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Dust Tracks on a Road
- An Autobiography
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
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Publisher's summary
"Warm, witty, imaginative... This is a rich and winning book." (The New Yorker)
Dust Tracks on a Road is the bold, poignant, and funny autobiography of novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of American literature's most compelling and influential authors. Hurston's powerful novels of the South - including Jonah's Gourd Vine and, most famously, Their Eyes Were Watching God - continue to enthrall readers with their lyrical grace, sharp detail, and captivating emotionality. First published in 1942, Dust Tracks on a Road is Hurston's personal story, told in her own words. The Perennial Modern Classics Deluxe edition includes an all-new foreword by Maya Angelou, an extended biography by Valerie Boyd, and a special section featuring the contemporary reviews that greeted the book's original publication.
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Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.
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A meandering audiobook...
- By Daniel on 09-03-04
By: Edward P. Jones
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Going to Meet the Man
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water.
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Punch in the gut
- By Rebecca on 05-08-17
By: James Baldwin
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Laddie
- A True Blue Story
- By: Gene Stratton-Porter
- Narrated by: Laurie Klein
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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This is a captivating, good-humored look at family life in a small farming community in Indiana in the early 1900s.
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An American Classic
- By Clint on 07-04-10
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The Moonflower Vine
- A Novel
- By: Jetta Carleton
- Narrated by: Natalie Ross
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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On a farm in western Missouri, during the first half of the twentieth century, Matthew and Callie Soames create a life for themselves and raise four headstrong daughters. Jessica will break their hearts. Leonie will fall in love with the wrong man. Mary Jo will escape to New York. And wild child Mathy’s fate will be the family’s greatest tragedy. Over the decades they will love, deceive, comfort, forgive - and, ultimately, they will come to cherish all the more fiercely the bonds of love that hold the family together.
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I didn't want it to end!!!
- By Amanda H. on 01-20-21
By: Jetta Carleton
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Peyton Place
- By: Grace Metalious
- Narrated by: Tim O'Connor
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1956, when this novel was first published, communities all over New England snapped up copies to see if they were the town portrayed in the book. Peyton Place is the story of a repressive New England town known for its high standards of public morality, and the steamy sexual activities that take place behind its bedroom doors.
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Best book I've read to date!
- By Crusader on 11-07-11
By: Grace Metalious
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The Ponder Heart
- By: Eudora Welty
- Narrated by: Sally Darling
- Length: 4 hrs
- Unabridged
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Originally published in The New Yorker in 1954, The Ponder Heart is easily Eudora Welty’s most comic novel, a lighthearted burlesque that rivals Caldwell’s Tobacco Road for capturing rural idioms, and the novels of Mark Twain for high farce.
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Great reader
- By Patricia B. on 03-12-17
By: Eudora Welty
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Fifth Business
- The Deptford Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Robertson Davies
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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This first novel in The Deptford Trilogy introduces Ramsay, a man who returns from World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross but who is destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As we hear Ramsey tell his story, we begin to realize that, from childhood, he has influenced those around him in a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious way.
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Been waiting for this
- By Vinity on 12-10-11
By: Robertson Davies
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
- By: Betty Smith
- Narrated by: Kate Burton
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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A moving coming-of-age story set in the 1900s, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows the lives of 11-year-old Francie Nolan, her younger brother Neely, and their parents, Irish immigrants who have settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Johnny Nolan is as loving and fanciful as they come, but he is also often drunk and out of work, unable to find his place in the land of opportunity.
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Book: flawless. SKIP THE RECORDED INTRO!!
- By Wild Wise Woman on 09-04-11
By: Betty Smith
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Main Street
- By: Sinclair Lewis
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
- Length: 19 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Widely hailed as a milestone in American literature, Sinclair Lewis' Main Street vividly describes a country on the verge of massive change, with traditional values being threatened by progress. The novel's heroine, Carol Milford, is a highly educated, ambitious woman who plans to join a newly enlightened society. But after marrying a small-town doctor, she finds herself trapped in the role of a dutiful wife. Carol's desires for social change conflict with the security of her comfortable married life, as she struggles to understand the cost of conformity...and rebellion. As relevant today as it was upon its 1920 publication, Main Street is both a masterful piece of writing and a fascinating microcosm of America's social evolution.
