Awakenings
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Davis
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Oliver Sacks
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By:
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Oliver Sacks
About this listen
Awakenings - which inspired the major motion picture - is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and the extraordinary transformations which went with their reintroduction to a changed world.
PLEASE NOTE: Some changes have been made to the original manuscript with the permission of Oliver Sacks.
©1973, 1976, 1982, 1983, 1987, 1990 Oliver Sacks (P)2011 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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-
-
FOR COMMITED LOVERS OF OLIVER SACKS WORK
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By: Oliver Sacks
-
Seeing Voices
- A Journey Into the World of the Deaf
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect - a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well.
-
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Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does - humans are a musical species.
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Oliver Sacks is well known as an explorer of the human mind - a neurologist with a gift for complex, insightful portrayals of people and their conditions. However, he is also a card-carrying member of the American Fern Society, and since childhood has been fascinated by these primitive plants and their ability to survive and adapt in many climates. Oaxaca Journal is Sacks' spellbinding account of his trip with a group of fellow fern enthusiasts to the beautiful, history-steeped province of Oaxaca, Mexico.
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In 1999, Clark Elliott suffered a concussion when his car was rear-ended. Overnight his life changed from that of a rising professor with a research career in artificial intelligence to a humbled man struggling to get through a single day. At times he couldn't walk across a room, or even name his five children. Doctors told him he would never fully recover. After eight years, the cognitive demands of his job, and of being a single parent, finally became more than he could manage.
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Mostly Tedious With Moments of Insight
- By Brent on 01-17-16
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Already Here
- A Doctor Discovers the Truth About Heaven
- By: Leo Galland M.D.
- Narrated by: Leo Galland M.D.
- Length: 4 hrs and 2 mins
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Already Here tells of the death of Leo Galland's son, Christopher, at age 22; the direct visual evidence Christopher showed Leo that our souls do go on; and the communications from Christopher's spirit that changed Leo's understanding of life and its meaning. In life, Christopher was a brain-damaged special-needs child who challenged everyone he knew with unpredictable behavior and uncanny insights. After his death, he revealed to Leo the real purpose of his life, as a spiritual guide who taught others by confounding their assumptions and expectations.
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I needed this book. thanks Doctor.
- By Anonymous User on 08-08-18
By: Leo Galland M.D.
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Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology
- By: Carl J. Jung
- Narrated by: Robert Bethune
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
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Carl Jung's Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology gathers in one volume some of his most important and influential shorter writings, and also some pieces that, from our perspective almost a century later, seem quaint or even idiosyncractic. The volume provides wonderful insight into his mind and thought as he reached a position of prominence in the world of psychoanalysis.
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Case studies
- By August on 08-05-18
By: Carl J. Jung
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The Gift of Adversity
- The Unexpected Benefits of Life's Difficulties, Setbacks, and Imperfections
- By: Norman E. Rosenthal M.D.
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
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The noted research psychiatrist explores how life's disappointments and difficulties provide us with the lessons we need to become better, bigger, and more resilient human beings. Adversity is an irreducible fact of life. Although we can and should learn from all experiences, both positive and negative best-selling author Dr. Norman E. Rosenthal believes that adversity is by far the best teacher most of us will ever encounter.
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Book ruined by the narrator
- By David C. on 12-07-22
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Manufacturing Depression
- The Secret History of a Modern Disease
- By: Gary Greenberg
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
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Am I happy enough? This has been a pivotal question since America's inception. "Am I not happy enough because I am depressed?" is a more recent version. Psychotherapist Gary Greenberg shows how depression has been manufactured---not as an illness but as an idea about our suffering, its source, and its relief. He challenges us to look at depression in a new way.
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Modern Gonzo Tour de Force
- By S. Frank on 11-12-11
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The Biology of Desire
- Why Addiction Is Not a Disease
- By: Marc Lewis PhD
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
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The psychiatric establishment and rehab industry in the Western world have branded addiction a brain disease based on evidence that brains change with drug use. But in The Biology of Desire, cognitive neuroscientist and former addict Marc Lewis makes a convincing case that addiction is not a disease and shows why the disease model has become an obstacle to healing. Lewis reveals addiction as an unintended consequence of the brain doing what it's supposed to do - seek pleasure and relief - in a world that's not cooperating.
