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Growing Up
- Narrated by: Corey M. Snow
- Length: 8 hrs and 19 mins
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Publisher's summary
In this heartfelt memoir by the Masterpiece Theatre host, Pulitzer Prize winner, and groundbreaking New York Times columnist, Russell Baker traces his youth in the mountains of rural Virginia. When Baker was only five, his father died. His mother, strong-willed and matriarchal, never looked back. After all, she had three children to raise.
These were Depression years, and Mrs. Baker moved her fledgling family to Baltimore. Baker's mother was determined her children would succeed, and we know her regimen worked for Russell. He did everything from delivering papers to hustling subscriptions for the Saturday Evening Post. As is often the case, early hardships made the man.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (Unabridged Selections)
- By: Edited by David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris, Mary-Louise Parker, Cherry Jones
- Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.
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Great stories but only 5 of 17 are included
- By Terri Kirk on 07-13-12
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The Night Ocean
- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
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Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
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Bettyville
- By: George Hodgman
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself - an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook - in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can't bring himself to force her from the home both treasure - the place where his father's voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict...
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Title Should Be Georgeville-It's All About George
- By Sara on 10-08-15
By: George Hodgman
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Babbitt
- By: Sinclair Lewis
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 13 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In this sardonic portrait of the up-and-coming middle class during the prosperous 1920s, Sinclair Lewis perfectly captures the sound, the feel, and the attitudes of the generation that created the cult of consumerism. With a sharp eye for detail and keen powers of observation, Lewis tracks successful realtor George Babbitt's daily struggles to rise to the top of his profession while maintaining his reputation as an upstanding family man.
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Makes You Think
- By E. Pearson on 02-21-13
By: Sinclair Lewis
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Main Street
- By: Sinclair Lewis
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
- Length: 19 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Widely hailed as a milestone in American literature, Sinclair Lewis' Main Street vividly describes a country on the verge of massive change, with traditional values being threatened by progress. The novel's heroine, Carol Milford, is a highly educated, ambitious woman who plans to join a newly enlightened society. But after marrying a small-town doctor, she finds herself trapped in the role of a dutiful wife. Carol's desires for social change conflict with the security of her comfortable married life, as she struggles to understand the cost of conformity...and rebellion. As relevant today as it was upon its 1920 publication, Main Street is both a masterful piece of writing and a fascinating microcosm of America's social evolution.
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Delightful reading of an excellent book
- By Steve Bird on 06-14-05
By: Sinclair Lewis
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Indignation
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Ray Chase
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad - mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees on every corner for his beloved boy.
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Tight, beautiful and also strange and sad.
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-16
By: Philip Roth
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Finding Fish
- A Memoir
- By: Antwone Q. Fisher
- Narrated by: Thomas Penny
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Baby Boy Fisher was raised in institutions from the moment of his birth in prison to a single mother. He ultimately came to live with a foster family, where he endured near-constant verbal and physical abuse. In his midteens he escaped and enlisted in the navy, where he became a man of the world, raised by the family he created for himself. Finding Fish shows how, out of this unlikely mix of deprivation and hope, an artist was born.
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This book will not disappoint you.
- By Joseph on 10-16-16
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Welcome to the Monkey House
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: David Strathairn, Maria Tucci, Bill Irwin, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.
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Classic Vonnegut
- By Michael Carrato on 08-17-06
By: Kurt Vonnegut
What listeners say about Growing Up
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- shipyardjay
- 08-15-21
Well done Corey Snow…..
……….and it goes without saying Mr. Russell Baker cracked this memoir of sorts out of the park! A fantastic story that I wish kept on going. A great coming of age tale. I felt such a kinship with the author in the way he remembered so much of his childhood. A great blueprint to look at if I ever finally start my own memoir someday. Just captures life in the honest lens it goes by in. Hard at times, impossible at others, on top of the world sometimes, falling in love…..but all the while there’s always that “home” back there in our rearviewmirror and the story of how we made it to where we are today. The sacrifices that the people we have in our lives made for us. As we age we see things much clearer now. When it’s too late sometimes. Time is a cruel thing. If you don’t call your mother after reading this one then you had better go back to playing video games or something. I loved this book.
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- LDO Trained
- 07-09-18
Wonderful biography of a great newspaperman
A great story that portrays life for so many of my parents generation. A reminder of wonderful can be even with its trials and tribulations. Not surprising it won a Pulitzer prize!
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- Cynthia
- 05-06-23
Good not great
This story was fine. It provided a different-ish look into a specific period of our country's past. The audio narration was good but the written "narrator" came off a bit arrogant and frustrating at times. good enough as a story, but not sure I would recommend it. take it or leave it.
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- Mark Parsells
- 01-17-19
Authentic and Heart Warming
Russell Baker’s Growing Up provides a charming and thoughtful story of his life up until marriage. It gives a powerful view of what it was like growing up during the depression and World War II. I was surprised at the end that I found myself in tears at the beauty and simplicity of this epic work, it is so human. It deserved the Pulitzer Prize.
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3 people found this helpful
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- yy
- 10-30-20
Lovely book
Sorry it ended such a well written and organized book. The story was told beautifully. I Loved it.
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- Mitzi
- 08-02-24
Excellent memoir
I am a scholar of women's autobiographies/memoirs: so this is an extremely MALE one. The tone, the focus, the authorial voice (obviously). Very different therefore from what I generally seek and love. However, "Growing Up" is an extremely pleasant story (despite the ugliness of life, sometimes) told by an exquisite writer. Great narration, great book. Highly recommended.
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- Robin Metz
- 05-23-19
One of my favorites!
I’ve read this book two or three times since the publication. Each time I found something new to relate to even though I’m female and was born at the end of 1959, quite different from Russell Baker.
Today I finished listening to the recorded version and again I found his take on life engaging and relatable. Do yourself a favor and spend some time with Growing Up.
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2 people found this helpful
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- John
- 09-08-19
Nostalgia Done Well
Like the man , this book is pleasantly thoughtful, lightly humorous, modest and yet penetrating in the candor of its self-reflections. Its greatest strength however is the way Baker evokes the common practices and beliefs of average, middle-brow, and sorely threatened Americans who had to guide themselves into various safe harbors as the Great Depression built its network of misery throughout the country. One extended, wrenching part of the book is Baker's use of courtship letters written by an amiable salesman to Baker's widowed mother. Even though the mother's part of the correspondence is missing, the story of these two, ultimately disappointed strivers cuts to the heart of the hardships endured by millions.
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- isaac newman
- 07-25-21
Nostalgic
loved it!! I first read this in 1988, and I've always had a copy around, since
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- Redbird57
- 06-15-18
It's good, very good, but...
I love to hear the stories of "everyday people." There are usually so many nuggets of truth and wisdom to be gleaned.
However, I found this story, not to be an "uninteresting" story, but extremely ordinary, without much suspense or humor. I may have laughed once the entire book.
Primarily, I read the book because the author's memoir fell almost exactly into the time period in which my father was a child. I wanted to better understand the world of my father's youth and perhaps this book helped a little. But, I had already learned from my father that times were hard in the 1930's. This memoir did little to tell me anything that I did not already know.
It was a different, and tougher world. The "poverty-stricken" of today would have been considered most blessed during the Great Depression. But, I knew that, too.
I am grateful to Mr. Baker to leave us this account of that most harsh era of modern American history. It is insightful. However, I must honestly say that, unlike Angela's Ashes, I find nothing particularly compelling about the story... It simply is what it is...a story of an ordinary, depression era family. Although fiction, it would not even approach the same class as Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. It's hard to see how this engaging little memoir won a Pulitzer.
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