Futureface
A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging
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Narrated by:
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Alex Wagner
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By:
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Alex Wagner
About this listen
An acclaimed journalist travels the globe to solve the mystery of her ancestry, confronting the question at the heart of the American experience of immigration, race, and identity: Who are my people?
"A thoughtful, beautiful meditation on what makes us who we are...and the values and ideals that bind us together as Americans." (Barack Obama)
"A rich and revealing memoir... Futureface raises urgent questions having to do with history and complicity." (The New York Times)
The daughter of a Burmese mother and a white American father, Alex Wagner grew up thinking of herself as a "futureface" - an avatar of a mixed-race future when all races would merge into a brown singularity. But when one family mystery leads to another, Wagner's postracial ideals fray as she becomes obsessed with the specifics of her own family's racial and ethnic history. Drawn into the wild world of ancestry, she embarks upon a quest around the world - and into her own DNA - to answer the ultimate questions of who she really is and where she belongs.
The journey takes her from Burma to Luxembourg, from ruined colonial capitals with records written on banana leaves to Mormon databases, genetic labs, and the rest of the 21st-century genealogy complex. But soon she begins to grapple with a deeper question: Does it matter? Is our enduring obsession with blood and land, race and identity, worth all the trouble it's caused us?
Wagner weaves together fascinating history, genetic science, and sociology but is really after deeper stuff than her own ancestry: In a time of conflict over who we are as a country, she tries to find the story where we all belong.
Praise for Futureface:
"Smart, searching... Meditating on our ancestors, as Wagner's own story shows, can suggest better ways of being ourselves." (Maud Newton, The New York Times Book Review)
"Sincere and instructive... This timely reflection on American identity, with a bonus expose of DNA ancestry testing, deserves a wide audience." (Library Journal)
"The narrative is part Mary Roach-style participation-heavy research, part family history, and part exploration of existential loneliness.... The journey is worth taking." (Kirkus Reviews)
©2018 Alex Wagner (P)2018 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Where was Vladeck?
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Critic reviews
“[A] ruminative exploration of ethnicity and identity.... Wagner’s odyssey is an effective riposte to anti-immigrant politics.” (Publishers Weekly)
“Alex Wagner is brilliant and hilarious. Futureface is a magic trick: She starts with the humble story of a third-culture kid’s existential loneliness and ends with a smart, timely, and moving exploration of family lies, exile and immigration, genetics, and the mystery of human belonging.” (Eddie Huang, best-selling author of Fresh off the Boat)
“Futureface is an important contribution to the American conversation - Alex Wagner’s story is insightful, moving, informative, and searing. I have deeply admired Alex for a long time as an original thinker, a keenly observant journalist, and a funny, empathetic human being. Read this book and you’ll understand why.” (Wes Moore, best-selling author of The Other Wes Moore)
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Hitler’s Forgotten Children is both a harrowing personal memoir and a devastating investigation into the awful crimes and monstrous scope of the Lebensborn program in World War 2. Created by Heinrich Himmler, the Lebensborn program abducted as many as half a million children from across Europe. Through a process called Germanization, they were to become the next generation of the Aryan master race in the second phase of the Final Solution.
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Interesting story.
- By Brad Bowles on 04-08-16
By: Ingrid von Oelhafen, and others
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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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Sign My Name to Freedom
- A Memoir of a Pioneering Life
- By: Betty Reid-Soskin
- Narrated by: Betty Reid-Soskin
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In Betty Reid Soskin’s 96 years of living, she has been a witness to a grand sweep of American history. When she was born in 1921, the lynching of African-Americans was a national epidemic, blackface minstrel shows were the most popular American form of entertainment, white women had only just won the right to vote, and most African-Americans in the Deep South could not vote at all. From her great-grandmother, who had been enslaved until her mid-20s, Betty heard stories of slavery and the times of terror and struggle for Black folk that followed.
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How she stressed Creole, but I guess it was a badge if honor not being regular black.
