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Freedom
- A Novel
- Narrated by: David LeDoux
- Length: 24 hrs and 9 mins
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Publisher's summary
From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a darkly comedic novel about family.
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outré rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,” an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?
In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's intensely realized characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.
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Annoyed by Hidden Theme
- By parsnip on 08-12-13
By: Mike Greenberg
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The Admissions
- A Novel
- By: Meg Mitchell Moore
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The Hawthorne family has it all. Great jobs, a beautiful house in one of the most affluent areas of Northern California, and three charming kids whose sunny futures are all but assured. And then comes their eldest daughter's senior year of high school....
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Anything for success
- By JillHen on 09-13-15
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Nearly Normal
- Surviving the Wilderness, My Family and Myself
- By: Cea Sunrise Person
- Narrated by: Cea Sunrise Person
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In her best-selling memoir North of Normal, Cea wrote with grace about her unconventional childhood - her early years living in a tipi in Alberta with her pot-smoking, free-loving counterculture family. But her struggles do not end when she leaves her family at the age of 13 to become a model. Honest and daring, Nearly Normal reveals the many ways that Cea's unconventional childhood continues to reverberate through the years.
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This one is just not for me
- By Pamela Plimpton on 03-15-19
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32 Candles
- A Novel
- By: Ernessa T. Carter
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Davie—an ugly duckling growing up in small-town Mississippi—is positive her life couldn’t be any worse. She has the meanest mother in the South, possibly the world, and on top of that, she’s pretty sure she’s ugly. Just when she’s resigned herself to her fate, she sees a movie that will change her life— Sixteen Candles. But in her case, life doesn’t imitate art.
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2 High Fives - for Monkey Night
- By Nevada on 10-03-12
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Small Admissions
- A Novel
- By: Amy Poeppel
- Narrated by: Carly Robins
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Despite her innate ambition and summa cum laude smarts, Kate Pearson has turned into a major slacker. After being dumped by her handsome French "almost fiancé", she abandons her grad school plans and spends her days lolling on the couch, leaving her apartment only when a dog-walking gig demands it. Her friends don't know what to do other than pass tissues and hope for a comeback while her practical sister, Angela, pushes every remedy she can think of, from trapeze class to therapy to job interviews.
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For fans of "Where'd You Go, Bernadette ?"
- By RueRue on 01-16-17
By: Amy Poeppel
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I'm the One That I Want
- By: Margaret Cho
- Narrated by: Margaret Cho
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Abridged
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I'm the One That I Want, based on her show of the same name, is filled with dead-on insights about the experience of being a woman with attitude, of flowing with the highs and lows of life, and of creating one's own identity and acceptance. It is every bit as hilarious, shocking, and irreverent as she is.
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Hilarious and deeply engrossing
- By Ling on 04-10-03
By: Margaret Cho
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The Pursuit of Happyness (Abridged)
- By: Chris Gardner
- Narrated by: Andre Blake
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Abridged
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At the age of 20, Chris Gardner arrived in San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. However, he surprised everyone and himself by setting his sights on the competitive world of high finance. Yet no sooner had he landed an entry-level position at a prestigious firm, Gardner found himself caught in a web of incredibly challenging circumstances that left him part of the city's working homeless with his toddler son.
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Very Good Story!
- By Lito Da Critic on 06-02-06
By: Chris Gardner
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The Southern Education of a Jersey Girl
- Adventures in Life and Love in the Heart of Dixie
- By: Jaime Primak Sullivan
- Narrated by: Jaime Primak Sullivan
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Jaime Primak Sullivan, a Jersey-bred, tough-as-nails PR maven - and unlikely transplant in an upscale suburb of Birmingham, Alabama - has spent her entire life crossing the line: whether she's pushing the boundaries of what proper Southern ladies consider to be "polite behavior" or literally traversing the Mason-Dixon line in the name of love. She isn't afraid to say what everyone is thinking when it comes to love, sex, friendship, and many other topics that are all too often sugar-coated in polite Southern company.
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Awesome book
- By Gwendolyn on 09-23-16
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Because I Come from a Crazy Family
- The Making of a Psychiatrist
- By: Edward M. Hallowell
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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When Edward M. Hallowell was 11, a voice out of nowhere told him he should become a psychiatrist. A mental health professional of the time would have called this psychosis. But young Edward (Ned) took it in stride, despite not quite knowing what "psychiatrist" meant. With a psychotic father, an alcoholic mother, an abusive stepfather, and two so-called learning disabilities of his own, Ned was accustomed to unpredictable behaviour from those around him and to a mind he felt he couldn't always control.
