Canyon Dreams
A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation
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Narrated by:
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Darrell Dennis
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By:
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Michael Powell
About this listen
The moving story of a Navajo high school basketball team, its members struggling with the everyday challenges of high school, adolescence, and family, and the great and unique obstacles facing Native Americans living on reservations.
Deep in the heart of Northern Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the vast 17.5 million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is passion, passed from grandparent to parent to child. Rez Ball is a sport for winters where dark and cold descend fast and there is little else to do but roam mesa tops, work, and wonder what the future holds. The town has 4,500 residents, and the high school arena seats 7,000. Fans drive 30, 50, even 80 miles to see the fast-paced and highly competitive matchups that are more than just games to players and fans.
Celebrated Times journalist Michael Powell brings us a narrative of triumph and hardship, a moving story about a basketball team on a Navajo reservation that shows how important sports can be to youths in struggling communities, and the transcendent magic and painful realities that confront Native Americans living on reservations. This audiobook details his season-long immersion in the team, town, and culture, in which there were exhilarating wins, crushing losses, and conversations on long bus rides across the desert about dreams of leaving home and the fear of the same.
©2019 Michael Powell (P)2019 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"What a beautiful, big-hearted, illuminating book Michael Powell has written. Canyon Dreams is at once particular and universal as we follow the coming of age journey of the Navajo basketball boys of Chinle High." (David Maraniss, author of Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero)
"In Canyon Dreams, Michael Powell transports us to a Navajo reservation with an old basketball coach who teaches the X and O’s of hope to a group of high-schoolers who have had little reason to believe it exists. It is as inspiring as it is heartbreaking: I couldn’t put it down." (Joe Drape, author of the New York Times best seller Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen)
"Powell knows his basketball, and his game accounts are exciting, but the real strength of Canyon Dreams is the insight it provides into the unique culture of the reservation." (Booklist)
"Delivering a deeply felt portrait of life.... As exciting as a full-court press and a thoughtful study of young athletes in a world little known to outsiders." (Kirkus Reviews)
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Dr. J Unabridged
- The Autobiography
- By: Julius Erving, Karl Taro Greenfeld
- Narrated by: Julius Erving
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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With his flights of improvisation around the basket and his towering afro, Julius Erving became one of the most charismatic (and revolutionary) players basketball has ever known. But while the public has long revered this cultural icon, few have ever known of the double life of Julius Erving. Dr. J traces the inner lives of the nearly perfect player and the imperfect man - and how he has come to terms with both.
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I may overrate it, but I’m a hoops junkie!
- By @JWTheBlueprint on 01-29-14
By: Julius Erving, and others
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Twelve Mighty Orphans
- The Inspiring True Story of the Mighty Mites Who Ruled Texas Football
- By: Jim Dent
- Narrated by: Barry Abrams
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing bigger in Texas high school football than the Masonic Home Mighty Mites - a group of orphans bound together by hardship and death. These youngsters, in spite of being outweighed by at least 30 pounds per man, were the toughest football team around. They began with nothing - not even a football - yet in a few years were playing for the state championship on the highest level of Texas football. This is a winning tribute to a courageous band of underdogs from a time when America desperately needed fresh hope and big dreams.
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Great story!!
- By Damian McKeon on 06-14-21
By: Jim Dent
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By the Grace of the Game
- The Holocaust, a Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream
- By: Dan Grunfeld
- Narrated by: Chris Lutkin
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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When Lily and Alex entered a packed gymnasium in Queens, New York, in 1972, they barely recognized their son. The boy who escaped to America with them, who was bullied as he struggled to learn English and cope with family tragedy, was now a young man who had discovered and secretly honed his basketball talent on the outdoor courts of New York City. That young man was Ernie Grunfeld, who would go on to win an Olympic gold medal and reach previously unimaginable heights as an NBA player and executive.
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Exceptional
- By Patrick Messing on 04-07-22
By: Dan Grunfeld
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Playing Through the Whistle
- Steel, Football, and an American Town
- By: S. L. Price
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 15 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Aliquippa, Pennsylvania is famous for two things: the Jones and Laughlin Steel mill, an industrial behemoth that helped win World War II; and football, with a high school team that has produced numerous NFL stars, including Mike Ditka and Darrelle Revis. But the mill, once the fourth largest producer in America, closed for good in 2000. What happens to a town when a dream dies? Does it just disappear?
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This is not a football book
- By radchick on 04-19-17
By: S. L. Price
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The Cost of These Dreams
- Sports Stories and Other Serious Business
- By: Wright Thompson
- Narrated by: Wright Thompson
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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There is only one Wright Thompson. He is, as they say, famous if you know who he is: his work includes the most-read articles in the history of ESPN (and it's not even close) and has been anthologized in the Best American Sports Writing series ten times, and he counts John Grisham and Richard Ford among his ardent admirers. But to say his pieces are about sports, while true as far as it goes, is like saying Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove is a book about a cattle drive.
