-
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: Louis Chude-Sokei
- Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $19.79
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's summary
The astonishing journey of a bright, utterly displaced boy, from the short-lived African nation of Biafra, to Jamaica, to the harshest streets of Los Angeles—a searing memoir that adds fascinating depth to the coming-to-America story
The first time Chude-Sokei realizes that he is “first son of the first son” of a renowned leader of the bygone African nation is in Uncle Daddy and Big Auntie’s strict religious household in Jamaica, where he lives with other abandoned children. A visiting African has just fallen to his knees to shake him by the shoulders: “Is this the boy? Is this him?”
Chude-Sokei’s immersion in the politics of race and belonging across the landscape of the African diaspora takes a turn when his traumatized mother, who has her own extraordinary history as the onetime “Jackie O of Biafra,” finally sends for him to come live with her. In Inglewood, Los Angeles, on the eve of gangsta rap and the LA riots, it’s as if he’s fallen to Earth. In this world, anything alien—definitely Chude-Sokei’s secret obsession with science fiction and David Bowie—is a danger, and his yearning to become a Black American gets deeply, sometimes absurdly, complicated. Ultimately, it is a boisterous pan-African family of honorary aunts, uncles, and cousins that becomes his secret society, teaching him the redemptive skill of navigating not just Blackness, but Blacknesses, in his America.
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
How the Word Is Passed
- A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
- By: Clint Smith
- Narrated by: Clint Smith
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the listener on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.
-
-
Sincerely grateful read
- By Kelvin Dixon on 06-08-21
By: Clint Smith
-
The 1619 Project
- A New Origin Story
- By: Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine, Caitlin Roper - editor, and others
- Narrated by: Nikole Hannah-Jones, Full Cast
- Length: 18 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together 18 essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with 36 poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance.
-
-
Comprehensive and Cutting
- By Thomas Ray on 12-30-21
By: Nikole Hannah-Jones, and others
-
A Spell of Good Things
- A Novel
- By: Ayobami Adebayo
- Narrated by: Babajide Oyekunle, Ore Apampa
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Eniola is tall for his age, a boy who looks like a man. Because his father has lost his job, Eniola spends his days running errands for the local tailor, collecting newspapers, begging when he must, dreaming of a big future. Wuraola is a golden girl, the perfect child of a wealthy family. Now an exhausted young doctor in her first year of practice, she is beloved by Kunle, the volatile son of an ascendant politician.
-
-
Horrible ending
- By Trish on 09-12-23
By: Ayobami Adebayo
-
Everyman
- A Novel
- By: M Shelly Conner
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Eve Mann arrives in Ideal, Georgia, in 1972 looking for answers about the mother who died giving her life. A mother named Mercy. A mother who for all of Eve’s 22 years has been a mystery and a quest. Eve’s search for her mother, and the father she never knew, is a mission to discover her identity, her name, her people, and her home. Eve’s questions and longing launch a multigenerational story that sprawls back to the turn of the 20th century.
-
-
It just wandered. I gave up!
- By Michele on 09-07-21
By: M Shelly Conner
-
Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
-
-
Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
-
Homeland Elegies
- A Novel
- By: Ayad Akhtar
- Narrated by: Ayad Akhtar
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.
-
-
a mishmash of political theory and porn
- By LC on 02-06-21
By: Ayad Akhtar
-
How the Word Is Passed
- A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
- By: Clint Smith
- Narrated by: Clint Smith
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the listener on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.
-
-
Sincerely grateful read
- By Kelvin Dixon on 06-08-21
By: Clint Smith
-
The 1619 Project
- A New Origin Story
- By: Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine, Caitlin Roper - editor, and others
- Narrated by: Nikole Hannah-Jones, Full Cast
- Length: 18 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together 18 essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with 36 poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance.