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Love and connection permeates through this book!
- By Steve Steinmetz on 06-29-18
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If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother
- By: Julia Sweeney
- Narrated by: Julia Sweeney
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Since her time on Saturday Night Live, where she created the infamous androgynous character "Pat", Julia Sweeney has gone on to establish herself as a witty, captivating performer of one-woman shows, like God Said Ha!, In the Family Way, and Letting Go of God. She gave a TED talk sharing how she explained the birds and the bees to her eight-year-old daughter, Mulan, which ignited an incredible response. Now, when it comes to talking about motherhood, people want to hear what Julia has to say.
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I Love Julia Sweeney
- By Lisa on 04-05-13
By: Julia Sweeney
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The Todd Glass Situation
- A Bunch of Lies about My Personal Life and a Bunch of True Stories about My 30-Year Career in Standup Comedy
- By: Todd Glass, Jonathan Grotenstein
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn't have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And once you added gay into the mix, life became more difficult. So Todd Glass decided to hide the gay part, no matter how comic, tragic, or comically tragic the results. Now, Todd has written an open, honest, and hilarious memoir in an effort to help everyone - young and old, gay and straight - breathe a little more freely.
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Worth It
- By Heather on 11-17-14
By: Todd Glass, and others
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In Love with a Younger Man
- By: Cheryl Robinson
- Narrated by: Nikki Amsterdam
- Length: 11 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Olena Day’s first love died tragically, and her college boyfriend left her for nother woman. Now a successful, independent 43-year-old,she begins a passionate relationship with Matthew, a man 18 years her junior. Can a relationship finally end happily-ever-after for Olena—or will it be torn apart once again?
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A Sequel Will Be Coming From This...
- By Leejorae on 03-15-10
By: Cheryl Robinson
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Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
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Not a case of Franzenfreude
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The Corrections
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The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
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"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
- By Georgia Burns on 10-08-13
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The End of the End of the Earth
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The way essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like “a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.” For the past 25 years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world. Franzen’s great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both.
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Many excellent essays.
- By Barbara S. Smith on 12-21-19
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Twenty-Seventh City
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Meetu Chilana
- Length: 20 hrs and 48 mins
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St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. A classic of contemporary fiction, The Twenty-Seventh City shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American dream unraveling into terror and dark comedy.
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A messy, ambitious, prognostic American novel
- By Darwin8u on 09-01-14
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Strong Motion
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Scott Aiello
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Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
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Compelling Story, Ridiculous Narrator
- By DianeReads on 02-28-16
By: Jonathan Franzen
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How to Be Alone
- Essays
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- Narrated by: Jonathan Franzen, Brian d'Arcy James
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections.
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The first story is the best
- By Susan S. on 01-20-14
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Purity
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- Narrated by: Jenna Lamia, Dylan Baker, Robert Petkoff
- Length: 25 hrs
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Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
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Not a case of Franzenfreude
- By Mel on 09-13-15
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Corrections
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 21 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
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"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
- By Georgia Burns on 10-08-13
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The End of the End of the Earth
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- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
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The way essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like “a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.” For the past 25 years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world. Franzen’s great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both.
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Many excellent essays.
- By Barbara S. Smith on 12-21-19
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Twenty-Seventh City
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Meetu Chilana
- Length: 20 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. A classic of contemporary fiction, The Twenty-Seventh City shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American dream unraveling into terror and dark comedy.
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A messy, ambitious, prognostic American novel
- By Darwin8u on 09-01-14
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Strong Motion
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Scott Aiello
- Length: 20 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
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Compelling Story, Ridiculous Narrator
- By DianeReads on 02-28-16
By: Jonathan Franzen
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How to Be Alone
- Essays
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Jonathan Franzen, Brian d'Arcy James
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
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Performance
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Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections.
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The first story is the best
- By Susan S. on 01-20-14
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Corrections
- By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century - a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.
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A memorable book; flawless narration
- By Charles Elmore on 01-06-04
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Discomfort Zone
- A Personal History
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Jonathan Franzen
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his development from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person", through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions.
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Good narration, like some essays more than others
- By Doggy Bird on 05-30-08
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Say You're One of Them
- By: Uwem Akpan
- Narrated by: Robin Miles, Dion Graham, Kevin R. Free
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few listeners will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.
