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American Ghost
- A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
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Publisher's summary
The dark-eyed woman in the long, black gown was first seen in the 1970s, standing near a fireplace. She was sad and translucent, present and absent at once. Strange things began to happen in the Santa Fe hotel where she was seen. Gas fireplaces turned off and on without anyone touching a switch. Glasses flew off shelves. And in one second-floor suite with a canopy bed and arched windows looking out to the mountains, guests reported alarming events: blankets ripped off while they slept, the room temperature plummeting, disembodied breathing, and dancing balls of light.
La Posada - "place of rest" - had been a grand Santa Fe home before it was converted to a hotel. The room with the canopy bed had belonged to Julia Schuster Staab, the wife of the home's original owner. She died in 1896, nearly a century before the hauntings were first reported. In American Ghost, Hannah Nordhaus traces the life, death, and unsettled afterlife of her great-great-grandmother, Julia, from her childhood in Germany to her years in the American West with her Jewish merchant husband.
As she traces the strands of Julia's life, Nordhaus uncovers a larger tale of how a true-life story becomes a ghost story and how difficult it can sometimes be to separate history and myth.
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- By: Bill Dedman, Paul Clark Newell Jr.
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly 60 years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the 19th century with a 21st-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades.
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Fascinating, But Know This...
- By Karen K on 04-08-15
By: Bill Dedman, and others
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Paper Love
- Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind
- By: Sarah Wildman
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Years after her grandfather's death, journalist Sarah Wildman stumbled upon a cache of his letters in a file labeled "Correspondence: Patients A-G". What she found inside weren't dry medical histories; instead what was written opened a path into the destroyed world that was her family's prewar Vienna. One woman's letters stood out: those from Valy-Valerie Scheftel, her grandfather's lover who remained behind when he fled Europe six months after the Nazis annexed Austria.
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Compelling and Personal Exploration
- By Murphee on 08-09-23
By: Sarah Wildman
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The Sheep Queen
- By: Tom Savage
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Savage, a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN/Faulkner Award nominee, has long been a critically acclaimed author. The New Yorker calls him "a writer of the first order". This starkly elegant story details the lives of Emma Russell Sweringen and her family in the early 1900s. Emma’s daughter Beth secretly gave up a baby girl for adoption many years ago. Now, Beth’s secret life is being unraveled as her daughter comes looking for her long-lost family.
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Excellent in all respects
- By Marlene J. Gustafson on 05-11-19
By: Tom Savage
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The Lady in Gold
- The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, 'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer'
- By: Anne-Marie O'Connor
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The Lady in Gold, considered an unforgettable masterpiece, one of the 20th century's most recognizable paintings, made headlines all over the world when Ronald Lauder bought it for $135 million a century after Klimt, the most famous Austrian painter of his time, completed the society portrait. Anne-Marie O'Connor, writer for the Washington Post, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, tells the galvanizing story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a dazzling Viennese Jewish society figure.
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Get a better narrator.
- By David A Weatherbie on 04-13-15
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Black Dog of Fate
- A Memoir
- By: Peter Balakian
- Narrated by: Peter Balakian
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia. He was immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced: the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians.
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Great book!
- By Lm on 06-27-13
By: Peter Balakian
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House of Stone
- A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
- By: Anthony Shadid
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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When Anthony Shadid—one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya as the region erupted—was freed, he went home, not to Boston, Beirut, or Oklahoma, where he was raised by his Lebanese American family, but to an ancient estate built by his great-grandfather, a place filled with memories of a lost era when the Middle East was a world of grace, grandeur, and unexpected departures.
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Bit depressing
- By Astrid Dahl on 03-17-12
By: Anthony Shadid
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Three Minutes in Poland
- By: Glenn Kurtz
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 15 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author’s grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community - an entire culture - that was annihilated in the Holocaust.
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Get this book! You will not regret it.
- By Joshua Ross on 02-22-15
By: Glenn Kurtz
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Lady Bird
- A Biography of Mrs. Johnson
- By: Jan Jarboe Russell
- Narrated by: Andrea Gallo
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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A revealing biography of Lady Bird Johnson with startling new insights into her marriage to Lyndon Baines Johnson and her unexpectedly strong impact on his presidency. Long obscured by her husband's shadow, Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson emerges in this first comprehensive biography as a figure of surprising influence and the centering force for LBJ, a man who suffered from extreme mood swings and desperately needed someone to help control his darker impulses.
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Do not waste an audible credit
- By Sandra B. on 10-15-23
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Murder in Matera
- A True Story of Passion, Family, and Forgiveness in Southern Italy
- By: Helene Stapinski
- Narrated by: Helene Stapinski
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Since childhood Helene Stapinski heard lurid tales about her great-great-grandmother, Vita. In Southern Italy she was a loose woman who had murdered someone. Immigrating to America with three children, she lost one along the way. Helene's youthful obsession with Vita deepened as she grew up, eventually propelling the journalist to Italy, where, with her own children in tow, she pursued the story, determined to set the record straight.
