
Eden Undone
A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II
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Narrated by:
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Cassandra Campbell
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By:
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Abbott Kahler
About this listen
An incredible true story of murder, romance, and a fateful search for utopia in the Galápagos—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Ghosts of Eden Park
“Abbott Kahler’s wickedly gothic tale confronts an essential truth about those who ditch civilization: Try as we might, humans cannot elude the tyranny of our own nature.”—Hampton Sides, author of The Wide Wide Sea
“With taut prose and sublime storytelling, Kahler crafts an atmospheric page-turner, ominous and thought-provoking.”—Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls and The Woman They Could Not Silence
At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise. One was so devoted to a life of isolation that he’d had his teeth extracted and replaced with a set of steel dentures.
As Hancock and his fellow American explorers would witness, paradise had turned into chaos. The three sets of exiles—a Berlin doctor and his lover, a traumatized World War I veteran and his young family, and an Austrian baroness with two adoring paramours—were riven by conflict. Petty slights led to angry confrontations. The baroness, wielding a riding crop and pearl-handled revolver, staged physical fights between her two lovers and unabashedly seduced American tourists. The conclusion was deadly: with two exiles missing and two others dead, the survivors hurled accusations of murder.
Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia—and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.
©2024 Abbott Kahler (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“We all long for utopias to escape into, but as Abbott Kahler brilliantly demonstrates in the sumptuous storytelling feat that is her latest nonfiction book, Eden Undone, there simply is no escaping the hell that is other people. I was wowed by her research, her depiction of the tropical magic of the Galápagos Islands, her empathy for such a vivid array of characters—some of whom behave very badly—and for the larger point that paradises can be squandered by human venality.”—Sarah Weinman, award-winning author of The Real Lolita and Scoundrel
“Eden Undone is a mind-blowing tale of adventure, obsession, and hubris, with more twists—and more eccentric characters—than an Agatha Christie mystery. (The gun-toting, sex-crazed Baroness is surely one of the more spectacular villains in true-crime history.) In Abbott Kahler’s ever-brilliant hands, truth is always stranger than fiction.”—Ada Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Can’t Sleep
“A wild ride through an extraordinary true story, Eden Undone is addictive and astonishing. It combines a forgotten piece of history with the urgency of a murder mystery in the most unlikely setting. It will captivate you.”—Susan Orlean, New York Times bestselling author of The Library Book
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Story
Karen Abbott's colorful, nuanced portrait of the iconic Everleigh sisters; their world-famous brothel, the Everleigh Club; and the perennial clash between our nation's hedonistic impulses and Puritanical roots culminates in a dramatic last stand between brothel keepers and crusading reformers. Sin in the Second City offers a vivid snapshot of America's journey from Victorian-era propriety to 20th-century modernity.
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Great book - brilliant narrator!
- By Z. Halley on 04-17-10
By: Karen Abbott
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The Sinners All Bow
- Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne
- By: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Narrated by: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncovered, more questions emerged. Was Sarah’s death a suicide...or something much darker? Determined to uncover the real story, Victorian writer Catharine Read Arnold Williams threw herself into the investigation as the trial was unfolding and wrote what many claim to be the first American true-crime narrative, Fall River.
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Wonderful storytelling!
- By Stephen Cronin on 05-26-25
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Save Our Souls
- The True Story of a Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder
- By: Matthew Pearl
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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On December 10, 1887, a shark fishing boat disappeared. On board the doomed vessel were the Walkers—the ship’s captain Frederick, his wife Elizabeth, their three teenage sons, and their dog—along with the ship’s crew. The family had spotted a promising fishing location when a terrible storm arose, splitting their vessel in two and leaving those onboard adrift on the perilous sea. When the castaways awoke the next morning, they discovered they had been washed ashore—on an island inhabited by a large but ragged and emaciated man who introduced himself as Hans.
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Awful
- By aleris on 02-11-25
By: Matthew Pearl
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The Feather Thief
- Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
- By: Kirk Wallace Johnson
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, 20-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins - some collected 150 years earlier.
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Unusual and true natural history mystery!
- By Sylvia on 04-28-18
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The Curse of the Marquis de Sade
- A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History
- By: Joel Warner
- Narrated by: Stephen Mendel
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Described as both “one of the most important novels ever written” and “the gospel of evil,” 120 Days of Sodom was written by the Marquis de Sade, a notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat who waged a campaign of mayhem and debauchery across France, evaded execution, and inspired the word “sadism,” which came to mean receiving pleasure from pain. Despite all his crimes, Sade considered this work to be his greatest transgression.
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A very fascinating historical story
- By Jeremy on 04-27-23
By: Joel Warner
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The Barn
- The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
- By: Wright Thompson
- Narrated by: Wright Thompson
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Wright Thompson’s family farm in Mississippi is 23 miles from the site of one of the most notorious and consequential killings in American history, yet he had to leave the state for college before he learned the first thing about it. To this day, fundamental truths about the crime are widely unknown, including where it took place and how many people were involved. This is no accident: the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing.
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Evocative
- By Mentally in Paris on 09-25-24
By: Wright Thompson
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An Unfinished Love Story
- A Personal History of the 1960s
- By: Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Narrated by: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Bryan Cranston
- Length: 17 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America’s most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.
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A Great Listen
- By Bill on 04-20-24
Fascinating true story
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By Abbott Kahler
One segment of this book described a news report about the subject’s of the book. The article talked about how a few wealthy and eccentric people had left the chaotic world of the 1930’s to settle on a remote Pacific island in the Galapagos where they sat in paradise sipping tea and reading while the world fell apart.
The book is proof that people bring drama with them regardless of where they go, as they managed to stir up intrigue, sexcapades and murder.
With that, the narrative still drags somewhat. It probably could have been half as long.
People bring drama to paradise
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Abslutely enchanting
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Didn’t enjoy it.
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