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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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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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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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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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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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Back Roads
- By: Tawni O'Dell
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Harley Altmyer should be in college drinking Rolling Rock and chasing girls. He should be freed from his closed-minded, stricken coal town, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he's constantly reminded of just how messed up his life is. With his mother in jail for killing his abusive father, Harley is an orphan with the responsibilities of an adult and the fiery, aggressive libido of a teenager.
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An unexpected twist
- By Leticia Porche on 01-02-20
By: Tawni O'Dell
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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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Underworld
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 31 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
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CYBEX burned into my eyes
- By Ruth Ann Orlansky on 07-01-12
By: Don DeLillo
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Tara Road
- A Novel
- By: Maeve Binchy
- Narrated by: Katherine Borowitz
- Length: 17 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Ria lived on Tara Road in Dublin with her dashing husband, Danny, and their two children. She fully believed she was happily married, right up until the day Danny told her he was leaving her to be with his young, pregnant girlfriend. By a chance phone call, Ria meets Marilyn, a woman from New England unable to come to terms with her only son's death and now separated from her husband. The two women exchange houses for the summer with extraordinary consequences, each learning that the other has a deep secret that can never be revealed.
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Material good - quality, not-so-much
- By B. W. on 09-05-08
By: Maeve Binchy
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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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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
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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2 people found this helpful
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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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2 people found this helpful
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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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1 person found this helpful
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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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1 person found this helpful
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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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1 person found this helpful