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An important addition to understanding addiction.
- By Jeff M on 02-28-16
By: Marc Lewis PhD
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Peace, Love & Healing
- Bodymind Communication & the Path to Self-Healing: An Exploration
- By: Bernie S. Siegel
- Narrated by: Bernie S. Siegel
- Length: 2 hrs and 56 mins
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A classic of patient empowerment, Peace, Love & Healing offered the revolutionary message that we have an innate ability to heal ourselves. Now proven by numerous scientific studies, the connection between our minds and our bodies has been increasingly accepted as fact throughout the mainstream medical community. In a new introduction, Dr. Bernie Siegel highlights current research on the relationships among consciousness, psychosocial factors, attitude, and immune function.
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horrible horrible
- By Honestly on 02-09-15
By: Bernie S. Siegel
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Constructive Living
- By: David Reynolds
- Narrated by: David Reynolds
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Constructive Living combines two of the most popular forms of therapy in Japan into one profoundly effective approach that will not only enhance your productivity but also bring a flexible, responsive mind - a Zenlike tranquility - a to your personal and professional lives. Discover the life-changing potential of Morita therapy (based on taking right action in the moment) and Naikan therapy (a way to cultivate your awareness of how the world supports you) in three information-packed sessions.
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Insightfully Practical and Realistic
- By Paul Fears on 02-08-16
By: David Reynolds
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Suspicious Minds
- How Culture Shapes Madness
- By: Joel Gold, Ian Gold
- Narrated by: Joel Gold, Ian Gold
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
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Mr. A. was admitted to Dr. Joel Gold’s inpatient unit at Bellevue Hospital in 2002. He was, he said, being filmed constantly, and his life was being broadcast around the world "like The Truman Show" - the 1998 film depicting a man who is unknowingly living out his life as the star of a popular soap opera. Over the next few years, Gold saw a number of patients suffering from what he and his brother, Dr. Ian Gold, began calling the "Truman Show Delusion," launching them on a quest to understand the nature of this particular phenomenon and the nature of madness itself.
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Intriguing
- By L. K. on 04-18-16
By: Joel Gold, and others
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Same ole Sacks--great yarns as usual.
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FOR COMMITED LOVERS OF OLIVER SACKS WORK
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Letters
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Sensitively introduced and edited by Kate Edgar, Sacks’s longtime editor, the letters deliver a portrait of Sacks as he wrestles with the workings of the brain and mind. We see, through his eyes, the beginnings of modern neuroscience, following the thought processes of one of the great intellectuals of our time, whose words, as evidenced in this book, were unfailingly shaped with generosity and wonder toward other people.
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A Leg to Stand On
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Dr. Oliver Sacks's books Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars and the best-selling The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat have been acclaimed for their compassion in the treatment of patients affected with profound disorders. In A Leg to Stand On, it is Sacks himself who is the patient: an encounter with a bull on a desolate mountain in Norway has left him with a severely damaged leg. But what should be a routine recuperation is actually the beginning of a strange medical journey.
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Not sure what he was trying for here
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By: Oliver Sacks
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Seeing Voices
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A Rich Experience
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What happens in our brains to make us feel fear, love, hate, anger, joy? Do we control our emotions, or do they control us? Do animals have emotions? How can traumatic experiences in early childhood influence adult behavior, even though we have no conscious memory of them? In The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux investigates the origins of human emotions and explains that many exist as part of complex neural systems that evolved to enable us to survive.
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Oaxaca Journal
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Oliver Sacks is well known as an explorer of the human mind - a neurologist with a gift for complex, insightful portrayals of people and their conditions. However, he is also a card-carrying member of the American Fern Society, and since childhood has been fascinated by these primitive plants and their ability to survive and adapt in many climates. Oaxaca Journal is Sacks' spellbinding account of his trip with a group of fellow fern enthusiasts to the beautiful, history-steeped province of Oaxaca, Mexico.
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A gem
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Dear Oliver
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To the world, he was Dr. Sacks, the brilliant neurologist behind bestselling books like Musicophilia and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. To professor Susan Barry, he became Dear Oliver—her mentor, friend, and confidant over the course of their ten-year correspondence.
