Americana Audiobook By Hampton Sides cover art

Americana

Dispatches from the New Frontier

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Americana

By: Hampton Sides
Narrated by: Kris Koscheski
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For more than 15 years, best-selling author and historian Hampton Sides has traveled widely across the continent exploring the America that lurks just behind the scrim of our mainstream culture. In these two dozen pieces, collected here for the first time, Sides gives us a fresh, alluring, and at times startling America brimming with fascinating subcultures and bizarre characters who could live nowhere else.

Following Sides, we crash the redwood retreat of an apparent cabal of fabulously powerful military-industrialists, drop in on the Indy 500 of bass fishing, and join a giant techno-rave at the lip of the Grand Canyon. We meet a diverse gallery of American visionaries - from the impossibly perky founder of Tupperware to Indian radical Russell Means to skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. We retrace the route of the historic Bataan Death March with veterans from Sides's acclaimed World War II epic, Ghost Soldiers. Americana gives us a sparkling mosaic of our country today, in all its wild and poignant charm.

©2004 Hampton Sides (P)2016 Tantor Anthropology North America Travel Writing & Commentary
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There is just nothing here. Each chapter is about some subject, but there is no angle, no nuance, nothing in the writing that makes the subject seem interesting in any way. The people are all dumb and kind of pathetic, while also being completely bland and boring.

I really dislike this book.

Boring stories about sad and uninteresting people.

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narrated well enough but poorly written materials about uninteresting subjects. perceptions and opinions were superficial. author is a sesquipedalian.

boring

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The author's essays span such a wide range of topics that I can't imagine anyone who would find even half of them of interest. The diversity of topics is compounded by the fact that so many of them are from before the turn of the latest century that they're dated; what might have been interesting 20 years ago has passed into the dustbin of forgotten history and is not missed.

The reader's tone is pleasant enough to listen to, but his pronunciation of specific names, places and vaguely unique words is intolerably bad. It's as if the whole reading was recorded without any in-studio editor to stop and correct the reader's errors.

Dated and overly diverse

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