Flyover Lives
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Suzanne Toren
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By:
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Diane Johnson
About this listen
Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of floating down the Mississippi River and venturing off to see the world. Years later, at home in France, a French friend teases her about her Americanness: “Indifference to history. That’s why Americans seem so naïve.”
The j’accuse stays with Johnson. Are Americans indifferent to history? Her own family seemed always to have been in the Midwest. Surely they had gotten there from somewhere? In digging around, she discovers letters and memoirs written by generations of her stalwart pioneer ancestors that testify to more complex and fascinating times than the derisive nickname “the Flyover” gives the region credit for. This is the story of the people who struggled to reach places like Ohio, Iowa, and Illinois two hundred years ago and saw no reason to leave.
Johnson weaves passages from these cherished records into her own pages, illuminating the westward journeys shared by so many American families and the bedrock character that enabled them to survive a brutal pioneer period to become the sheltered guardians of Americana in both its best and worst incarnations.
With the acuity and sympathy that her bestselling novels are known for, Johnson captures the magnetic pull of home against our lust for escape and self-invention. Here is the small-town charm of a midwestern childhood as well as the series of adventures that led to her unlikely situation in France, so far from Moline — yet, as her history reveals, the birthplace of her first ancestor to brave the New World. A dazzling meditation on the mysteries of the “wispy but material” family ghosts who shape us, this spellbinding memoir is also a keenly insightful exploration of how we shape ourselves.
©2014 Diane Johnson (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved. Recorded by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random House Company. Portions of this book appeared in different form as “The Generals” in National Post (Toronto), “The Writing Life” in The Washington Post, “Stanley Kubrick: 1928– 1999” in The New York Review of Books, and “A Passion for Cars—Just Don’t Make Her Drive Them” in The New York Times.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.
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Narration Issues
- By Sara on 12-14-17
By: Amy Tan
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Reading My Father
- A Memoir
- By: Alexandra Styron
- Narrated by: Alexandra Styron
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexandra Styron's parents—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written with humor, compassion, and grace.
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William Styron Ranks...
- By Douglas on 12-22-13
By: Alexandra Styron
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Pearl Buck in China
- Journey to The Good Earth
- By: Hilary Spurling
- Narrated by: Hilary Spurling
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The author of the much honored two-volume biography of Henri Matisse unearths the life and work of the Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winner Pearl Buck, whose novels in the 1930's and 40's were the first written for a Western audience to describe ordinary life in the still secret China of the late 19th and early 20th century.
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Very good
- By M. Brandman on 06-15-10
By: Hilary Spurling
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Things I've Been Silent About
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Naila Azad
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.
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Family portrait in the frame of history
- By Galina COS on 07-02-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
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Crazy for God
- By: Frank Schaeffer
- Narrated by: Frank Schaeffer
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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By the time he was 19, Frank Schaeffer’s parents had achieved global fame as best-selling evangelical authors and speakers, and Frank had joined his father on the evangelical circuit. He would go on to speak before thousands and publish his own best seller. But while coming of age as a rising evangelical star, Schaeffer felt increasingly alienated, and as a result, he experienced a crisis of faith that would ultimately lead to his journey out of the fold - even if it meant losing everything.
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Recommended!
- By Catherine Heard on 10-29-10
By: Frank Schaeffer
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty
- An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother
- By: Kate Hennessy
- Narrated by: Randye Kaye
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was a prominent Catholic, writer, social activist, and cofounder of a movement dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor. Her life has been revealed through her own writings as well as the work of historians, theologians, and academics. What has been missing until now is a more personal account from the point of view of someone who knew her well.
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Great content.HORRIBLE Narration. Cannot listen.
- By Christian on 04-21-17
By: Kate Hennessy
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Eleanor and Hick
- The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady
- By: Susan Quinn
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1932 Eleanor Roosevelt entered the claustrophobic, duty-bound existence of the first lady with dread. By that time she had put her deep disappointment in her marriage behind her and developed an independent life - now threatened by the public role she would be forced to play. A lifeline came to her in the form of a feisty campaign reporter for the Associated Press: Lorena Hickok. Over the next 30 years, until Eleanor's death, the two women carried on an extraordinary relationship.
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An Icon who was real.
- By Francine Fields on 08-17-17
By: Susan Quinn
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Finding Samuel Lowe
- China, Jamaica, Harlem
- By: Paula Williams Madison
- Narrated by: Paula Williams Madison
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Thanks to her spiteful, jealous Jamaican mother, Nell Vera Lowe was cut off from her Chinese father, Samuel, when she was just a baby, after he announced that he was taking a Chinese bride. By the time Nell was old enough to travel to her father's shop in St. Anne's Bay, he'd taken his family back to China, never learning what became of his eldest daughter. Bereft, Nell left Jamaica for New York to start a new life.
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Fascinating
- By ayodele higgs on 01-27-16
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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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Zelda Fitzgerald
- The Tragic, Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess
- By: Sally Cline
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the first American flapper." Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.
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The Beautiful and the Bungled
- By Silverthorne on 12-08-17
By: Sally Cline
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Lady Bird
- A Biography of Mrs. Johnson
- By: Jan Jarboe Russell
- Narrated by: Andrea Gallo
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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A revealing biography of Lady Bird Johnson with startling new insights into her marriage to Lyndon Baines Johnson and her unexpectedly strong impact on his presidency. Long obscured by her husband's shadow, Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson emerges in this first comprehensive biography as a figure of surprising influence and the centering force for LBJ, a man who suffered from extreme mood swings and desperately needed someone to help control his darker impulses.
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Do not waste an audible credit
- By Sandra B. on 10-15-23
What listeners say about Flyover Lives
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- christine
- 02-10-14
bad performance from narrator
Where does Flyover Lives rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
Narrator puts on an annoyingly affected snobbish accent, totally unnecessary in this book and it kind of ruined the pleasure of an otherwise good book.
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- Emma
- 02-16-14
Somehow lacking...
Any additional comments?
Although I enjoyed Johnson's memoir, I was a little disappointed. The first chapter sets up the question of Americans' attitudes towards history and and their family line, but after tracing her own, Johnson never draws any conclusions. I just did not see the connection the New Yorker did between her "cheerful pragmatism and unsparing work ethic" and her pioneer ancestors. So for me the book was a collection of personal recollections and interesting reconstructions of her ancestors lives, but not a cohesive work that connects them all. It did not surprise me to hear at the end that some parts of the book had been previously published as separate pieces.
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