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Save your Money!
- By Michal A. Joyner on 11-20-09
By: Uwem Akpan
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We Were the Mulvaneys
- By: Joyce Carol Oates
- Narrated by: Scott Shina
- Length: 22 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Judd is the youngest of the four Mulvaney children - three boys and a girl - on their parents’ lush farm in upstate New York. In his childhood, Judd is swept along by the sheer energy of the Mulvaneys and their wealth of beloved family stories. But now, 30 years old, Judd looks back through his memories to tell the secrets that eventually ripped apart the fabric of his storybook family.
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Overlooked Masterpiece
- By Jason on 10-26-12
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Ellen Foster
- By: Kaye Gibbons
- Narrated by: Ruth Ann Phimister
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy." So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kaye Gibbons's first novel, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Wise, funny, affectionate and true, Ellen Foster is, as Walker Percy called it, "The real thing. Which is to say, a lovely, sometimes heart/wrenching novel...."
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Great!!
- By Jo on 04-06-18
By: Kaye Gibbons
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Mother of Pearl
- By: Melinda Haynes
- Narrated by: Nana Visitor
- Length: 16 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty-eight-year-old Even Grade is a Black man who was orphaned as a child. 15-year-old Valuable Korner is a White girl who might as well have been orphaned. Petal, Mississippi, circa 1956, seems an unlikely spot for these two to connect, but a friendship forged across race lines is just one of many miracles waiting to happen in this small Southern town.
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Narrator problem??
- By Nana on 06-23-11
By: Melinda Haynes
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The Corrections
- A BBC Radio 4 Full-Cast Dramatisation
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Kelly Burke, Colin Stinton, Richard Schiff, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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This dramatisation of Jonathan Franzen's acclaimed, epic, award-winning novel revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-20th century to 'one last Christmas' together near the turn of the millennium. A family saga, that sits against the backdrop of this century's changing face of America, the novel was published 10 days before 9/11 but is widely considered an observation of what happened to the American psyche after 9/11.
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Don't use your valuable audible credit on this!!
- By Linda M. Gulyn on 09-30-21
By: Jonathan Franzen
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A Virtuous Woman
- By: Kaye Gibbons
- Narrated by: Ruth Ann Phimister, Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was 20 and he was 40. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.
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Reminder of How Beautiful a Simple Life Can Be
- By Carla Espinoza on 05-21-21
By: Kaye Gibbons
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Drowning Ruth
- A Novel
- By: Christina Schwarz
- Narrated by: Blair Brown
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Winter, 1919. Amanda Starkey spends her days nursing soldiers wounded in the Great War. Finding herself suddenly overwhelmed, she flees Milwaukee and retreats to her family's farm on Nagawaukee Lake, seeking comfort with her younger sister, Mathilda, and three-year-old niece, Ruth. But very soon, Amanda comes to see that her old home is no refuge—she has carried her troubles with her. On one terrible night almost a year later, Amanda loses nearly everything that is dearest to her when her sister mysteriously disappears and is later found drowned beneath the ice that covers the lake.
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surprisingly good
- By lookingin2you on 07-31-03
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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Rodgers
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not of her memory. It was a Sunday night in 1944 when her husband left the little row house on Baltimore's Calvert Street, abandoning Pearl to raise their three children alone: Jenny, high-spirited and determined, nurturing to strangers but distant to those she loves; the older son, Cody, a wild and incorrigible youth possessed by the lure of power and money; and sweet, clumsy Ezra, Pearl's favorite, who never stops yearning for the perfect family that could never be his own. Now Pearl and her three grown children have gathered....
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Classic Anne Tyler
- By Eve Harris on 09-14-21
By: Anne Tyler
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The Fortress of Solitude
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 18 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."
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A smorgasbord of language
- By Jonathan on 10-21-03
By: Jonathan Lethem
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Black and Blue
- By: Anna Quindlen
- Narrated by: Ruth Ann Phimister
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
When 19-year-old Fran married Bobby Benedetto, she never dreamed that she would find herself in an abusive relationship. Every time her New York City policeman husband hit her, she would think of convincing reasons to stay. Now, with her 10-year-old son in tow, she is running for her life.
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Another Quindlen Jewel
- By Carol T. Carr on 09-11-12
By: Anna Quindlen
What listeners say about Freedom
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Michael
- 09-12-10
Perfection
Franzen peels back the the American psyche with the same empathy for flaws as Updike and all of the pathos of Roth. Each character is at war with themselves in a battle to be the excessive American role model. The conflicts are both rich and subtle and every word is like a scalpel. This is a story for the ages.