-
-
Comprehensive and Cutting
- By Thomas Ray on 12-30-21
By: Nikole Hannah-Jones, and others
-
A Spell of Good Things
- A Novel
- By: Ayobami Adebayo
- Narrated by: Babajide Oyekunle, Ore Apampa
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Eniola is tall for his age, a boy who looks like a man. Because his father has lost his job, Eniola spends his days running errands for the local tailor, collecting newspapers, begging when he must, dreaming of a big future. Wuraola is a golden girl, the perfect child of a wealthy family. Now an exhausted young doctor in her first year of practice, she is beloved by Kunle, the volatile son of an ascendant politician.
-
-
Horrible ending
- By Trish on 09-12-23
By: Ayobami Adebayo
-
Everyman
- A Novel
- By: M Shelly Conner
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Eve Mann arrives in Ideal, Georgia, in 1972 looking for answers about the mother who died giving her life. A mother named Mercy. A mother who for all of Eve’s 22 years has been a mystery and a quest. Eve’s search for her mother, and the father she never knew, is a mission to discover her identity, her name, her people, and her home. Eve’s questions and longing launch a multigenerational story that sprawls back to the turn of the 20th century.
-
-
It just wandered. I gave up!
- By Michele on 09-07-21
By: M Shelly Conner
-
Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
-
-
Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
-
Homeland Elegies
- A Novel
- By: Ayad Akhtar
- Narrated by: Ayad Akhtar
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.
-
-
a mishmash of political theory and porn
- By LC on 02-06-21
By: Ayad Akhtar
-
The Yellow House
- By: Sarah M. Broom
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities.
-
-
Great book. I wish the pictures had been included.
- By Lindsay on 02-28-20
By: Sarah M. Broom
-
Memorial Drive
- A Daughter's Memoir
- By: Natasha Trethewey
- Narrated by: Natasha Trethewey
- Length: 5 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At age 19, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief.
-
-
poetic
- By Amazon Customer on 08-03-20
-
Where the Light Fell
- A Memoir
- By: Philip Yancey
- Narrated by: Philip Yancey
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Where the Light Fell is a gripping family narrative set against a turbulent time in post-World War II America, shaped by the collision of Southern fundamentalism with the mounting pressures of the civil rights movement and '60s-era forces of social change. In piecing together his fragmented personal history and his search for redemption, Yancey gives testament to the enduring power of our hunger for truth and the possibility of faith rooted in grace instead of fear.
-
-
The full sweep
- By Amazon Customer on 10-12-21
By: Philip Yancey
-
More than I Imagined
- What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew
- By: John Blake
- Narrated by: John Blake
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
John Blake grew up in a Black neighborhood in inner-city Baltimore that became the setting for the HBO series The Wire. There he became a self-described “closeted biracial person,” hostile toward white people while hiding the truth of his mother’s race. The son of a Black man and a white woman who met when interracial marriage was still illegal, Blake knew this much about his mother: She vanished from his life not long after his birth, and her family rejected him because of his race. But at the age of seventeen, Blake had a surprise encounter that uncovered a disturbing family secret.
-
-
Should be required reading!
- By Karen Campbell on 05-15-23
By: John Blake
-
The Road from Raqqa
- A Story of Brotherhood, Borders, and Belonging
- By: Jordan Ritter Conn
- Narrated by: Graham Halstead
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Alkasem brothers, Riyad and Bashar, spend their childhood in Raqqa, the city that would later became the capital of ISIS. As a teenager in the 1980s, Riyad witnesses the devastating aftermath of the Hama massacre—an atrocity by the Assad regime. Wanting to expand his notion of government and justice, Riyad moves to the US to study law, but his plans are derailed and he eventually falls in love with a Southern belle. Bashar, meanwhile, stayed in Syria and embarked on a brilliant legal career under the same corrupt Assad government that Riyad despised.
-
-
Gripping & Meaningful
- By Amazon Customer on 09-04-20
-
After the Last Border
- Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America
- By: Jessica Goudeau
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The welcoming and acceptance of immigrants and refugees have been central to America's identity for centuries - yet America has periodically turned its back in times of the greatest humanitarian need. After the Last Border is an intimate look at the lives of two women as they struggle for the 21st-century American dream, having won the "golden ticket" to settle as refugees in Austin, Texas.
