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Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs
- A Journey Through the Deep State
- Narrated by: Nikki Massoud
- Length: 7 hrs
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Publisher's summary
A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • A VANITY FAIR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
“Riveting and darkly funny and in all senses of the word, unclassifiable.” – The New York Times
A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of Thrown
Who are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections—a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs tells the true story of intelligence specialist Reality Winner, a lone young woman who stuffs a state secret under her skirt and trusts the wrong people to help. After printing five pages of dangerous information she was never supposed to see, Winner finds herself at the mercy of forces more invasive than she could have possibly imagined.
Following Winner’s unlikely journey from rural Texas to a federal courtroom, Howley maps a hidden world, drawing in John Walker Lindh, Lady Gaga, Edward Snowden, a rescue dog named Outlaw Babyface Nelson, and a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughter out of jail. Howley’s subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing is sacred, from a singular writer unafraid to ask essential questions about the strangeness of modern life.
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Critic reviews
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair
“An odyssey through the post-9/11 American security state… Howley’s prose reminded me of Don DeLillo’s, not just in its preternatural attunement to invisible currents of feeling which course between varied pockets of the globalized American project, but also in the feeling that she’d taken her experience of the world and melted it down into a weapon meant to puncture our hardened habits of perception… Bottoms Up restores the world to something akin to its original strangeness. It’s a daring approach, and an invaluable one: seeing the world anew makes it feel, in some small way, up for grabs, and this feeling is a precondition for real thought.”—Peter C. Baker, The New Yorker
“Riveting and darkly funny and, in all senses of the word, unclassifiable. Howley writes about privacy and its absence; about hiding and leaking and secrets and betrayal. But she also writes about the strange experience of living, and how it gets flattened and codified into data that can be turned into portraits of static, permanent beings—creatures who would be unrecognizable to ourselves… The arc of Howley’s extraordinary book feels both startling and inevitable; of course a journey through the deep state would send her down the rabbit hole… We become ourselves by shedding our past selves—but now those discarded selves are recorded somewhere, potentially living longer than we do. In her acknowledgments, Howley ends with a note to her children that could serve as a blessing for us all: ‘May you be only as remembered as you wish.’”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
"When whistleblower Reality Winner was arrested in 2017 and later pleaded guilty to sending classified documents to The Intercept, it was a story with huge relevance to the group of activists and journalists with interests in the security state and its overreaches, but it didn’t easily translate to the broader public... Kerry Howley draws an intimate portrait of the woman, her world, and her motivations with literary flair and a wry voice.... Most attempts to understand the war on terror leave a reader with more questions and moral confusion than they began with. In approaching that lack of stability with intellect and keen aesthetics, Howley’s book leaves a reader immeasurably enriched."—Vanity Fair
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Overall
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Performance
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On July 27, 1996, a hapless former cop turned hypervigilant security guard named Richard Jewell spotted a suspicious bag in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, the town square of the 1996 Summer Games. Inside was a bomb, the largest of its kind in FBI and ATF history. Minutes later, the bomb remotely detonated by the attacker amid a crowd of 50,000 people. But thanks to Jewell, it only killed two and wounded 111, not the hundreds who authorities estimated could have otherwise died. With the eyes of the world on Atlanta, the games continued.
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Kudos !
- By Tyree on 11-24-19
By: Kent Alexander, and others
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The Rebel and the Kingdom
- The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime
- By: Bradley Hope
- Narrated by: Lee Osorio
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the early 2000s, Adrian Hong was a soft-spoken Yale undergraduate looking for his place in the world. After reading a harrowing account of life inside North Korea, he realized he had found a cause so pressing that he was ready to devote his life to it. Hong journeyed to China, outwitting Chinese security services as he helped ferry asylum-seeking North Korean escapees to safety. The Rebel and the Kingdom is an exhilarating account of a man who turns his back on the status quo—to instead live boldly by his principles.
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Phenomenal true story
- By NYCdogmomma on 11-13-22
By: Bradley Hope
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The Grey Men
- Pursuing the Stasi into the Present
- By: Ralph Hope
- Narrated by: B. J. Harrison
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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By 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded. During 40 years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Overnight, almost 100,000 Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed. This is the story of what they did next.
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Very Enlightening
- By Katy on 07-09-22
By: Ralph Hope
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Truth Worth Telling
- By: Scott Pelley
- Narrated by: Scott Pelley
- Length: 16 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A 60 Minutes correspondent and former anchor of the CBS Evening News, Scott Pelley writes as a witness to events that changed our world. In moving, detailed prose, he stands with firefighters at the collapsing World Trade Center on 9/11, advances with American troops in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, and reveals private moments with presidents (and would-be presidents) he’s known for decades. Pelley also offers a resounding defense of free speech and a free press as the rights that guarantee all others.
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A great listen... worth your time
- By Christina on 05-26-19
By: Scott Pelley
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Executive Actions
- By: Gary Grossman
- Narrated by: John McLain
- Length: 20 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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An assassin takes aim at a Presidential candidate during a primary stump speech. The instant he pulls the trigger, the outcome of the election is irrevocably changed. But Democrat Teddy Lodge, an upcoming media sweetheart, isn't killed. His wife is. As a result, Lodge emerges as the man to beat and the greatest threat to the incumbent President, Morgan Taylor.
