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Children and Fire
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Ursula Hegi
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
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Publisher's summary
The fourth novel in the Burgdorf Cycle.
Though more than 15 years have passed since Ursula Hegi's Stones from the River captivated critics and readers alike, it retains its popularity, is on academic reading lists, and continues to be adopted by book groups.
Also set in Burgdorf, Germany, Hegi's Children and Fire tells the story of a single day that will forever transform the lives of the townspeople. At the core of this remarkable novel is the question of how one teacher - gifted and joyful, passionate and inventive - can become seduced by propaganda during the early months of Hitler's regime and encourage her 10-year-old students to join the Hitler-Jugend with its hikes and songs and bonfires. Membership, she believes, will be a step toward better schools, better apprenticeships.
How can a woman we admire choose a direction we don't admire? So much has changed for the teacher, Thekla Jansen, and the people of Burgdorf in the year since the parliament building burned. Thekla's lover, Emil Hesping, is sure the Nazis did it to frame the communists. But Thekla believes what she hears on the radio, that the communists set the fire, and she's willing to relinquish some of her freedoms to keep her teaching position. She has always taken her moral courage for granted, but when each silent agreement chips away at that courage, she knows she must reclaim it.
Hegi funnels pivotal moments in history through the experiences of individual characters: Thekla's mother, who works as a housekeeper for a Jewish family; her employers, Michel and Ilse Abramowitz; Thekla's mentally ill father; Trudi Montag and her father, Leo Montag; Frulein Siderova, midwife to the dying; and the students who adore their young teacher. As Ursula Hegi writes along that edge where sorrow and bliss meet, she shows us how one society - educated, cultural, compassionate - can slip into a reality thats fabricated by propaganda and controlled by fear, how a surge of national unity can be manipulated into the dehumanization of a perceived enemy and the justification of torture and murder.
Gorgeously rendered and emotionally taut, Children and Fire confirms Ursula Hegi's position as one of the most distinguished writers of her generation.
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Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.
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Not Your Average "16 and Pregnant"
- By Susie on 12-11-12
By: Meredith Hall
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The Women in the Castle
- By: Jessica Shattuck
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined - an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times notable book The Hazards of Good Breeding.
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Skating On The Thin Ice Of Life
- By Sara on 04-29-17
By: Jessica Shattuck
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Island of a Thousand Mirrors
- By: Nayomi Munaweera
- Narrated by: Priya Ayyar
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Yasodhara tells the story of her own Sinhala family, rich in love, with everything they could ask for. As a child in idyllic Colombo, social hierarchies, their parents’ ambitions, teenage love shape Yasodhara and her siblings’ lives, and, subtly, the differences between Tamil and Sinhala people; but the peace is shattered by the tragedies of war. Yasodhara's family escapes to Los Angeles. But Yasodhara's life has already become intertwined with a young Tamil girl's.
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Pronunciation
- By Mahidevran on 04-07-18
By: Nayomi Munaweera
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A Tale of Love and Darkness
- By: Amos Oz
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 23 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.
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His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz
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The Vine of Desire
- By: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Anju and Sudha formed an astounding, almost psychic connection during their childhood in India. When Anju invites Sudha, a single mother in Calcutta, to come live with her and her husband, Sunil, in California, Sudha foolishly accepts, knowing full well that Sunil has long desired her. As Sunil's attraction rises to the surface, the trio must struggle to make sense of the freedoms of America - and of the ties that bind them to India and to one another.
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Vine of desire
- By Mz Shantay on 03-27-21
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The Vagrants
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Jackie Chung
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Yiyun Li is the winner of the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. The Vagrants, set in 1979 China, is the story of those affected by the execution of a 28-year-old counterrevolutionary. Though suffering, Li's characters nevertheless struggle to maintain hope amid cruel circumstance.
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Lovely prose, good story, deadly narration
- By Athene on 05-10-13
By: Yiyun Li
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The Star Side of Bird Hill
- By: Naomi Jackson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Two sisters, ages 10 and 16, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados, after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister, Dionne, live, for the summer of 1989, with their grandmother, Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah. Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother's limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations.
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My absolute favorite book of all time
- By Eme on 07-16-15
By: Naomi Jackson
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Beyond the Pale
- By: Elana Dykewomon
- Narrated by: Elana Dykewomon
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Beyond the Pale - winner of the Lambda Literary Award - tells the stories of two Jewish women living through times of darkness and inhumanity in the early 20th century, capturing their undaunted love and courage in luminous and moving prose. The richly textured novel details Gutke Gurvich's odyssey from her apprenticeship as a midwife in a Russian shtetl to her work in the suffrage movement in New York.