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Delightful reading of an excellent book
- By Steve Bird on 06-14-05
By: Sinclair Lewis
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Freedom Road
- By: Howard Fast
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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It was everywhere. You couldn’t talk about the revolution without using the word freedom in the same breath. But Gideon Jackson knew that freedom meant something different if your skin was black. Fast’s fictional account of the post Civil War era takes us into the life of Gideon Jackson, a black man, newly freed, and determined to make a difference.
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Great Story, Decent Narrator
- By Keon Gardner on 12-04-17
By: Howard Fast
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skip the introduction!
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perfection
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The audio is not the same as the book
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In the 1950s, as a continuation of Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston penned a historical novel about one of the most infamous figures in the Bible, Herod the Great. In Hurston’s retelling, Herod is not the wicked ruler of the New Testament who is charged with the “slaughter of the innocents,” but a forerunner of Christ—a beloved king who enriched Jewish culture and brought prosperity and peace to Judea.
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Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
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So good that I'm writing my first Audible review!
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Born to parents who fled slavery and the Trail of Tears, Magnolia Flower is a girl with a vibrant spirit. Not to be deterred by rigid ways of the world, she longs to connect with others, who too long for freedom. She finds this in a young man of letters who her father disapproves of. In her quest to be free, Magnolia must make a choice and set off on a journey that will prove just how brave one can be when leading with one’s heart.
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Beautiful Love story
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It is the late 21st century, and due to the economic breakdown and rising crime rate, nearly every citizen has fled Toronto. The city is a slum, populated by the homeless, the poor, and criminals like Rudy, who uses the power of voodoo to help him control the booming drug market. But also left behind are people like Ti-Jeanne, who hope to use voodoo to help rebuild the city, even as Canada's privileged population turns to Toronto to begin harvesting human organs.
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Fascinating, unique story deftly narrated
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Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade - Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet - at the center of the "Harlem Renaissance." Arnold Rampersad writes in his incisive new introduction to The Big Sea, an American classic: "This is American writing at its best...."
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The Big Sea
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How It Feels to Be Colored Me
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How It Feels To Be Colored Me was first published in The World Tomorrow in May 1928. In this autobiographical piece that focuses on race and 1920s America, Hurston reflects on her early childhood in an all-black Florida town and her first experiences in life where she felt "different." Hurston focuses on the similarities we all share and on her own self-identity in the face of difference. "Through it all," she says, "I remain myself."
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made me tear up
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The Source of Self-Regard
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Refreshing thoughts
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Newjack
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As he struggles to be a good officer, Ted Conover angers inmates, dodges blows, works to balance decency with toughness, and participates in prison rituals - strip frisks, cell searches, cell "extractions" - that exact a toll on inmates and officers alike. The tale begins with the corrections academy and ends with the flames and smoke of New Year's Eve on Conover's floor of the notorious B-Block. Along the way, Conover also recounts the history of Sing Sing.
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THE BEST BOOK ON PRISON LIFE I HAVE EVER READ!!!
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An American Childhood
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A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard’s poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.
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Very Disappointing
- By woody on 01-30-11
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What listeners say about Dust Tracks on a Road
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jefferson
- 02-24-21
“I feel that I have lived”
Zora Neale Hurston begins her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) with a historical overview of her hometown, Eatonville, Florida, the first officially sanctioned all-black town in America, including details on the conflict between the USA and the Cherokee and Seminoles and the runaway black slaves they adopted into their tribes. She then describes the backgrounds, personalities, courtship, marriage, and children of her parents; recounts her childhood (the most interesting chapters in the book for me), including her questioning, creative, and wandering mind and love of stories (which led her to chafe at the standard “pigeon hole way of life”); her vivid visions of future turning points in her life; the breakup of her family with the death of her mother; her education; her professional career (as ethnologist and writer); her love life and friendships; and her thoughts on race and religion and America, etc.
The book ends well, but the audiobook—finely read by Bahni Turpin—adds an Appendix featuring a series of essays and short pieces, many of which repeat anecdotes, parables, ideas, and turns of phrase that she uses in her autobiography, such that I began feeling a chafing redundancy. After the Appendix comes a Chronology by Henry Louis Gates that ends with the sad fact that Zora Neal Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave in 1960, and that Alice Walker discovered and marked her grave in 1973, launching a Hurston revival.
