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City of God
- A Novel
- Narrated by: John Rubinstein
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
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Publisher's summary
New York Times best-seller.
With brilliant and audacious strokes, E. L. Doctorow creates a breathtaking collage of memories, events, visions, and provocative thought, all centered on an idea of the modern reality of God. At the heart of this stylistically daring tour de force is a detective story about a cross that vanishes from a rundown Episcopal church in lower Manhattan only to reappear on the roof of an Upper West Side synagogue. Intrigued by the mystery - and by the maverick rector and the young rabbi investigating the strange act of desecration - is a well-known novelist, whose capacious brain is a virtual repository for the ideas and disasters of the age.
Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, filled with the sights and sounds of New York, and encompassing a large cast of vividly drawn characters including theologians, scientists, Holocaust survivors, and war veterans, City of God is a monumental work of spiritual reflection, philosophy, and history by America’s preeminent novelist and chronicler of our time.
Praise for City of God:
“A grander perspective on the universe...a novel that sets its sights on God.” (The Wall Street Journal)
“Dazzling.... The true miracle of City of God is the way its disparate parts fuse into a consistently enthralling and suspenseful whole.” (Time)
“Blooms with humor, and a humanity that carries triumphant as intelligent a novel as one might hope to find these days.” (Los Angeles Times)
“Radiates [with] panoramic ambition and spiritual incandescence.” (Chicago Tribune)
“One of the greatest American novels of the past fifty years.... Reading City of God restores one’s faith in literature.” (The Houston Chronicle)
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- A Memoir
- By: Patricia Lockwood
- Narrated by: Patricia Lockwood
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met - a man who lounges in boxer shorts, who loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972". His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide.
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Terrible narration--read, don't listen
- By Penelope on 08-06-17
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Doctor Zhivago
- By: Boris Pasternak, Larissa Volokhonsky - translator, Richard Pevear - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 23 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is a new translation of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago’s love for the tender and beautiful Lara.
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Russian Philosophical Feast
- By Syd Young on 02-16-13
By: Boris Pasternak, and others
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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Gravity's Rainbow
- By: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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"Time to touch the person next to you"
- By Jefferson on 07-04-16
By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
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Freddy and Fredericka
- By: Mark Helprin
- Narrated by: Robert Ian Mackenzie
- Length: 25 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling, critically acclaimed author Mark Helprin's work has drawn favorable comparisons to an elite group of literary legends, including James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, and Thomas Mann. Helprin's sheer comic brilliance shines in this ingenious farce.
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Can't rate it high enough (and I'm a tough grader)
- By Annette on 09-06-05
By: Mark Helprin
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Night Soldiers
- By: Alan Furst
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 18 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times bestselling author Alan Furst is widely recognized as master of the historical spy novel. Furst’s works are vivid evocations of long-forgotten heroes and feature plots that unfold to the inexorable cadence of history. Night Soldiers is a simultaneously thrilling and illuminating tale of espionage set in 1934.
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Best Alan Furst novel!
- By Placeholder on 04-27-11
By: Alan Furst
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Humboldt's Gift
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Christopher Hurt
- Length: 18 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.
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Great Book, Great Reader
- By Scott on 05-10-08
By: Saul Bellow
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The Dervish House
- By: Ian McDonald
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 21 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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It begins with an explosion. Another day, another bus bomb. Everyone, it seems, is after a piece of Turkey. But the shockwaves from this random act of 21st century pandemic terrorism will ripple further and resonate louder than just Enginsoy Square. Welcome to the world of The Dervish House; the great, ancient, paradoxical city of Istanbul, divided like a human brain, in the great, ancient, equally paradoxical nation of Turkey. The year is 2027....
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Listen, but then read
- By Karen on 09-18-11
By: Ian McDonald
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Falconer
- By: John Cheever
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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A convict named Farragut struggles to remain a man while inside a nightmarish prison. Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation.
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Unsettling and beautiful
- By Darwin8u on 01-21-13
By: John Cheever
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The Blind Assassin
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Whitney on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
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The astonishing novel of a young boy's life in the New York City of the 1930s, a stunning recreation of the sights, sounds, aromas and emotions of a time when the streets were safe, families stuck together through thick and thin, and all the promises of a generation culminate in a single great World's Fair.
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The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life…marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different.
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Post WWII Red Scare Politics Meets 60's Radicalism
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- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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One rainy morning in 1871 in lower Manhattan, Martin Pemberton, a freelance writer sees in a passing stagecoach several elderly men, one of whom he recognizes as his supposedly dead and buried father. While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins.
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History, mystery, and Drama
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- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
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The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears.
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too good for words
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Homer & Langley
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From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World's Fair, and The March, the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work. Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers - the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War.
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What a Dump.....
- By Kindle Customer on 09-04-09
By: E. L. Doctorow
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Billy Bathgate
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- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
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To listen to this audiobook is to enter the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who is accepted into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. Like an urban Tom Sawyer, Billy takes us along on his fateful adventures as he becomes good-luck charm, apprentice, and finally protégé to one of the great murdering gangsters of the Depression-era underworld in New York City. The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that is E. L. Doctorow's trademark comes to triumphant fruition in Billy Bathgate.