- By Satisfied customer on 05-21-24
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White like Her
- By: Gail Lukasik PhD, Kenyatta D. Berry - foreword
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother's decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother's fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother's racial lineage, tracing her family back to 18th-century colonial Louisiana. In coming to terms with her decision to publicly out her mother, Gail changed how she looks at race and heritage.
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Disappointed
- By Yoli on 06-06-18
By: Gail Lukasik PhD, and others
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Life Beyond Measure
- Letters to My Great-Granddaughter
- By: Sidney Poitier
- Narrated by: Sidney Poitier
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Abridged
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Sidney Poitier is one of the most revered actors in the history of Hollywood. He has overcome enormous obstacles in extraordinary times and is a role model for many Americans because of his convictions, bravery, and grace. Poitier reflects on his amazing life in Life Beyond Measure, offering inspirational advice and personal stories in the form of extended letters to his great-granddaughter.
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Mix of family history and life advice.
- By Adam Shields on 10-31-19
By: Sidney Poitier
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The Almost Nearly Perfect People
- Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
- By: Michael Booth
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 13 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Journalist Michael Booth has lived among the Scandinavians for more than 10 years, and he has grown increasingly frustrated with the rose-tinted view of this part of the world offered up by the Western media. In this timely audiobook, he leaves his adopted home of Denmark and embarks on a journey through all five of the Nordic countries to discover who these curious tribes are, the secrets of their success, and, most intriguing of all, what they think of one another.
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Obsessed with bad politics
- By Erik on 09-07-20
By: Michael Booth
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Wandering in Strange Lands
- A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots
- By: Morgan Jerkins
- Narrated by: Morgan Jerkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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From the acclaimed cultural critic and New York Times best-selling author of This Will Be My Undoing - a writer whom Roxane Gay has hailed as “a force to be reckoned with” - comes this powerful story of her journey to understand her Northern and Southern roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America.
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Not Just Black History -- It's All Of Our History
- By Ardee on 08-22-20
By: Morgan Jerkins
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Disintegration
- The Splintering of Black America
- By: Eugene Robinson
- Narrated by: Alan Bomar Jones
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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The African American population in the United States has always been seen as a single entity: a "Black America" with unified interests and needs. In his groundbreaking book Disintegration, longtime Washington Post journalist Eugene Robinson argues that, through decades of desegregation, affirmative action, and immigration, the concept of Black America has shattered.
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Written for Popular Consumption
- By Catherine S. Read on 06-03-11
By: Eugene Robinson
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India
- A Portrait
- By: Patrick French
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 17 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Second only to China in the magnitude of its economic miracle and second to none in its potential to shape the new century, India is fast undergoing one of the most momentous transformations the world has ever seen. In this dazzlingly panoramic book, Patrick French chronicles that epic change, telling human stories to explain a larger national narrative. Melding on-the-ground reports with a deep knowledge of history, French exposes the cultural foundations of India’s political, economic and social complexities.
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An Epic Book by Award-Winning Author
- By morton on 10-31-11
By: Patrick French
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We Don't Know Ourselves
- A Personal History of Modern Ireland
- By: Fintan O'Toole
- Narrated by: Aidan Kelly
- Length: 22 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In We Don't Know Ourselves, Fintan O'Toole weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society - perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism.
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Relentlessly Negative
- By John on 06-02-22
By: Fintan O'Toole
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Amsterdam
- A History of the World's Most Liberal City
- By: Russell Shorto
- Narrated by: Russell Shorto
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In this effortlessly erudite account, Russell Shorto traces the idiosyncratic evolution of Amsterdam, showing how such disparate elements as herring anatomy, naked Anabaptists parading through the streets, and an intimate gathering in a 16th-century wine-tasting room had a profound effect on Dutch - and world - history. Weaving in his own experiences of his adopted home, Shorto provides an ever-surprising, intellectually engaging story of Amsterdam from its golden age to the present.
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Worth Reading - Highly Recommended
- By Whit B on 05-12-14
By: Russell Shorto
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The Hemingses of Monticello
- An American Family
- By: Annette Gordon-Reed
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 30 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha.