Hurston’s writing, as in her splendid Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), is savory and rich, refined and earthy, witty and concise, including colorful utterances by her family and friends, as when her father became enraged when she asked for a horse for Christmas: “It’s a sin and a shame. Let me tell you something right now my young lady. You ain’t white. Ridin’ a horse. Always trying to wear the big hat.” She can write a lyrical sensual poetry in prose, too: “I was only happy in the woods and when the ecstatic Florida springtime came strolling from the sea, transglorifying the world with its aura. Then I hid out in the tall wild oats that waved like a green tea veil. I nibbled sweet oat stalks and listened to the wind soughing and sighing through the crowns of the lofty pines.” And an earthy pithy writing: “This was the very corn I wanted to grind” (i.e., an excuse to physically fight her stepmother). And great similes: “Strange things must have looked out of my eyes like Lazarus after his resurrection.”
And she writes great lines about--
Feeling different:
“If the village was singing a chorus, I must’ve missed the tune.”
Prayer:
“Prayer seems to me a crying of weakness and an attempt to avoid by trickery the rules of the game as laid down… I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life as it is does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it.”
Religion:
“Mystery is the essence of divinity.”
Love:
“Much that passes for constant love is a golded up moment walking in its sleep. Some people know that it is the walk of the dead, but in desperation and desolation they have staked everything on life after death and the resurrection. So they haunt the graveyard. They build an altar on the tomb and wait there like faithful Mary for the stone to roll away. So the moment has authority over all of their lives. They pray constantly for the miracle of the moment to burst it’s bonds and spread out over time.”
Patriotism:
“I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.”
Poverty:
“There is something about poverty that smells like death… People can be slave ships in shoes.”
Hurston would disapprove of the current movement for reparations for slavery. She says that although slavery and reconstruction were “sad” and that America would be better off without them, they are in the past, and she is a forward-looking person who does not want to go around beating on the coffins of our unpleasant past and does not want to confront descendants of slaveowners to blame them for the actions of their ancestors.
She also argues that there is no such thing as race and that she does not like constructions like “race consciousness” or “race pride” or “race problems,” and that after all everybody is an individual and is not determined by the color of his or her skin and that there are good and bad people among the members of every skin color. In this, she does not acknowledge the stacked deck with which black people must play the game of life in America or the racist environment in which they must try to survive in the USA. And when viewed from the current context of Black Lives Matter and the police shooting of unarmed black men, she seems a little disingenuous and out of date when saying that everyone has a chance to do what they want to do if they work hard.
At the same time, in great detail she lists multiple criteria you can use if you want to determine what a black person is, and I would imagine that some of them must seem stereotypical and offensive to Black people. E.g., if the person likes making up words that sound good in context, if the person likes imitating others, if the person cannot agree with their friend, if the person likes acting dramatically, etc., then the person is a “Negro.” I think she only partly has her tongue in cheek as she undercuts her claims elsewhere that there’s no such thing as race, especially when you take into account her compelling account of organizing “natural Negro songs with action” in which she says she wanted to present and promote the “real music of my people.”
I did like the book a lot, though not so much as Their Eyes Were Watching God. But fans of that book or of Hurston should read her autobiography.
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- SanBasBiz
- 03-15-19
Engaging and Thought Provoking
Amazing narrator that brings everything to life. Along the way learned many things. Now have deep respect and gratitude for what early pioneers went through. we
Definitely recommend this one.
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- lovetoread
- 09-28-19
interesting
This book helped me with a better understanding of black culture. I was particularly interested in the difference between spirituals performed as they really are and how composers have changed the idiom.
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- WolfWoman
- 01-09-22
great narrator
always wanted to read her books. this one is her biography. she hung out with some literary wits
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- Bisky's Dad.
- 03-27-20
Exceptional author. Exceptional narrator.
This production deserves 10 stars. Zora Neale Hurston was an outstanding writer and the narration does her work justice. Audible should seek out more of Hurston's works and produce them with this narrator.
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15 people found this helpful
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- Mary
- 06-22-18
w Wonderful and Thrilling!!!!
Excellent,and well narrated.Ms.Turpin brings the book to life in a way that takes there !!!!!!
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4 people found this helpful
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- Linda M. Harp
- 02-26-19
Special in every way
So much love, respect & intelligence poured into the narration. Bravo B Turpin! This was my first Zora Hurston read and I will be back for more. Everything about this wonderful woman sits well with my soul!
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-21-19
Creatively Written.
Zora Neale Hurston was an outstanding writer. I thank Alice Walker for reintroducing her works to another generation.
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- Julie A. Reiskin
- 06-21-20
lyrical story telling
it was easy to listen to. I want to read more by this incredible author.
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- amrasa
- 02-21-22
Exceptional!!!
Loved every minute, replayed certain passages to infuse how she used the tongue .Fantastic.
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