Birth of a Dream Weaver
A Writer's Awakening
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Narrated by:
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Benjamin A. Onyango
About this listen
One of Oprah.com's "17 Must-Read Books for the New Year" and O Magazine's "10 Titles to Pick up Now."
"Exquisite in its honesty and truth and resilience, and a necessary chronicle from one of the greatest writers of our time." --Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Guardian, Best Books of 2016.
"Every page ripples with a contagious faith in education and in the power of literature to shape the imagination and scour the conscience." --The Washington Post
From one of the world’s greatest writers, the story of how the author found his voice as a novelist at Makerere University in Uganda
Birth of a Dream Weaver charts the very beginnings of a writer’s creative output. In this wonderful memoir, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o recounts the four years he spent at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda - threshold years during which he found his voice as a journalist, short story writer, playwright, and novelist just as colonial empires were crumbling and new nations were being born - under the shadow of the rivalries, intrigues, and assassinations of the Cold War.
Haunted by the memories of the carnage and mass incarceration carried out by the British colonial-settler state in his native Kenya but inspired by the titanic struggle against it, Ngũgĩ, then known as James Ngugi, begins to weave stories from the fibers of memory, history, and a shockingly vibrant and turbulent present.
What unfolds in this moving and thought-provoking memoir is simultaneously the birth of one of the most important living writers - lauded for his "epic imagination" (Los Angeles Times) - the death of one of the most violent episodes in global history, and the emergence of new histories and nations with uncertain futures.
©2016 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Evocative, poignant, and thoughtful, Thiong’o’s courageous narrative will linger in readers’ minds.” --Publishers Weekly, starred
“A writer's coming-of-age tale featuring an artistic mix of pride and humility." --Kirkus Reviews
“An autobiographical masterpiece.... As essential as Achebe’s There Was a Country, this is a riveting read in African history and literature.” --Library Journal, starred
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The American Spirit
- Who We Are and What We Stand For
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: David McCullough
- Length: 4 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Over the course of his distinguished career, David McCullough has spoken before Congress, colleges and universities, historical societies, and other esteemed institutions. Now, at a time of self-reflection in America following a bitter election campaign that has left the country divided, McCullough has collected some of his most important speeches in a brief volume designed to identify important principles and characteristics that are particularly American.
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Our New "OLD MAN ELOQUENT" Rides Again
- By Ray on 04-21-17
By: David McCullough
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Fracture
- Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938
- By: Philipp Blom
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
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When the Great War ended in 1918, the West was broken. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced by both sides. Shell-shocked and traumatized, the West faced a world it no longer recognized: The old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The world hurtled forward on gears and crankshafts, and terrifying new ideologies arose from the wreckage of past belief.
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Lots of good trivia information
- By Jean on 07-23-15
By: Philipp Blom
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Natasha's Dance
- A Cultural History of Russia
- By: Orlando Figes
- Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
- Length: 29 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning in the 18th century with the building of St. Petersburg - a 'window on the West' - and culminating with the challenges posed to Russian identity by the Soviet regime, Figes examines how writers, artists, and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia itself - its character, spiritual essence and destiny. He skillfully interweaves the great works - by Dostoevsky, Stravinsky, and Chagall - with folk embroidery, peasant songs, religious icons and all the customs of daily life, from food and drink to bathing habits to beliefs about the spirit world.
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A Kaleidescopic panorama of an enigmatic culture.
- By Tarquin on 02-13-19
By: Orlando Figes
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Shakespeare in a Divided America
- What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned.
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An Entertaining History Lesson
- By David on 08-17-20
By: James Shapiro
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Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- By: Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
- By: Gerald Martin
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 22 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In his novels and short stories, Gabriel García Márquez has transformed the particulars of his own life and the lives of his fellow Colombians into wondrous fiction. While telling the story of the sloppily dressed, skinny young man who rose from obscurity as a provincial journalist to international fame as the progenitor of a new literature, Gerald Martin also considers the tensions in García Márquez's life between celebrity and the personal quest for literary quality, between politics and writing, and between the seductions of power, solitude, and love.
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Great content, somewhat disappointing narrator.
- By Paola Herrington on 01-08-13
By: Gerald Martin
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Mobituaries
- By: Mo Rocca
- Narrated by: Mo Rocca
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Mo Rocca has always loved obituaries - reading about the remarkable lives of global leaders, Hollywood heavyweights, and innovators who changed the world. But not every notable life has gotten the send-off it deserves. His quest to right that wrong inspired Mobituaries, his number one hit podcast. Now with Mobituaries, the audiobook, he has gone much further, with all new essays on artists, entertainers, sports stars, political pioneers, founding fathers, and more. Even if you know the names, you’ve never understood why they matter...until now.
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Very good, but.....
- By Christopher on 11-15-19
By: Mo Rocca
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There Was a Country
- A Personal History of Biafra
- By: Chinua Achebe
- Narrated by: Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The defining experience of Chinua Achebe's life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967-1970. The conflict was infamous for its savage impact on the Biafran people, Chinua Achebe's people, many of whom were starved to death after the Nigerian government blockaded their borders. Immediately after, Achebe took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for more than 40 years he has maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years. Now, decades in the making, comes a towering reckoning with one of modern Africa's most fateful events.
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The Audible Edition Is a Disaster
- By Olu on 11-28-12
By: Chinua Achebe
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Afropean
- Notes from Black Europe
- By: Johny Pitts
- Narrated by: Johny Pitts
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the face of growing racial discrimination, anti-immigrant sentiment and the spectre of terrorism looming large over an economically stricken continent, Afropean is an on-the-ground documentary of areas where Europeans of African descent are juggling their multiple allegiances and forging new identities: too indelibly woven into Europe to identify with Africa and yet struggling with outdated ideas of what it means to be European.
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Excellent
- By Suzie M on 04-04-24
By: Johny Pitts
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Learning from the Germans
- Race and the Memory of Evil
- By: Susan Neiman
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 20 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights-era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin.
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This is an important book.
- By Amazon Customer on 05-29-20
By: Susan Neiman
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The Fire Is upon Us
- James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America
- By: Nicholas Buccola
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
- Length: 14 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro", and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event.
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Sadly, the story is timeless.
- By Edward P. Cerne on 01-17-20
By: Nicholas Buccola
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The House of Government
- A Saga of the Russian Revolution
- By: Yuri Slezkine, Claire Bloom - director
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 45 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment.
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Inside saga of the leaders of Bolshevism & the USSR
- By Edward V. Blanchard on 11-05-17
By: Yuri Slezkine, and others
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1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
- A Memoir
- By: Ai Weiwei, Allan H. Barr - translator
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp.
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This book changed my life
- By Johnny Nopolis on 08-16-22
By: Ai Weiwei, and others
What listeners say about Birth of a Dream Weaver
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Håkon Astrup
- 01-27-21
Important memoir, disappointing production
The reading performance was good, but more could have been done with the quality of the recording and production. Happy that it's read by a kenyan, allthough it's not a kikuyu like the author It provides authecity. The production though, doesn't give credit to an important and interesting memoir that provides insight into Kenya and Ugandas history at the end of colonialism and begining of an era of upheaval, revolution and post colonial dictatorship.
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