-
-
Great Content. Odd Structure.
- By Susan Stillings on 02-10-21
By: Jessica Goudeau
-
Somewhere in the Unknown World
- A Collective Refugee Memoir
- By: Kao Kalia Yang
- Narrated by: Kao Kalia Yang, Kurt Kwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Somewhere in the Unknown World is a themed collection of stories of refugees from around the world who have converged on Minneapolis, collected and told by the award-winning author of The Latehomecomer and The Song Poet.
-
-
Understanding refugees
- By Jeannie on 02-24-24
By: Kao Kalia Yang
-
Who Killed My Father
- By: Édouard Louis
- Narrated by: Edouard Louis
- Length: 1 hr and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French - at the minimum - of negligent homicide. The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely 50 years old, who can hardly walk or breathe: “You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that.
-
-
Powerful. Poetic. Sparse. Piercing.
- By Theophile Jones on 06-01-23
By: Édouard Louis
-
Black Boy
- By: Richard Wright
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Richard Wright's powerful and eloquent memoir of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. At once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment, Black Boy is a poignant record of struggle and endurance - a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time. The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate.
-
-
Outstanding
- By Trevin Harvey on 11-11-20
By: Richard Wright
-
Say I'm Dead
- A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love
- By: E. Dolores Johnson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fearful of prison time - or lynching - for violating Indiana’s anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's Black father and White mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her family that she was the victim of foul play, either dead or sold into white slavery.
-
-
Deeply meaningful important read
- By A.M.Rousseau on 12-21-21
-
Disturbed in Their Nests
- A Journey from Sudan's Dinkaland to San Diego's City Heights
- By: Alephonsion Deng, Judy A. Bernstein
- Narrated by: Dion Graham, Suzie Althens
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nineteen-year-old refugee Alephonsion Deng, from war-ravaged Sudan, had great expectations when he arrived in America three weeks before two planes crashed into the World Trade Towers. Suburban mom Judy Bernstein assumed the teenaged "Lost Boys of Sudan" needed a little mothering and a change of scenery. Partnered through a mentoring program in San Diego, these two individuals from opposite sides of the world began an eye-opening journey that radically altered each other's vision and life. Disturbed in Their Nests recounts the first year of this heartwarming partnership.
-
-
Amazing
- By Debra Hinz on 02-03-20
By: Alephonsion Deng, and others
-
Growing Up X
- A Memoir by the Daughter of Malcolm X
- By: Ilyasah Shabazz
- Narrated by: Ilyasah Shabazz
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
February 21, 1965: Malcolm X is assassinated in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. June 23, 1997: After surviving for a remarkable 22 days, his widow, Betty Shabazz, dies of burns suffered in a fire. In the years between, their six daughters reach adulthood, forged by the memory of their parents’ love, the meaning of their cause, and the power of their faith. Now, at long last, one of them has recorded that tumultuous journey in an unforgettable memoir: Growing Up X.
-
-
A great book and insight into the legacy of Malcom
- By MJohns on 10-05-20
By: Ilyasah Shabazz
Related to this topic
-
My Father's Paradise
- A Son's Search For His Family's Past
- By: Ariel Sabar
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.
-
-
Great story, poorly narrated
- By Oren Kessler on 09-10-24
By: Ariel Sabar
-
The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
-
-
Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
-
What Storm, What Thunder
- By: Myriam J.A. Chancy
- Narrated by: Ella Turenne
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Earth had buckled, and, in that movement, all that was not in its place fell upon the Earth’s children, upon the blameless as well as the guilty, without discrimination. At the end of a long sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster
-
-
We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
- By AuthorAnnaBella on 03-15-22
-
Unforgetting
- A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas
- By: Roberto Lovato
- Narrated by: Roberto Lovato
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato’s memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time - and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten.
-
-
Difficult to hear but important to know.
