
Briefly Perfectly Human
Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End
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Narrated by:
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Alua Arthur
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By:
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Alua Arthur
About this listen
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | Named a New York Times' Staff Favorite Book of 2024 and a Boston Globe Best Book of 2024
A deeply transformative memoir that reframes how we think about death and how it can help us lead better, more fulfilling and authentic lives, from America’s most visible death doula.
""A truly unique, inspiring perspective on the time we have, what we do with it, and how we let go of this world.... There is no one I'd trust more to guide me through an understanding of death, and how it informs life."" — Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Mad Honey and The Book of Two Ways
""Briefly Perfectly Human is a beautiful, raw, light-bringing experience. Alua's voice is shimmering, singular, and pulses with humor, vulnerability, insight, and refreshing candor.... Be prepared for it to grab you, hold you tight, and raise the roof on the power of human connection."" — Tembi Locke, author of From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home
For her clients and everyone who has been inspired by her humanity, Alua Arthur is a friend at the end of the world. As our country’s leading death doula, she’s spreading a transformative message: thinking about your death—whether imminent or not—will breathe wild, new potential into your life.
Warm, generous, and funny AF, Alua supports and helps manage end-of-life care on many levels. The business matters, medical directives, memorial planning; but also honoring the quiet moments, when monitors are beeping and loved ones have stepped out to get some air—or maybe not shown up at all—and her clients become deeply contemplative and want to talk. Aching, unfinished business often emerges. Alua has been present for thousands of these sacred moments—when regrets, fears, secret joys, hidden affairs, and dim realities are finally said aloud. When this happens, Alua focuses her attention at the pulsing center of her clients’ anguish and creates space for them, and sometimes their loved ones, to find peace.
This has had a profound effect on Alua, who was already no stranger to death’s periphery. Her family fled a murderous coup d’état in Ghana in the 1980s. She has suffered major, debilitating depressions. And her dear friend and brother-in-law died of lymphoma. Advocating for him in his final months is what led Alua to her life’s calling. She knows firsthand the power of bearing witness and telling the truth about life’s painful complexities, because they do not disappear when you look the other way. They wait for you.
Briefly Perfectly Human is a life-changing, soul-gathering debut, by a writer whose empathy, tenderness, and wisdom shimmers on the page. Alua Arthur combines intimate storytelling with a passionate appeal for loving, courageous end-of-life care—what she calls “death embrace.” Hers is a powerful testament to getting in touch with something deeper in our lives, by embracing the fact of our own mortality. “Hold that truth in your mind,” Alua says, “and wondrous things will begin to grow around it.”
©2023 Alua Arthur (P)2023 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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Author shared his own life experiences which made it somewhat more relatable
- By Anonymous User on 12-22-24
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With the End in Mind
- Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial
- By: Kathryn Mannix
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Carling, Kathryn Mannix
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Modern medical technology is allowing us to live longer and fuller lives than ever before. But with changes in the way we understand medicine come changes in the way we understand death. Once a familiar and gentle process, death has come to be something from which we shy away, preferring to fight it desperately than to accept its inevitability. Palliative care has a long tradition in Britain, where Dr. Kathryn Mannix has practiced it for 30 years. In this book, she shares beautifully crafted stories from a lifetime of caring for the dying.
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Wonderful book!
- By Randall Roth on 01-29-18
By: Kathryn Mannix
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Inner Mastery, Outer Impact
- How Your Five Core Energies Hold the Key to Success
- By: Hitendra Wadhwa PhD
- Narrated by: Hitendra Wadhwa PhD
- Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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It seems that our drives for Outer and Inner Success are destined to clash. But perhaps that’s only because we’ve been searching for success in the wrong places. Through extensive scientific research and masterful storytelling about exemplary figures and everyday heroes drawn from Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa’s class at Columbia Business School and client workshops at Mentora Institute—listeners arrive at timeless principles of success in life and leadership. Empowered by your Five Core Energies, you discover how to create outer impact from a place of inner mastery.
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A soulful passage
- By Steven Morris on 06-26-24
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Nine Pints
- A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood
- By: Rose George
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Blood carries life, yet the sight of it makes people faint. It is a waste product and a commodity pricier than oil. It can save lives and transmit deadly infections. Each one of us has roughly nine pints of it, yet many don’t even know their own blood type. And for all its ubiquitousness, the few tablespoons of blood discharged by 800 million women are still regarded as taboo: menstruation is perhaps the single most demonized biological event.
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Author goes on long unnecessary tangents
- By Jonathan Malzone on 03-03-19
By: Rose George
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The Book of Beautiful Questions
- The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead
- By: Warren Berger
- Narrated by: Michael Quinlan
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Book of Beautiful Questions, Berger shares illuminating stories and compelling research on the power of inquiry. Drawn from the insights and expertise of psychologists, innovators, effective leaders and some of the world's foremost creative thinkers, he presents the essential questions readers need to make the best choices when it truly counts, with a particular focus in four key areas: decision-making, creativity, leadership and relationships.
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Where's the Beef
- By Tintin on 03-03-19
By: Warren Berger
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Fascinate, Revised and Updated
- How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist
- By: Sally Hogshead
- Narrated by: Sally Hogshead
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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A newly revised and updated edition of the influential guide that explores one of the most powerful ways to attract attention and influence behavior - fascination - and how businesses, products, and ideas can become irresistible to consumers. In an oversaturated culture defined by limited time and focus, how do we draw attention to our messages, our ideas, and our products when we have only seconds to compete?