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Just great
- By ACK on 06-02-19
By: Wright Thompson
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Tomboyland
- Essays
- By: Melissa Faliveno, Joey Soloway - introduction
- Narrated by: Melissa Faliveno
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Flyover country, the middle of nowhere, the space between the coasts. The American Midwest is a place beyond definition, whose very boundaries are a question. It's a place of rolling prairies and towering pines, where guns in bars and trucks on blocks are as much a part of the landscape as rivers and lakes and farms. Where girls are girls and boys are boys, where women are mothers and wives, where one is taught to work hard and live between the lines.
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Embrace the Quirk
- By Lorraine S. on 07-26-22
By: Melissa Faliveno, and others
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Navajos Wear Nikes
- A Reservation Life
- By: Jim Kristofic
- Narrated by: Jim Kristofic
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Just before starting second grade, Jim Kristofic moved from Pittsburgh across the country to Ganado, Arizona, when his mother took a job at a hospital on the Navajo Reservation. Navajos Wear Nikes reveals the complexity of modern life on the Navajo Reservation, a world where Anglo and Navajo coexisted in a tenuous truce. After the births of his Navajo half-siblings, Jim and his family moved off the Reservation to an Arizona border town where they struggled to readapt to an Anglo world that no longer felt like home.
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Entertaining and Educational
- By Savanna A Harvey on 07-13-15
By: Jim Kristofic
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Outcasts United
- An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman's Quest to Make a Difference
- By: Warren St. John
- Narrated by: Lincoln Hoppe
- Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Set against the backdrop of an American town that without its consent had become a vast social experiment, Outcasts United follows a pivotal season in the life of the Fugees and their charismatic coach. Warren St. John documents the lives of a diverse group of young people as they miraculously coalesce into a band of brothers, while also drawing a fascinating portrait of a fading American town struggling to accommodate its new arrivals.
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great story, lackluster narration
- By CRE on 02-19-13
By: Warren St. John
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Dalva
- A Novel
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrated by: Chris Henry Coffey, Stacey Glemboski
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born, and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at 45 she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians.
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As a woman, I can finally appreciate Jim Harrison with this book.
- By kathryn gray on 09-11-24
By: Jim Harrison
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Oak Flat
- A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West
- By: Lauren Redniss
- Narrated by: Lauren Redniss, Darrell Dennis, Kyla Garcia, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Oak Flat is a serene high-elevation mesa that sits above the Southeastern Arizona desert, 15 miles to the west of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. For the San Carlos tribe, Oak Flat is a holy place, an ancient burial ground and religious site where Apache girls celebrate the coming-of-age ritual known as the Sunrise Ceremony. In 1995, a massive untapped copper reserve was discovered nearby.
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Beautiful Story
- By Amazon Customer on 11-23-21
By: Lauren Redniss
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Barkley
- A Biography
- By: Timothy Bella
- Narrated by: Korey Jackson
- Length: 16 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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He's one of the most interesting American athletes in the past fifty years. Passionate, candid, iconoclastic, and gifted both on and off the court, Charles Barkley has made a lasting impact on not only the world of basketball but pop culture at large. Yet few people know the real Charles. Informed by over 370 original interviews and painstaking research, Timothy Bella's Barkley is the most comprehensive biography to date of one of the most talked about icons in the world of sports.
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Great insight to the big man’s life.
- By marci rodee on 07-03-23
By: Timothy Bella
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Head On
- A Memoir
- By: Larry Csonka
- Narrated by: Phil Thron
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Larry Csonka ran the football with audacity and authority. He lived his off-the-field life with equal abandon. As part of the NFL's 100th Anniversary, he and his undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins teammates were named the best team in NFL history. In Head On, Csonka shares how they achieved their legendary Perfect Season. From quitting football at a young age, to his often-combative relationship with Coach Don Shula, to brazen exploits with his NFL pals, Csonka narrates a life that is colorful, unbridled, and thrilling.
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My Childhood Hero
- By Amy MacDougall on 01-28-23
By: Larry Csonka
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Dust Bowl Girls
- The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory
- By: Lydia Reeder
- Narrated by: Virginia Wolf
- Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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At the height of the Great Depression, Sam Babb, the charismatic basketball coach of tiny Oklahoma Presbyterian College, began dreaming. Like so many others, he wanted a reason to have hope. Traveling from farm to farm, he recruited talented, hardworking young women and offered them a chance at a better life: a free college education if they would come play for his basketball team, the Cardinals. Despite their fears of leaving home and the sacrifices faced by their families, the women followed Babb and his dream.
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Only A 'Nice' Story
- By Gillian on 01-29-17
By: Lydia Reeder
What listeners say about Canyon Dreams
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- haynes9
- 05-27-22
Rez Ball Fleshed Out
Having had the privilege of living on the Reservation for 25 years, this book is certainly an accurate portrayal of the hold the basketball has on the Navajo Nation. it was well done, poignant, and accurate. I appreciate the passion that the narrator put into this. Made you feel transported to the gym. Very well done and a good read for anyone interested in Navajo life.
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- J. Webber
- 09-08-20
growing up n the rez...
Basketball has been apart of America since inception. I love that it is such a tool for great opportunity.
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- Denny & Geraldine calhoun
- 11-07-23
Outstanding
A great story which I enjoyed very much. The fact that it was a true story makes it even better and more enjoyable.
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