- By M. Lindquist on 12-18-20
By: Roberto Lovato
-
Black Boy
- By: Richard Wright
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Richard Wright's powerful and eloquent memoir of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. At once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment, Black Boy is a poignant record of struggle and endurance - a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time. The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate.
-
-
Outstanding
- By Trevin Harvey on 11-11-20
By: Richard Wright
-
Mitka’s Secret
- A True Story of Child Slavery and Surviving the Holocaust
- By: Steven W. Brallier, Joel N. Lohr, Lynn G. Beck
- Narrated by: Trevor Thompson
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is Mitka’s account of facing the past, confronting his captors, connecting with lost relatives, and finding peace in the rediscovery of his origins. For Mitka, this also meant reclaiming his Jewish heritage - a journey that gave him a new sense of purpose and freedom from the lingering effects of trauma that had filled his life to that point. By the end, Mitka’s Secret is less a story of survival and more one of redemption and transformation - from hidden suffering to abundant joy.
-
-
This should be a movie!!!
- By Amazon Customer on 09-11-21
By: Steven W. Brallier, and others
-
My Father's Paradise
- A Son's Search For His Family's Past
- By: Ariel Sabar
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.
-
-
Great story, poorly narrated
- By Oren Kessler on 09-10-24
By: Ariel Sabar
-
The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
-
-
Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
-
What Storm, What Thunder
- By: Myriam J.A. Chancy
- Narrated by: Ella Turenne
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Earth had buckled, and, in that movement, all that was not in its place fell upon the Earth’s children, upon the blameless as well as the guilty, without discrimination. At the end of a long sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster
-
-
We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
- By AuthorAnnaBella on 03-15-22
-
Unforgetting
- A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas
- By: Roberto Lovato
- Narrated by: Roberto Lovato
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato’s memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time - and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten.
-
-
Difficult to hear but important to know.
- By M. Lindquist on 12-18-20
By: Roberto Lovato
-
Black Boy
- By: Richard Wright
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Richard Wright's powerful and eloquent memoir of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. At once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment, Black Boy is a poignant record of struggle and endurance - a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time. The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate.
-
-
Outstanding
- By Trevin Harvey on 11-11-20
By: Richard Wright
-
Mitka’s Secret
- A True Story of Child Slavery and Surviving the Holocaust
- By: Steven W. Brallier, Joel N. Lohr, Lynn G. Beck
- Narrated by: Trevor Thompson
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is Mitka’s account of facing the past, confronting his captors, connecting with lost relatives, and finding peace in the rediscovery of his origins. For Mitka, this also meant reclaiming his Jewish heritage - a journey that gave him a new sense of purpose and freedom from the lingering effects of trauma that had filled his life to that point. By the end, Mitka’s Secret is less a story of survival and more one of redemption and transformation - from hidden suffering to abundant joy.
-
-
This should be a movie!!!
- By Amazon Customer on 09-11-21
By: Steven W. Brallier, and others
-
The Yellow House
- By: Sarah M. Broom
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities.
-
-
Great book. I wish the pictures had been included.
- By Lindsay on 02-28-20
By: Sarah M. Broom
-
Who Killed My Father
- By: Édouard Louis
- Narrated by: Edouard Louis
- Length: 1 hr and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French - at the minimum - of negligent homicide. The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely 50 years old, who can hardly walk or breathe: “You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that.
-
-
Powerful. Poetic. Sparse. Piercing.
- By Theophile Jones on 06-01-23
By: Édouard Louis
-
Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
-
-
Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
-
The Shadow Lines
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Raj Varma
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh’s radiant second novel follows two families - one English, one Bengali - as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian-born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.
-
-
Narrator Doesn't Know How to Pronounce
- By Amazon Customer on 08-27-11
By: Amitav Ghosh
-
After the Last Border
- Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America
- By: Jessica Goudeau
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The welcoming and acceptance of immigrants and refugees have been central to America's identity for centuries - yet America has periodically turned its back in times of the greatest humanitarian need. After the Last Border is an intimate look at the lives of two women as they struggle for the 21st-century American dream, having won the "golden ticket" to settle as refugees in Austin, Texas.