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Great Gangster story. Beautiful prose. The best
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World's Fair
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The astonishing novel of a young boy's life in the New York City of the 1930s, a stunning recreation of the sights, sounds, aromas and emotions of a time when the streets were safe, families stuck together through thick and thin, and all the promises of a generation culminate in a single great World's Fair.
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The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life…marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different.
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One rainy morning in 1871 in lower Manhattan, Martin Pemberton, a freelance writer sees in a passing stagecoach several elderly men, one of whom he recognizes as his supposedly dead and buried father. While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins.
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- Narrated by: E. L. Doctorow
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Overall
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Performance
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The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears.
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too good for words
- By connie on 10-05-08
By: E. L. Doctorow
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Homer & Langley
- A Novel
- By: E. L. Doctorow
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World's Fair, and The March, the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work. Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers - the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War.
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What a Dump.....
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Great Gangster story. Beautiful prose. The best
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What listeners say about City of God
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kathi
- 03-09-14
Deep and enormous sweep of ideas
This is a challenging book to review. It is unlike almost any I have read--and difficult to classify, though quite satisfying to listen to (after I began to grasp it's process, or non-process).
There is a rather light plot going on--a writer is committing ideas to notebooks--therefore, as we hear them, they lack the continuity of a novel--but seem to be the range of things that capture his attention, the scope of which are enormous. Then there is a story about a Christian church losing it's cross, and having it cruelly show up on the roof of a Jewish synagogue. This gives the sense that the entire book is meant to arouse notions of vexing theological questions, and Doctorow does not disappoint as he brings it to even cosmological questions.
It begins--in parallel with the Bible, with an explanation of one current belief about beginning of the universe, an expanded story about the Big Bang, and thereafter shifts among various ideas, verses, stories, that the writer would like to explore. The priest and the rabbis do some of the story telling, but as the book is not intended to simply be a novel with a linear plot, it is not always clear "who" is speaking--the writer, the other people or possibly the author himself. (It might be different if reading it--since there are sometimes breaks that make those things more clear).
However, not always being certain of whose consciousness is being expressed does not take away from the more important aspects, which seem to be a collection and expression of ideas and events (especially the Holocaust) that permeate the thinking around the latter part of the 20th century and the turn of the century (and still, for that matter). I believe it was originally published in 2000, so I'd say is quite appropriate in it's symbolic timing.
It is dazzling to listen to--I know I could listen many times and always find new things to hear and contemplate. This book defies an easy definition--as at one moment we are hearing about Einstein's ability to hold deeply religious and also scientific ideas in his mind simultaneously--while having a character (the priest) who seems unable to manage the religious ideas that he promotes to his congregation, so many doubts does he have.
I have not done justice to this book in my review--there are so many different aspects that one could comment upon. I will just say that it is fascinating--and though it is necessary to suspend the need for a book to have the typical movement from one point to another, it is quite something to sit back and listen to some of the ideas that are defining our time--in some contrast (implied if not stated) to those which shaped the thinking of others in history. It is a book that relies less on character development and mostly on the exposition of consciousness as it explores the broad and the miniscule in the universe from a theological, philosophical, even poetic point of view. I will have to say it has left an impact on me--and I know that I will listen again.
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4 people found this helpful
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- KBergin
- 11-29-20
A wonderful, challenging novel by one our greatest authors
In the past (before I retired from my job as an English Professor, I’ve named E. L. Doctorow as one of the United States’ greatest gifts to world literature for several reasons: his deep understanding of the society that he writes about in each of his books; his willingness to delve into philosophy and the human mind; his sometimes jarring plot structure and his ability to knit those seemingly disparate parts into a grand whole; his unbelievable ability to skip into genre fiction (gangster stories and mysteries, for example) and, of course, his dazzling prose.
But even as he does create a meaningful “whole” by the end of the last chapter, perhaps the quality that I most admire is that his books do not “end,” Rather they open out into the lived world of the reader, echoing and enlarging perception of the truthfulness of the book’s themes (or ideas). His books keep returning for a while, reinstating themselves in the reader’s thoughts.
This is a serious book that asks profound questions about modern (2000) religion, science, greed, and inhumanity. But it’s also about memory, friendship, and love.
Stick with Doctorow and you’ll be rewarded.
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- John S
- 03-21-14
Where is the story?
I listened to two hours of this book and there is no story. It seems just a collection of random sentences. It's disappointing because I have read and enjoyed all of the author's previous books. This one made no sense. It begins with a chapter about the beginnings of the universe, then goes on to a chapter about what I guess is the main theme and characters and then diverges from there. The author is a great writer but seems to be wandering all over the literary landscape. I very rarely do this, but I am returning the book to get a credit back.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Andrew Wienckowski
- 07-18-19
Shallow ramblings of a self centered man
jumble of perspectives from someone of questionable character. stop and deleted after 5 minutes of listening.
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