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In 2015, Barbara Lipska - a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness - was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Within months, her frontal lobe, the seat of cognition, began shutting down. She descended into madness, exhibiting dementia- and schizophrenia-like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, the immunotherapy her doctors had prescribed worked quickly. Just eight weeks after her nightmare began, Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity.
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Be Prepared To Feel Insane--
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The Psychopath Test
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The Psychopath Test is a fascinating journey through the minds of madness. Jon Ronson's exploration of a potential hoax being played on the world's top neurologists takes him, unexpectedly, into the heart of the madness industry. An influential psychologist who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are, in fact, psychopaths teaches Ronson how to spot these high-flying individuals by looking out for little telltale verbal and nonverbal clues. And so Ronson, armed with his new psychopath-spotting abilities, enters the corridors of power.
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Interesting because it comes to more than one conclusion
- By Laura J on 06-20-23
By: Jon Ronson
What listeners say about Awakenings
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- Johan
- 04-01-15
interesting
fascinating, well written, and a good performance, but it did get a bit too repetitive and tedious to listen too with all the cases. but the ending was strong, so im glad I listened to the book.
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- AM
- 05-15-23
Not my favorite, but grateful for it
I’ve been a fan of Dr Sacks for years, and so I was eager to read the book that made him famous. After reading the man who mistook his wife for a hat, anthropologist on mars, and on the move, I found this book interesting but excessively clinical. The language and vocabulary are less accessible than his later works. If you are a Sacks fan, it is a must-read. But if you are new to Sacks, there are better places to start.
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- 4thace
- 05-24-19
Breaks free of clinical detachment
This book was one of the first by Sacks to make his reputation as a popular writer of forefront neuroscientific topics, which is unusual because of the rather high concentration of medical jargon in the case studies making up the major part of the book. He does explain what 'festination' and 'oculogyric crisis' is about, but you still have to keep the translations in mind when you encounter them later, while wondering whether you are properly picturing what they are like. The profound deficits many of the patients had made me wonder how they were able to stay alive for decades in the first place, consuming food and eliminating waste in perpetual sleeplike states. For each of the patients he starts out with a description of their life story before they came to his facility, the level at which they started prior to being treated with l-dopa, and then the evolution of their response to the drug almost always with pronounced near-miraculous recoveries and devastating relapses. After a few of these, you learn to appreciate the idea that they really didn't have much of a clue what was likely to happen, at first. After a few more, you learn that whatever you learn from the first half-dozen or dozen patients tells you practically nothing about what will happen the next group. And when you hear about the ones who, unlike the other famous ones, never actually experienced the full awakening and loss of Parkinson's symptoms, you begin to feel what makes this kind of life work incredibly tough to bear up under.
As I understand it, Parkinson's disease of the post-encephalitic and of the ordinary sort is still somewhat poorly understood fifty years after this pioneering set of trials. The idea is that administration of l-dopa, a precursor feedstock of the neurotransmitter dopamine, would compensate for the loss of the brain's ability to create the chemical on its own either due to an acute infection (the post-encephelitis lethargica cases which occurred as an epidemic in the 1920s) or some kind of autoimmune process (the conventional kind). The dopamine was then going to find its way to where it was needed by other brain structures, and the sole way the doctor had of regulating this was with the number of grams of l-dopa the patient would consume daily. There was no way of targeting the dopamine to the portions of the brain that would benefit from it and not the ones which would malfunction, causing hallucinations and tics and obsessive behavior, and since the chemical would persist in the system over time, once the undesired symptoms began to manifest there was no way to shut them down quickly. It sounds likely that the initial administration would show little effect, but as more and more was added, the patient would accumulate too much in their system and overshoot the optimum range. Most discouragingly, once the dosage had gone too far and was corrected, not everyone would be able to recover what seemed to be the best circumstances they enjoyed. A few of them even seemed to suffer permanent and crippling damage because of the regimen, which must have been a difficult thing to accept much as what happens with experimental and risky treatments of today. Maybe the most emotional part was what the patients would do and say when asked whether they wanted to continue, perhaps with a modified dosage or some other accommodation, to try to avoid Parkinsonian insensibility on the one hand and full-blown psychosis on the other. Some would ask to be taken off the drug entirely, while others would decide that the level of function the drug gave them, even with the severe side effects, was worth continuing.