-
-
Great Content. Odd Structure.
- By Susan Stillings on 02-10-21
By: Jessica Goudeau
-
A Mighty Long Way
- My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
- By: Carlotta Walls Lanier
- Narrated by: Peter Fernandez, Lizan Mitchell
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1951, Carlotta Walls Lanier was one of the nine African-American students to integrate Little Rock High School, and the first to earn a diploma. Here she provides a firsthand account of her experiences - including the bombing that rocked her home, the constant threats she and her classmates faced, and the pressure and bullying her parents endured.
-
-
Very insightful book
- By karen feek on 01-05-21
-
The Song and the Silence
- A Story About Family, Race, and What Was Revealed in a Small Town in the Mississippi Delta While Searching for Booker Wright
- By: Yvette Johnson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"Have to keep that smile", said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time Wright was a waiter in a Whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: Before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.
-
-
Exceeded every expectation
- By ZeeJ84 on 05-23-21
By: Yvette Johnson
-
Black Sunday
- A Novel
- By: Tola Rotimi Abraham
- Narrated by: Liz Femi, Dele Ogundiran, Miebaka Yohannes, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike are enjoying a relatively comfortable life in Lagos in 1996. Then their mother loses her job due to political strife, and the family, facing poverty, is drawn into the New Church, an institution led by a charismatic pastor who is not shy about worshipping earthly wealth. Soon Bibike and Ariyike's father wagers the family home on a sure bet that evaporates like smoke.
-
-
Good Story - Awful accents
- By Tamara C-J on 02-15-21
-
Say I'm Dead
- A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love
- By: E. Dolores Johnson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fearful of prison time - or lynching - for violating Indiana’s anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's Black father and White mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her family that she was the victim of foul play, either dead or sold into white slavery.
-
-
Deeply meaningful important read
- By A.M.Rousseau on 12-21-21
-
Breathe
- A Letter to My Sons
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: Imani Perry
- Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Breathe explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world. Emotionally raw and deeply reflective, Imani Perry issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving of humanity. She admits fear and frustration for her African-American sons in a society that is increasingly racist and at times seems irredeemable. However, as a mother, feminist, writer, and intellectual, Perry offers an unfettered expression of love.
-
-
Delightful peek into the heart & soul of a mother
- By Treesey on 10-08-19
By: Imani Perry
-
The First Man
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
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.
-
-
Great Narration by Jefferson Mays
- By Sean Patrick Stevens on 07-31-21
By: Albert Camus
-
Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All
- A New Zealand Story
- By: Christina Thompson
- Narrated by: Sarah Mollo-Christensen
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson's marriage to a Maori man.
-
-
a beautiful story
- By Pumpkin99 on 12-24-22
What listeners say about Floating in a Most Peculiar Way
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Michelle McFarlane
- 03-30-21
Biafra Not Forgotten
A story of love, tragedy, longing and a coming of age and understanding. A wonderful memoir.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Todd
- 04-22-22
Many memorable nuggets
For the vastness of experiences this is short enough to remember and rich enough to want to. Extra meaningful to me because of family connections to Africa—though distant similarities to Chude-Sokei’s path. Valuable insight into blackness in America.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- n.a
- 04-13-21
excellent for any first generation americans
many things in this book resonated with me, a first generation American...but what had the most impact was this," complaining about America to African cousins is like those with wings complaining about thin air." i don't think I'll ever do it again.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- chaosdreams
- 02-08-21
Difficult to listen at times, but so worth it.
This touches on so many things that I can't imagine explaining. There are moments I had to stop, to breathe through the pain expressed in words. But it's such an important piece, a picture of diaspora.
Some parts may make you laugh, others cry. But it's a picture overall that you cannot help but stop and look at.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- C. Vick
- 01-21-22
Insights into a place not well known
This is a well written and poignant story about a young African man’s difficult journey to manhood and in different parts of the diaspora.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!