
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I Just Keep Talking
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From the New York Times bestselling author of The History of White People and Old in Art School, a finalist for the NBCC Award, comes a comprehensive new collection of essays spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it. These essays resist easy answers in favor of complexity, the inescapable sense of our country’s potential thwarted by its failures. This collection will surely solidify Painter’s place among the finest critics and writers of the last half century.
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Author reader
- By K D S on 07-11-24
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Splinters
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Overall
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Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond.
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Felt too self indulgent - even for a memoir
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By: Leslie Jamison
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Neighbors and Other Stories
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Story
A remarkable talent far ahead of her time, Diane Oliver died in 1966 at the age of 22, leaving behind these crisply told and often chilling tales that explore race and racism in 1950s and 60s America. In this first and only collection by a masterful storyteller finally taking her rightful place in the canon, Oliver’s insightful stories reverberate into the present day.
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mesmerizing
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By: Diane Oliver
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The Bluestockings
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In England in the 1700s, a woman who was an intellectual, spoke out, or wrote professionally was considered unnatural. After all, as the wisdom of the era dictated, a clever woman—if there were such a thing—would never make a good wife. But a circle of women called the Bluestockings did something extraordinary: Coming together in glittering salons to discuss and debate as intellectual equals with men, they fought for women to be educated and to have a public role in society. In this intimate and revelatory history, Susannah Gibson delves into the lives of these pioneering women.
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fascinating book almost ruined by the reader
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By: Susannah Gibson
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Modern Poetry
- Poems
- By: Diane Seuss
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Diane Seuss's signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those often underrepresented.
By: Diane Seuss
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All the Worst Humans
- How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians
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After nearly two decades in the Washington PR business, Elwood wants to come clean, by exposing the dark underbelly of the very industry that’s made him so successful. The first step is revealing exactly what he’s been up to for the past twenty years—and it isn’t pretty. Elwood has worked for a murderer’s row of questionable clients, including Gaddafi, Assad, and the government of Qatar. In All the Worst Humans, Elwood unveils how the PR business works, and how the truth gets made, spun, and sold to the public—not shying away from the gritty details of his unlikely career.
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Wow, what a story!
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By: Phil Elwood
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Dead in Long Beach, California
- A Novel
- By: Venita Blackburn
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- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles—and triples—down on posing as her brother.
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Great Literary Work
- By Dr Ag on 02-25-24
By: Venita Blackburn
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Smoke Kings
- A Novel
- By: Jahmal Mayfield
- Narrated by: Terrence Kidd
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Smoke Kings is a powerful and propulsive novel with a diverse and unforgettable cast of characters. Like Steph Cha's Your House Will Pay it explores decades of racial tensions through a fictional landscape where the line between justice and revenge is blurred.
By: Jahmal Mayfield
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Fi
- A Memoir
- By: Alexandra Fuller
- Narrated by: Alexandra Fuller
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
It’s the middle of the summer before her fiftieth birthday and Alexandra is just barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, chafing and straining against the stresses and strictures of midlife as a mother and ex-wife, and piecing her way through a disastrous relationship with a younger woman that lurches and buckles, but never quite breaks. And then—suddenly and incomprehensibly—her son Fi, at 21 years old, dies in his sleep. What happens next is what Alexandra details in this book.
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Lifting the fog
- By Nina J. on 04-20-24
By: Alexandra Fuller
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Health and Safety
- A Breakdown
- By: Emily Witt
- Narrated by: Emily Witt
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.
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Bored voice
- By Amazon Customer on 12-20-24
By: Emily Witt
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Undivided
- The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church
- By: Hahrie Han
- Narrated by: Vivienne Leheny
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The inspiring story of evangelicals in Cincinnati struggling to bridge racial divides in their own church, their community, and across the nation.
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Excellent and accurate storytelling
- By Mike Baticala on 02-08-25
By: Hahrie Han
What listeners say about All Things Are Too Small
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Gregory S. Moss
- 07-07-24
Incisive and intelligent writing; great narration
Smart, idiosyncratic and self-aware essays on contemporary American culture, narrated with precision and clarity
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- appmur3030
- 07-18-24
Insightful and provocative
I loved this book. The author’s points of view on modern subjects were at turns humorous and provocative, but always well informed. The book focuses on lifestyle trends and separates from them those that are personally liberating and empowering from others that only pretend to be.
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- David
- 12-04-24
Smart and clever
A thought provoking, well sourced series of essays. I look forward to more from the author. My only criticism is that the narrator voice doesn't match the content. It should have been read by a millennial type voice. The older vocal tone talking about Instagram stalking took me away from the content a bit. The narrator is truly spectacular and professional, just not for this book.
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- Dana Orefice
- 08-26-24
Boring
I should have read the term paper comment first . It just wasn’t for me and I read mostly non fiction
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