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Interesting story about unraveling the family lore
- By Denise Sproed on 08-04-17
By: Helene Stapinski
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Those Wild Wyndhams
- Three Sisters at the Heart of Power
- By: Claudia Renton
- Narrated by: Claudia Renton
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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They were confidantes to British prime ministers, poets, writers, and artists, their lives entwined with the most celebrated and scandalous figures of the day, from Oscar Wilde to Henry James. They were the lovers of great men - or men of great prominence... They lived in a world of luxurious excess, a world of splendor at 44 Belgrave Square and later at the even more vast Clouds, the exquisite Wiltshire house on 4,000 acres, the "house of the age", designed in 1876 by the visionary architect Philip Webb - the model for Henry James' The Spoils of Poynton.
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SLOW START BUT STICK WITH THIS ONE
- By The Louligan on 01-22-19
By: Claudia Renton
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White like Her
- By: Gail Lukasik PhD, Kenyatta D. Berry - foreword
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother's decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother's fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother's racial lineage, tracing her family back to 18th-century colonial Louisiana. In coming to terms with her decision to publicly out her mother, Gail changed how she looks at race and heritage.
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Disappointed
- By Yoli on 06-06-18
By: Gail Lukasik PhD, and others
What listeners say about American Ghost
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Winston811
- 07-03-15
The narrator was EXCELLENT for this book
Where does American Ghost rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
One of the top 5.
Have you listened to any of Xe Sands’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
No, but I am going to find more of her narrations.
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3 people found this helpful
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- EJJ
- 03-06-17
Interesting but....
Interesting story about author's family research, which was impressive, but rather too much speculation on subjects' motives and sentiments. Author claims to be a historian but violates the historian's rules of operation--she either makes some leaps in interpretation or omits supporting evidence. Not really a ghost story.
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1 person found this helpful
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- EileenAkey
- 04-10-15
Intelligent spirit filled Americana
Smart personal indepth informative and enjoyable. A history lesson from a loving angle. Human and beguiling to the end good listen.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Cegelius
- 01-06-24
Wonderful and Touching
As a board member of the Fairview Cemetery Preservation Association and a native of Santa Fe, this book was a must read. I spend a lot of time at the cemetery and one of my best contributions was to restore the water supply that had been broken and leaking. We have much more small repairs to make to the irrigation system but we have planted new trees, removed dead ones and have a landscaping maintenance company on contract. I visit the Stabb plot frequently. I also have great grandparents and other relatives laid to rest there. My great great grandfather came to Santa Fe in the 1880s and homesteaded a ranch near where St. John’s College now sits. He was also born in Germany. I imagine he crossed paths with the Stabbs during his years there. He passed in 1922. His home still stands and is was acquired by John Gaw Meem whose family still lives in it. Thank you so much for sharing your story, I truly enjoyed it.
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- Irishdancer187
- 07-07-15
Drawn out
Meh - I thought the narrator did a great job. However, the story was really just about a woman trying to find out what happened to a distant relative. Not my cup of tea.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Kenny Cook
- 01-18-19
Great story!
What an interesting story. And, as usual, Xe Sands did an excellent job reading the story,
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- Cleo Colorado
- 05-29-15
A true American tale
Where does American Ghost rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
This is one of the top 10 stories I have read (listened to) so far
Who was your favorite character and why?
Probably the author herself - she explores the story of her great great grandmother (Julia Staub) who must have suffered from clinical depression (although the author never explicitly says so) and was one of the first German families to settle in the area. The author offsets depressing stories of her other German relatives who were killed in the Holocaust by whimsical tales of consulting several mediums in her search for Julia's story.
What about Xe Sands’s performance did you like?
I loved her voice and enjoyed her storytelling very much. Clear, consistent reading.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
I have traveled to Santa Fe several times and have always been fascinated by the story of the German Jews who settled there. In the Palace of the Governors history museum there are several portraits of these early settlers and now after reading the book, I can't wait to return there to match names to faces.
Any additional comments?
If you are looking for a story full of ghost sightings and other paranormal activity, this is not the story for you. However, if you are looking for a well-researched story of one woman's search for her family's past and are intrigued by this kind of tale (as I am) this is the story for you.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Patricia
- 01-08-16
Good book with a deceptive title
What did you like best about American Ghost? What did you like least?
I could have gotten into the story of this woman's ancestors and her journey into reassembling their lives as pioneer/merchants in the Victorian Age if it weren't so loooong!
The title promises a ghost story but there is very very little of that at least before the tenth chapter (out of thirty one) which is where I "gave up the ghost".
The book is well written, the subject is very well researched and the story is told with clarity and enthusiasm. The narration was superb - Ms. Sands should narrate all the audio books as far as I'm concerned - a breath of fresh air!
If you are into this kind of geneaological journey and/or the pioneers of the American Southwest, then this book is for you. As one of the other reviewers said: "Not my cup of tea."
What did you like best about this story?
The actual ghost story.
Which scene was your favorite?
I presume it would have been the actual ghost investigation but I didn't get far enough.
If this book were a movie would you go see it?
No.
Any additional comments?
Titles with "ghost" in them are going to lumped in (at least in most readers minds) with the plethora of true ghost stories that are on the market now.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Joliecajun
- 01-31-19
Great Story for Deep Thinkers
American Ghost isn't what it seems so the listener should not judge a book by its cover title. The listener is guided through a journey of past and present and the story flows and transitions well through all of this, and the pieces are easily connected; the author doesn't take you down any unnecessary rabbit holes.
The narrator does a fine job and is without accent, and winds the listener through the intriguing parts with proper inflection.
I listened to this selection for book club and recommend it as well, due to the fact that both the reader and the author find more than they are originally looking for.
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