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Field Notes from a Waterborne Land
- Bengal Beyond the Bhadralok
- Narrated by: Anindya Chakravorty
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
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Publisher's summary
In the late 2000s, when the three-decade-long Left Front rule in West Bengal was crumbling, Parimal Bhattacharya began to travel outside the well-trodden urban centres to different parts of the region - from the Sundarbans to tribal Jangalmahal, from the outskirts of Kolkata to villages on the Bangladesh border, from the floodplains of the Hooghly to the forests of Simlipal in neighbouring Odisha.
There, he encountered: a woman who was branded a witch because she was listed in the census as literate; an island that vanished famously, only to resurface; a paralysed communist who dreams about the death of a river; a forest community who believe they are descendants of the Harappans; an old millworker and his wife who fight the ghosts of a dead industrial town with laughter; a fisherman uprooted by a river eleven times in twenty years; and many more. This book documents the missing narratives of these 'other' Bengalis, the largely invisible majority beyond the bhadralok that the rest of India knows.
Moving between the personal and the political, and between travelogue, journal and memoir, Field Notes from a Waterborne Land takes the listener on a journey across a fascinating land peopled with unforgettable characters.
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- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
In The First Man, Albert Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds, and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. The result is a moving journey through the lost landscape of youth that also discloses the wellsprings of Camus's aesthetic powers and moral vision.
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Great Narration by Jefferson Mays
- By Sean Patrick Stevens on 07-31-21
By: Albert Camus
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Full Circle
- A Pacific Journey with Michael Palin
- By: Michael Palin
- Narrated by: Michael Palin
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Story
Following the hugely popular and successful Around the World in 80 Days and Pole to Pole, Michael Palin set off to meet another challenge: an anti-clockwise circumnavigation of the world's largest ocean, the Pacific.
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Excellent, per usual
- By Enroute8 on 06-03-07
By: Michael Palin
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On the Plain of Snakes
- By: Paul Theroux
- Narrated by: Joseph Balderrama
- Length: 19 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Nogales is a border town caught between Mexico and the United States of America. A 40-foot steel fence runs through its centre, separating the prosperous US side from the impoverished Mexican side. It is a fascinating site of tension, now more than ever, as the town fills with hopeful border crossers and the deportees who have been caught and brought back. And it is here that Paul Theroux will begin his journey into the culturally rich but troubled heart of modern Mexico.
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A pedantic, poorly narrated, 20 hour lecture
- By Birdshot on 11-16-19
By: Paul Theroux
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Mukiwa
- A White Boy in Africa
- By: Peter Godwin
- Narrated by: Peter Godwin
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In unforgettable tales of innocence lost under African skies, we follow Godwin's awakening to the often savage struggle between Whites and Blacks, his horror when he is forced to fight in a civil war he detests, and his experiences as a journalist covering the country's violent transition to Black rule as Rhodesia's colonial era comes to an end and the new state of Zimbabwe is born from its bloody ashes. Mukiwa is a poignant, compelling memoir and an invaluable addition to the literature of southern Africa.
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Captivating, poignant memoir.
- By Nakaale on 10-04-20
By: Peter Godwin
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America Is in the Heart
- By: Carlos Bulosan, Elaine Castillo - foreword, E. San Juan Jr. - introduction, and others
- Narrated by: Ramon de Ocampo
- Length: 13 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Poet, essayist, novelist, fiction writer, and labor organizer, Carlos Bulosan (1911-1956) wrote one of the most influential working class literary classics about the US pre-World War II, a period and setting similar to that of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row. Bulosan's semi-autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart begins with the narrator's rural childhood in the Philippines and the struggles of land-poor peasant families affected by US imperialism after the Spanish-American War of the late 1890s.
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Pointless, wandering narrative poorly performed
- By B. Bartok on 08-15-20
By: Carlos Bulosan, and others
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Finding George Orwell in Burma
- By: Emma Larkin
- Narrated by: Emily Durante
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, she has come to know all too well the many ways this police state can be described as "Orwellian". The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. The connection between George Orwell and Burma is not simply metaphorical, of course; Orwell's mother was born in Burma, and he was shaped by his experiences there as a young man working for the British Imperial Police.
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Orwell's Horrors Brought to Life
- By Roger on 09-21-10
By: Emma Larkin
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Married to a Bedouin
- By: Marguerite van Geldermalsen
- Narrated by: Cat Gould
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
"Where you staying?" the Bedouin asked. "Why you not stay with me tonight - in my cave?" Thus begins Marguerite van Geldermalsen's story of how a New Zealand-born nurse came to be married to Mohammad Abdallah Othman, a Bedouin souvenir-seller from the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. It was 1978, and she and a friend were travelling through the Middle East when Marguerite met the charismatic Mohammad who convinced her that he was the man for her.
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Disappointing
- By Ellen on 12-03-23
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Exile and the Kingdom
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man's perpetual search for an inner kingdom.
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So good!
- By Christopher A. Douglas on 10-24-24
By: Albert Camus
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The Library of Legends
- A Novel
- By: Janie Chang
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
China, 1937: When Japanese bombs begin falling on the city of Nanking, 19-year-old Hu Lian and her classmates at Minghua University are ordered to flee. Lian and a convoy of more than 100 students, faculty, and staff must walk 1,000 miles to the safety of China’s western provinces, a journey marred by hunger, cold, and the constant threat of aerial attack. And it is not just the student refugees who are at risk: Lian and her classmates have been entrusted with a priceless treasure, a 500-year-old collection of myths and folklore known as the Library of Legends.
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Wonderful and Umique!
- By D. Fields on 02-18-22
By: Janie Chang
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Kingdom by the Sea
- A Journey Around the Coast of Britian
- By: Paul Theroux
- Narrated by: Ron Keith
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
American-born Paul Theroux had lived in England for 11 years when he realized he'd explored dozens of exotic locations without discovering anything about his adopted home. So, with a knapsack on his back, he set out to explore by walking and by short train trips. The result is a witty, observant and often acerbic look at an ever eccentric assortments of Brits in all shapes and sizes.
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Casting creates utter confusion
- By Susan on 09-01-09
By: Paul Theroux
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Nine Continents
- A Memoir In and Out of China
- By: Xiaolu Guo
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey. It begins in the fishing village shack on the East China Sea where her illiterate grandparents raised her, and brings her to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions: a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home.
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must read
- By Jeff Darlington on 10-22-17
By: Xiaolu Guo