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Worried at first
- By Phillip Goodson on 12-13-08
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The Invitation-Only Zone
- The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project
- By: Robert S. Boynton
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout the late 1970s and early '80s, dozens of Japanese citizens were abducted from coastal Japanese towns by North Korean commandos. In what proved to be part of a global project, North Korea attempted to reeducate the abductees and train them to spy on the state's behalf. When the project faltered, the abductees were hidden in a series of guarded communities known as "Invitation-Only Zones" - the fiction being that these were exclusive enclaves, not prisons.
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Over enthusiastic reader!
- By AJW on 02-14-16
What listeners say about Futureface
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-12-22
Excellent read: history & search for meaning
This is Alex's personal story, but in a distant way, it is everyone's search for meaning. We are all mutts - all mixed breeds - and simultaneously all the same breed. Thank you for sharing your life with us, to free us to contemplate our own and how we view it. It was fun to see your dogged pursuit of truth & detail. You would've been a good engineer.
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- Fred C Rasmason III
- 03-13-22
A wonderful book on Alex's heritage
I love it. Alex was terrific at narration. Couldn't put it down. Very interesting.
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- Jailan elsarha
- 03-03-19
Belonging
Very interesting true story about Alex Wagner the biracial , American Burmese , journalist lady searching for the answer “where do I belong ? Where is home”. The journey of self searching is driven by her own curiosity , and less by her mother or father who seems to be comfortable with their own “I Am ...” . Alex research found different avenues to dig deep into trying to discover truth behind masks . Regardless of who she is, what blood runs in her veins , all said the same thing the source is one for all , and all made it to the dream land that is Home . The belonging is here , even if she was made of many diverse races . Isn’t our diversity and belonging feelings what made America ? Then why we accepted who divided us because of our diversity?
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- Robert H Kleven
- 08-06-24
Timeliness! Read in early August 2024.
Loved this book for its way of putting ostensibly difficult, send and divisive issues into clear perspective with humor and grace. I read it while the news cycle was covering and totally obsessed with our racial ‘differences’ (NABJ interview and follow-up), for which it was a welcome breath of fresh air. Alex writes just as she presents herself on TV. That is to say, smart, focused and with a beautiful smile.
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- Michael Cook
- 06-10-18
fun story
I thoroughly enjoyed this book she's very funny and I could relate to all of the twist turns and miss- steps tracing my own family history. however I will say I didn't always agree with her assessments and conclusions. I found my own 23and Me DNA testing quite satisfying it even busted a family myth regarding a certain great-great grandmother's being half-indian.
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- borgyborgy
- 05-18-18
Very interesting,personal and informative
Alex reading is expressive a great to listen to. She has an engaging kind of eloquence to her writing, using an elevated term in a sentence that uses street vernacular. For me it made listening fun and never dry. She give a great summary of the strengths (few) and shortcomings (many) of the genetic testing enterprise so popular today. I had a suspicion but hadn’t taken the time to look into it. I wish I could extract the written text to show to my top enthusiastic family members. Usually when any human construct is too simple, something is wrong and it’s always more complicated.
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- Stephen Veal
- 11-02-23
Alex Wagner is a great American.
Alex describes her immigrant heritage and how it is such an American story. And that is human beings. We are all connected.
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- Saba
- 02-07-23
Disappointing
I thought this was going to be more of an autobiography, a story of someone’s life who seemingly has a similar background like me, but unfortunately, there are only small sprinkles of some events in the author’s life, Otherwise it’s more listening to her general thought process on what identity / belonging means and run down of all the available DNA kits on the market and their potential uselessness. Not sure I liked this book at all. Didn’t want to finish it after I realized this book was not going to be about the author’s life, but the author’s opinion and where she got them from.
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- Michele
- 03-17-20
Author is an idiot
She is a self obsessed twit who labels herself but is enraged if anyone else asks her about her heritage. I pity her parents. Only wish I could return this superficial waste of money
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- Cristina
- 11-13-18
Self indulgent
Boring and repetitive. The author is trying to find her meaning in the history of her ancestors. I do not recommend this book. It is a waste of words
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