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My highest possible recommendation for this novel!
- By Wayne on 08-12-16
By: Gary Grossman
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Enemies Within
- Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America
- By: Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman
- Narrated by: Keith Szarabajka
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In Enemies Within Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman lay bare the complex and often contradictory state of counterterrorism and intelligence in America through the pursuit of Najibullah Zazi, a terrorist bomber who trained under one of bin Laden's most trusted deputies. Zazi and his coconspirators represented America's greatest fear: a terrorist cell operating inside America. Apuzzo and Goldman lift the veil of secrecy to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of our counterterrorism measures.
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Very in depth. I highly detailed account.
- By Patrick on 10-08-20
By: Matt Apuzzo, and others
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The Education of an Idealist
- A Memoir
- By: Samantha Power
- Narrated by: Samantha Power
- Length: 21 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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In her memoir, Power offers an urgent response to the question "What can one person do?" and a call for a clearer eye, a kinder heart, and a more open and civil hand in our politics and daily lives. The Education of an Idealist traces Power’s distinctly American journey from immigrant to war correspondent to presidential Cabinet official. In 2005, her critiques of US foreign policy caught the eye of newly elected senator Barack Obama, who invited her to work with him on Capitol Hill and then on his presidential campaign.
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Sam's Power: Privilege in U.S. Politics
- By RelizzScholar27 on 11-09-19
By: Samantha Power
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The Terror Years
- From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State
- By: Lawrence Wright
- Narrated by: John H. Mayer, Lawrence Wright
- Length: 17 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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With the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. This collection draws on several articles he wrote while researching that book as well as many that he's written since, following where and how al-Qaeda and its core cultlike beliefs have morphed and spread.
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Contains much old material from "Looming Tower"
- By peter on 09-21-16
By: Lawrence Wright
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The Black Banners (Declassified)
- How Torture Derailed the War on Terror After 9/11
- By: Ali H. Soufan
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 19 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Widely heralded on publication as a “must-read” (Military Review) and “important window on America’s battle with al-Qaeda” (Washington Post), Ali Soufan’s revelatory account of the war on terror as seen from its front lines changed the way we understand al-Qaeda and how the United States prosecuted the war — and led to hard questions being asked of our leaders.
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Magnificent !
- By JJ on 09-21-20
By: Ali H. Soufan
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The Reluctant Spy
- My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror
- By: John Kiriakou, Michael Ruby
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Long before the waterboarding controversy exploded in the media, one CIA agent had already gone public. In a groundbreaking 2007 interview with ABC News, John Kiriakou called waterboarding torture - but admitted that it probably worked. This book, at once a confessional, an adventure story, and a chronicle of Kiriakou's life in the CIA, stands as an important, eloquent piece of testimony from a committed American patriot.
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Fascinating Read about the CIA
- By Nancy on 05-13-10
By: John Kiriakou, and others
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Prisoner
- My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison—Solitary Confinement, a Sham Trial, High-Stakes Diplomacy, and the Extraordinary Efforts It Took to Get Me Out
- By: Jason Rezaian
- Narrated by: Jason Rezaian
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The dramatic memoir of the journalist who was held hostage in a high-security prison in Tehran for 18 months and whose release - which almost didn’t happen - became a part of the Iran nuclear deal.
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Should have been much better given subject matter
- By Sample Sloth on 04-17-19
By: Jason Rezaian
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Mayhem
- Unanswered Questions About the Tsarnaev Brothers, the US Government and the Boston Marathon Bombing
- By: Michele R. McPhee
- Narrated by: Devon Sorvari
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Mayhem goes a long way toward answering questions that still linger about the notorious Boston Marathon bombing, such as: Where were the bombs made? And what had been Tamerlan Tsarnaev's relationship to the FBI? This engaging narrative casts a spotlight on the US government's relationship with the older Tsarnaev brother as his younger brother, Dzhokhar, continues his efforts to have his death sentence commuted.
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Tough to follow
- By Angela Leone on 11-06-20
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Please Scream Inside Your Heart
- Breaking News and Nervous Breakdowns in the Year That Wouldn't End
- By: Dave Pell
- Narrated by: John Parsons, Peter Coyote, L. J. Ganser, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Please Scream Inside Your Heart is a time capsule; a real-time ride through the maddening hell that was the 2020 news cycle - when historic turmoil and media mania stretched American sanity, democracy, and toilet paper. Who better to examine this unhinged period in all of its twists and turns than news addict Dave Pell, a.k.a. the internet’s managing editor?
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Couldn’t stop listening!!
- By Rofar4 on 11-16-21
By: Dave Pell
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Nobody's Victim
- Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls
- By: Carrie Goldberg, Jeannine Amber
- Narrated by: Carrie Goldberg
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Riveting and an essential timely conversation-starter, Nobody's Victim invites listeners to join Carrie on the front lines of the war against sexual violence and privacy violations as she fights for revenge porn and sextortion laws, uncovers major Title IX violations, and sues the hell out of tech companies, schools, and powerful sexual predators. Her battleground is the courtroom; her crusade is to transform clients from victims into warriors.