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Motivational, but lacks substance!
- By Melanie Iannaggi on 09-15-17
By: Sally Hogshead
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Ghostland
- An American History in Haunted Places
- By: Colin Dickey
- Narrated by: Jon Lindstrom
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Colin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie homes", Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places.
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A fluffed-up college essay writ large.
- By Gavin on 10-13-16
By: Colin Dickey
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Knocking on Heaven's Door
- The Path to a Better Way of Death
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non - life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker.
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A better way to narrate a book about death?
- By MAUREEN on 10-21-13
By: Katy Butler
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Blackout
- Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget
- By: Sarah Hepola
- Narrated by: Sarah Hepola
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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A memoir of unblinking honesty and poignant, laugh-out-loud humor, Blackout is the story of a woman stumbling into a new kind of adventure - the sober life she never wanted. For Sarah Hepola, alcohol was "the gasoline of all adventure". She spent her evenings at cocktail parties and dark bars where she proudly stayed till last call. But there was a price. Publicly, she covered her shame with self-deprecating jokes, and her career flourished, but as the blackouts accumulated, she could no longer avoid a sinking truth.
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Blackout: A Knockout
- By W Perry Hall on 07-17-15
By: Sarah Hepola
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Tremors in the Blood
- Murder, Obsession, and the Birth of the Lie Detector
- By: Amit Katwala
- Narrated by: Paul Bellantoni
- Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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As new forms of lie detection gain momentum in the present day, Tremors in the Blood reveals the incredible truth behind the creation of the polygraph, through gripping true-crime cases featuring explosive gunfights, shocking twists, and high-stakes courtroom drama. Touching on psychology, technology, and the science of the truth, Tremors in the Blood is a vibrant, atmospheric thriller and a warning from history: beware what you believe.
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Incredible Book
- By Christine on 01-04-24
By: Amit Katwala
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The Formula
- Unlocking the Secrets to Raising Highly Successful Children
- By: Ronald F. Ferguson, Tatsha Robertson
- Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Formula: Unlocking the Secrets to Raising Highly Successful Children, Harvard economist Ronald Ferguson, named in a New York Times profile as the foremost expert on the US educational "achievement gap," along with award-winning journalist Tatsha Robertson, reveal an intriguing blueprint for helping children from all types of backgrounds become successful adults.
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would recommend
- By Marcia on 02-25-20
By: Ronald F. Ferguson, and others
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The Last Neanderthal
- A Novel
- By: Claire Cameron
- Narrated by: Lisa Stathoplos, Casey Turner
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Forty thousand years in the past, the last family of Neanderthals roams the earth. After a crushingly hard winter, their numbers are low, but Girl, the oldest daughter, is just coming of age, and her family is determined to travel to the annual meeting place and find her a mate. But the unforgiving landscape takes its toll, and Girl is left alone to care for Runt, a foundling of unknown origin. As Girl and Runt face the coming winter storms, Girl realizes she has one final chance to save her people, even if it means sacrificing part of herself.
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The story is wonderful, the narration is HORRIBLE.
- By Traci on 04-30-17
By: Claire Cameron
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Nowhere Girl
- A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood
- By: Cheryl Diamond
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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By the time she was in her teens, Diamond had lived dozens of lives and lies, but as she grew older, love and trust turned to fear and violence, and her family—the only people she had in the world—began to unravel. She started to realize that her life itself might be a big con, and the people she loved, the most dangerous of all. With no way out and her identity burned so often that she had no proof she even existed, all that was left was a girl from nowhere.
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As Diamond said in an interview, “It is a horrific story at times, but also absolutely magical.”
- By Teela Klekotka on 02-11-23
By: Cheryl Diamond
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Writing Tools (10th Anniversary Edition)
- 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer
- By: Roy Peter Clark
- Narrated by: Neil Kaplan
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Ten years ago, Roy Peter Clark, America's most influential writing teacher, whittled down almost 30 years of experience in journalism, writing, and teaching into a series of 50 short essays on different aspects of writing. In the past decade, Writing Tools has become a classic guidebook for novices and experts alike and remains one of the best loved books on writing available. This new edition includes five brand-new, never-before-shared tools.
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Refreshing
- By Danielle on 06-15-21
By: Roy Peter Clark
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Standing My Ground
- A Capitol Police Officer's Fight for Accountability and Good Trouble After January 6th
- By: Harry Dunn
- Narrated by: Harry Dunn
- Length: 5 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Standing My Ground will provide a crucial, definitive first-hand account of what happened that day our world was shocked to its core. But it will also share the story of a man who refused to stay quiet when he learned that some of the men and women he had risked his life protecting, who knew him by name, would deny the horrors they faced.
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Listen and listen, again
- By B on 10-24-23
By: Harry Dunn
Alua’s words found their way into my heart, and grounded me in my body.
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This longtime follower is grateful!
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This book feels like a hug!
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Highly recommend
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Raw, authentic, human
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get this one for sure and read
then
Perfect is right
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Alua Arthur is a gifted writer.
A magnificent journey
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Authenticity
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Something we all should be thinking about to live our life and prepare for the inevitable
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the compassion and empathy in her voice as she read her book
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