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great historical fiction with a lesbian twist
- By Kelly on 11-25-13
By: Elana Dykewomon
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The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
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Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
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Wicked
- The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
- By: Gregory Maguire
- Narrated by: John McDonough
- Length: 19 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Heralded as an instant classic of fantasy literature, Maguire has written a wonderfully imaginative retelling of The Wizard of Oz told from the Wicked Witch's point of view. More than just a fairy tale for adults, Wicked is a meditation on the nature of good and evil.
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It's not easy being green
- By PangaeaReads on 07-30-08
By: Gregory Maguire
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The Song Poet
- A Memoir of My Father
- By: Kao Kalia Yang
- Narrated by: Kao Kalia Yang
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until one day a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee's mother, the songs leave him for good.
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Beautiful, full of sadness, power, and heart.
- By Melissa L. Magana on 04-27-17
By: Kao Kalia Yang
What listeners say about Children and Fire
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jennifer Nieboer
- 12-14-14
Listen to sample before buying audio version
I downloaded this book on the recommendation of someone who had read the printed version and loved it. I wish I had listened to a sample of it before I bought it or I would have gotten the printed version as well.
The book is a fascinating look at the lives of ordinary citizens of a small German town during Hitler's rise to power, and explores reasons for why good, moral people could be seduced by the promises of the Nazi regime, or more often, refused to believe that it would go any further down the road toward genocide and therefore did nothing until it was too late. Told mostly through the eyes of a young teacher, flashbacks reveal much about her past and the consequences she faces if she doesn't go along with the regime and all it entails.
The problem that I had with the book was the narrator, who happens to be the author herself. I realize that English is not her native language, and I admire her for wanting to have the book read the way she probably heard it in her mind, but she was not a good choice for an audio version of the book. She reads in a languid, slow, almost sometimes halting fashion that I could have tolerated except for her pronounced lisp. And I don't mean a German accent, which was quite easy to listen to, but her chronic inability to pronounce the Rs and Ls in words, instead substituting Ws. This is not a side effect of a German accent, and I found it to be incredibly distracting. I am sympathetic to people with speech difficulties (I've had problems with an occasional stammer throughout my life) but I in no way think they should be narrating audio books. I finally had to put the playback speed on my iPod to Faster play, to help minimize the lisp, and it also neatly solved the very slow pace of the narration. I think this audio version would have been much better served with someone such as Diane Kruger or Elisabeth Rohm reading it. Both are actresses with good speaking voices who are German born or raised, and could have easily handled the German passages throughout the novel.
So, I would recommend the book, but consider carefully if the audio version is acceptable to you by listening to a sample first.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Ruth Green
- 10-10-11
Thoughtful and moving literary fiction
The publisher's summary more than adequately explains the setting of the novel. I simply want to recommend this novel and its narration, done by the author herself. It is warm, intimate, and deliberate. The German accent is not difficult, but rather gives a flavor to the reading that enhances the experience of listening. As a teacher, I found the relationship of the protagonist to her students to be remarkably insightful. The canvas of the novel is brush-stroked with the complexities of human relationships, whether it be parents to children, one teacher to another, among the villagers, or among the children themselves, and the author explores the ambiguous question of when compromise is a virtuous sacrifice, and when it becomes a moral failing. We see this village through a mist of melancholy, as we know what is around the corner for these schoolboys with the rise of Nazism, and yet the experience of listening to this book is ultimately affirming of the preciousness of human life and relationships, at the same time it gives an appreciation for the precariousness of identity and belonging.
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- J. Elliott
- 06-12-22
Moving and beautifully written
I first read Stones from the River 25 years ago and, given the troubling hints of approaching fascism in America, I decided to revisit Hegi. Like SFTR, this is set in Bergdorf, beginning in 1934, this time focusing on a young teacher, her 4th grade boys being cultivated for Hitler Tough, and the intertwining histories that only a few see will lead to the Nazi destruction of all they've loved. It's an interesting combination of dispassionate storytelling and poetic language, full of brilliant observations that engaged head and heart without forca moment uslipping into melodrama. Hegi's characters feel believable, if not always likable. indeed, the teacher wants her students to think about courage vs hubris and what it means to be heroic. We see the small steps Hitler took to marginalize people and how people rationalized going on even if they didn't support him. They thought they could wait it out and he would go away. But each step from marginalizing built on the last -- Jews could not teach, then books must be burned, then children betrayed parents -- and soon it is unstoppable and everyone is focused on self-preservation. The parallels with total are too close for comfort.
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- Gerry
- 10-08-22
Ursula never disappoints
Please get her other books on Audible. They are so good. Not to be missed. Stones from the River, Floating in my Mothers Palms, etc just to name two.
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1 person found this helpful