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Everyone should read this book
- By Alexander on 09-06-19
By: Carrie Goldberg, and others
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Can’t wait for more from this author!
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Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.
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Excellent narration
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Very disappointing
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In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.
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The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away.
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Bone Clocks meets Jonathan Franzen
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From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there.
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Well that was depressing
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Doppelganger
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What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who.
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Elite Psychobabble
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The Undertow
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An unmatched guide to the religious dimensions of American politics, Jeff Sharlet journeys into corners of our national psyche where others fear to tread. The Undertow is both inquiry and meditation, an attempt to understand how, over the last decade, reaction has morphed into delusion, social division into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies—sometimes realities—of violence.
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I'm just not feeling this one....
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When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets.
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An American Masterpiece
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Victory City
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In the wake of an unimportant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess, who begins to speak out of the girl’s mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana’s comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga—“victory city”—the wonder of the world.
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Rushdie never fails to engage.
- By Tom on 02-23-23
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Counterweight
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- By: Djuna
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On the fictional island of Patusan—and much to the ire of the Patusan natives—the Korean conglomerate LK is constructing an elevator into Earth’s orbit, gradually turning this one-time tropical resort town into a teeming travel hub: a gateway to and from our planet. Up in space, holding the elevator’s “spider cable” taut, is a mass of space junk known as the counterweight. And stashed within that junk is a trove of crucial data: a memory fragment left by LK’s former CEO, the control of which will determine the company’s—and humanity’s—future.
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Thumbs down
- By Christine on 07-13-23
By: Djuna
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The Rigor of Angels
- Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality
- By: William Egginton
- Narrated by: David Glass
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality.
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The most ridiculous narration
- By Anonymous User on 03-07-24
By: William Egginton
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Humanly Possible
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- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Humanism is an expansive tradition of thought that places shared humanity, cultural vibrancy, and moral responsibility at the center of our lives. For centuries, this worldview has inspired people to make their choices by principles of freethinking, intellectual inquiry, fellow feeling, and optimism. In this sweeping new history, Sarah Bakewell, herself a lifelong humanist, illuminates the very personal, individual, and, well, human matter of humanism and takes listeners on a grand intellectual adventure.
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A glimmer of hope
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What listeners say about Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs
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- Scott Engstrom
- 08-24-24
Well written and to the point
Crazy story(ies) that provide more context to what you may have read in the paper
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- Anonymous User
- 07-14-23
Really good - But Too Much Focus on Reality Winner
The first half of the book is quite good bouncing around from whistle-blower to whistle-blower and I enjoy the style of writing. As fascinated initially I was with Reality Winners story, the trial was too drawn out. Reality is not inherently more interesting than any other subject, arguably less interesting. Early when discussing Reality Kerry succinctly describes the reason for Realitys persona seemingly a bit rife with contradiction. It is a mark of many other military whistle-blowers- they were not raised by standard middle class intellectuals and don't get a lot of the concepts there in, then their naivety leads to an awakening that results in whistleblowing. Kerry never investigates the specific contradictions contained in Reality further than that. To focus on Realities boring trial lends a girl boss air to the book which should be too self aware for such things. One can't help but feel the focus on an almost middle class white girl is author insertion in a very typical way. Realities story in no way deserves the extra attention receives if the attention is merely on the logistics of the trial and not a philosophical discussion with her as the subject. Why not focus on the contradiction of her aiding in the killing of many innocent people with her intense affinity for helping others and charity work? The first half of the hook leads you to think the threads of the whistle-blower will be tied together more meaningfully than they are, making the product feel unfinished but with good potential, potential it's too late to come to fruition now of course.
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4 people found this helpful
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- jaxhldn
- 07-01-23
Amazing.
I was enthralled from beginning to end. Kerry Howley is a fantastic writer. This book is not only engaging and deeply interesting but important in this day and age.
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- Fill1749
- 12-02-23
Great listen
Really like the inside view on how Reality was treated worst than a career criminal. Yes she did leak a “ secret” document but at what harm. Thank for a great book
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1 person found this helpful
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- Juan G.
- 03-05-24
Deep state more
The storyline all mashed up together but would have wished a little more in the deep state and not just the characters that got swallowed by it.
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- best Amazon customer
- 01-21-24
Compelling read
The author writes with uncommon fluidity. The story is compelling. The connections she makes are thought-provoking.
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- Truth Speaker
- 02-12-24
Eminently Forgettable
Interesting topic, well written but left no trace of recollection when it was gone. Poor Reality Winner, a loser in life when her sense of proportion crosses with national security. Too bad for the young thing. Too bad for us b
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- K. R. Madsen
- 03-09-24
Good performance, average story
The performance was great, but the story itself was a bit jilted and drawn out. I struggled through the second half.
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- GinHou
- 03-22-24
Random
The few chapters on Reality were wonderful! Everything else was disjointed with no purpose or clarity
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- isorox
- 04-06-24
just good journalism
Howley takes stories we're a little familiar with and provides excellent analysis of what they expose about the "deep state" and our own complicity in the "surveillance state".
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