There were two epilogues in the audiobook version I listened to. One was an update written about ten years after the author left off caring for this group of patients and had moved on to other postings. A very few of the original group of patients were still living by then, some still on l-dopa treatment and others having ended it. Accompanying these updates were a number of more-or-less philosophical ruminations by Sacks on what lessons he has gained over time from the experience of treating these individuals. The second epilogue concerns the behind the scenes notes connected with the Hollywood film inspired by the book and the case histories presented. The way the film actors and the director approached the depiction of the Parkinson's patients gave another glimpse of what it was like to try to take those individual's places. It will be interesting to watch the film (which I haven't seen yet) to see how closely the way I pictured the persons described matches their interpretations of the manifestations of disease and recovery.
I think that experiencing the remarkable stories of long-term institutionalization suddenly interrupted by a return to normal function, then setbacks, and more and more daunting challenges to maintain a balance is a good thing
One note on the audiobook version: there are many patients described in depth, always referred to by first name and last initial, and I thought it was difficult to keep them straight especially when the author returned to their cases, either when talking about another patient of his or in the epilogues. Since I didn't listen to the audio chapters in a continuous sitting, and since there would be only a few mentions of the patient's name, at the beginning and maybe sprinkled in among the rest of the text, it was easy to miss out on the association of the name to the specifics of the case. In a printed book or an ebook, it would be possible, although inconvenient, to look back and see what name was at the head of whatever chapter you were taking in. This is not a comment on the performance or the writing, only on a limitation of the medium.
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- Margaret
- 12-07-15
Not for the average reader!
This book should come with a warning "for medically proficient readers". The book is a technically, very difficult book to read with terminology only known to people very knowledgeable in medical terminology. I was very disappointed in the lengthy and excessive language used which make this book barely a treat to listen to but rather a lecture I didn't sign up for and wish I didn't choose because of my knowledge of the movie that was made.
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- josh
- 12-13-11
Oliver Sacks puts poetry into psychology
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
I would recommend this book to my friends because it is an amazing voyage you are taken on through the professional eyes of Oliver Sacks. His descriptions are poetic and allow you to understand that disease is not uniform especially anything that effects the brain.
What did you like best about this story?
I loved the history of each patient and how the past of each person interacts with the L-DOPA given to each patient. Truly amazing in its artistic quality.
What does Jonathan Davis and Oliver Sacks bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Oliver Sacks is quirky and his introduction is almost parallel to Robin Williams in the movie version of the book. Jonathan Davis is truly amazing in his connection to the subject. With Jonathan Davis as a narrator to some of the most amazing and saddening events in peoples lives there is a pathos that is undeniable and will tug at you in the most elemental or human ways.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
When one of the patients started to have hallucinations of a visitor to her room. She would start to get prepared for company and await her late night gentleman caller. It is amazing to hear just what human beings are capable of.
Any additional comments?
Amazing! Read the book. Watch the movie. Watch the documentary. Rethink what makes you...you.
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16 people found this helpful
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- Hannah
- 06-29-16
Nerding out.
This is probably the 5th Oliver Sacks book I've read and listened too. I can't get enough. Neurology is fascinating <3 the narrator brings these people to life. All the feels.
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2 people found this helpful
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- R. G. Pickering
- 12-13-15
Fascinating Story
This is an amazing story of an illness and of the effects of a drug on the illness, if only for a short time. It is well told and performed.
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- Douglas
- 09-01-12
Absolute classic!
Sachs does a marvelous job of taking one through the science of "sleepy sickness" and then immersing one in the lives of the poor souls affected by it. We see their "rebirth" into life and how some came to chose the return to total immobility once more. Like so much of Sachs' work, this is a strange and wondrous portrayal of neurology and this bizarre and glorious experience we call human life. (If you saw the movie years ago... be prepared for a rather long--but necessary primer on the science of the illness in the beginning of the book. It is not a novelization. It is first and foremost a science book.)
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21 people found this helpful
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- Gervaise
- 03-14-16
Reads like a text book
Expected a novel. Interesting case studies but too technical and medical jargon for my understanding at times.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 02-07-23
Powerful!
A science fiction awe inspiring grip, on an historical event, that leaves one in tears. Beautiful!
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