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40 people found this helpful
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Overall
- JOHN
- 10-31-10
Not as good as The Corrections
Like the rest of the world, I was very much looking forward to the release of Jonathan Franzen's new novel FREEDOM. In one sense, I was not disappointed, and Franzen continues to prove his writing prowess is no fluke. FREEDOM is chock full of the crazy family dysfunctionality that we grew to love in THE CORRECTIONS, actually a good bit more of it. And that might be the slight problem with this book - too much of it. When sometimes less is more, FREEDOM heaps on nutcase after nutcase.
The characters in this book are very believable and we all know and/or are related to them. We just prefer not to know them too well. Still, I enjoyed this book a lot and would recommend it, but not quite at highly as Franzen's previous and best book.
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8 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Scott
- 12-15-10
A Muddled Story about Jerks
This writer tries too hard to create serious "literature", with significant themes but ends up with a true paucity of entertainment value. The author slowly takes each character's virtues and turns them into flaws while simultaneously showing they DO have a good side. (Writing 101- "no cardboard characters allowed in "literature" so as to qualify as "good writing".)
However... there is no one to "root for" ultimately or rather there is and then everyone is shot down by their obsession with their their own values. (It didn't have to be this way... I didn't hate Holden Caufield for his feelings.)
Intelligent people already "get" that too many people are obsessed with their personal "freedoms" allowing us to wreck each others relationships and/or our environment in the name of our "freedom". Oh well. I suppose it *needed* to be written. Trust me... now you know it's"out there" you don't NEED to trudge through the mire of characters and story that make up this ostensibly "significant" book. I pity the poor student who gets this book stuck on their reading list for an American Literature class. Perhaps it will lead to lively class discussions about what makes a person turn into a jerk.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Jenny
- 10-07-10
Get past the first chapter - and the reader
This book is, of course, fantastic. That said, I nearly gave up after listening to the lackluster first section and my general annoyance with the style and tone of the reader. However, by the middle of the initial "autobiography" section I was fully hooked. I literally remember the moment in the that I couldn't stop listening!
It strikes me how many other reviewers are negative by reason of "not liking" many of the characters. This seems to completely irrelevant to the enjoyment of this narrative for me. The book, and in particular the reading, are not without serious flaws but neither are we as a species or the time we live in.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Cathy
- 10-11-10
a bit much
I am no prude, but the the amount of graphic sex was more than I needed. The story was wonderful and it made me think of political ideals, conservation and how a person is affected by all experiences in their lives. The characters were well developed and changed before my eyes. I enjoyed the book. I didn't think it dragged at all.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- kelly
- 10-08-10
great listening!!
Loved this book!! Page turner!! Did not want to turn off my player. The author pulled you in to the characters lives and made you want to know them and know more about them. Very interesting plot. Followed these characters through their lives, through their trials and tribulations....Very much enjoyed.
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Overall
- Don M
- 09-21-10
Freedom to find fault in everything
The book is engaging, I couldn't stop listening, but it leaves me with a feeling that the author believes that everything and everyone is false. Every character, and the narrator, thrives on contempt or self loathing. A great book for cynics.
The voice performance, and it is a performance, is excellent.
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Overall
- paula
- 02-27-11
Excellent!
While I enjoyed Jonathan Frazen's earlier work, I wish he had had a more forceful editor. While there are a few rambling sections, this book was a much better read. The characters are compelling. Their stories interesting. The complex structure of the book was actually very easy to follow. This was a truly enjoyable book and worth all the hours.
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Overall
- David
- 10-17-10
Missed the point
Although I heard the entire book and did find many part interesting I think I missed the point of the book - assuming there was one. I don't think I would recommend this to any of my friends unless they were desperate for an audible.
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Overall
- Sara
- 12-05-10
Freedom, a truly American concept
I read and listened to this book. Franzen clearly points out how ethnocentric Americans truly are. We have the freedom to criticize, denigrate, choose, decline, and yet somehow the blame is not equal to the responsibility. Sure, we made the decision, but it was because our mommy didn't love us enough, I daddy held us too tight, our classmate told us we had buck teeth! Franzen points all of this out in an amusing, entertaining, and delightful way. Thanks Franzen for this masterpiece of American Life.
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