Hill Women
Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains
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Narrated by:
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Cassie Chambers
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By:
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Cassie Chambers
About this listen
After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong "hill women" who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region.
"Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated." (BookPage starred review)
"Poverty is enmeshed with pride in these stories of survival." (Associated Press)
Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County is one of the poorest counties in both Kentucky and the country. Buildings are crumbling and fields sit vacant, as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women are finding creative ways to subsist in their hollers in the hills.
Cassie Chambers grew up in these hollers, and through the women who raised her, she traces her own path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains. Chambers' granny was a child bride who rose before dawn every morning to raise seven children. Despite her poverty, she wouldn’t hesitate to give the last bite of pie or vegetables from her garden to a struggling neighbor. Her two daughters took very different paths: strong-willed Ruth - the hardest-working tobacco farmer in the county - stayed on the family farm, while spirited Wilma - the sixth child - became the first in the family to graduate from high school, then moved an hour away for college. Married at 19 and pregnant with Cassie a few months later, Wilma beat the odds to finish school. She raised her daughter to think she could move mountains, like the ones that kept her safe but also isolated her from the larger world.
Cassie would spend much of her childhood with Granny and Ruth in the hills of Owsley County, both while Wilma was in college and after. With her "hill women" values guiding her, Cassie went on to graduate from Harvard Law. But while the Ivy League gave her knowledge and opportunities, its privileged world felt far from her reality, and she moved back home to help her fellow rural Kentucky women by providing free legal services.
Appalachian women face issues that are all too common: domestic violence, the opioid crisis, a world that seems more divided by the day. But they are also community leaders, keeping their towns together in the face of a system that continually fails them. With nuance and heart, Chambers uses these women’s stories paired with her own journey to break down the myth of the hillbilly and illuminate a region whose poor communities, especially women, can lead it into the future.
©2020 Cassie Chambers (P)2020 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Women in Kentucky’s Appalachian community come into focus in lawyer Chambers’s powerful debut memoir, which aims to put a human face on a stereotyped region.... This is a passionate memoir, one that honors Appalachia’s residents." (Publishers Weekly)
"A family memoir that celebrates the inspiration of strong women within a rural culture most often characterized as patriarchal... [Chambers tells] stories that illuminate the hardworking spirit and flashes of hope among the populace, the women in particular." (Kirkus Reviews)
"Hill Women is a gritty, warm love letter to Appalachian communities and the resourceful womenwho lead them.... [It] feels especially urgent now, in our post-2016, post - Hillbilly ElegyAmerica. In a sense, Chambers is responding to the ‘bootstraps’ narrative of J. D. Vance’s controversial memoir, which has been criticized for blaming Appalachians for their own circumstances. Hill Women shows an Appalachia that Hillbilly Elegy obscured.” (Slate)
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Raised in Miami and the daughter of Cuban refugees, Crucet examines the political and personal contours of American identity and the physical places where those contours find themselves smashed: be it a rodeo town in Nebraska, a university campus in upstate New York, or Disney World in Florida. Crucet illuminates how she came to see her exclusion from aspects of the theoretical American Dream, despite her family's attempts to fit in with white American culture - beginning with their ill-fated plan to name her after the winner of the Miss America pageant.
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Empowering
- By elvia on 10-23-19
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A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves
- One Family and Migration in the 21st Century
- By: Jason DeParle
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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When Jason DeParle moved into the Manila slums with Tita Comodas and her family three decades ago, he never imagined his reporting on them would span three generations and turn into the defining chronicle of a new age - the age of global migration. In a monumental book that gives new meaning to "immersion journalism", DeParle paints an intimate portrait of an unforgettable family as they endure years of sacrifice and separation, willing themselves out of shantytown poverty into a new global middle class.
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Excellent and Important
- By Booklover on 03-22-20
By: Jason DeParle
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A Wild and Precious Life
- A Memoir
- By: Edie Windsor, Joshua Lyon
- Narrated by: Donna Postel, Joshua Lyon
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Overall
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In this memoir, which she began before passing away in 2017 and completed by her co-writer, Edie recounts her childhood in Philadelphia, her realization that she was a lesbian, and her active social life in Greenwich Village's electrifying underground gay scene during the 1950s. Edie was also one of a select group of trailblazing women in computing, working her way up the ladder at IBM and achieving their highest technical ranking while developing software.
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🏳️🌈 Wow! 🏳️🌈
- By Natalia Zimnoch on 10-15-19
By: Edie Windsor, and others
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The Undocumented Americans
- By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Narrated by: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
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Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants—and to find the hidden key to her own.
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Raw, heartbreaking - we can do better by others
- By RapaciousReader on 04-11-20
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The Working Poor
- Invisible in America
- By: David K. Shipler
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 15 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Nobody who works hard should be poor in America, writes Pulitzer Prize-winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.
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Textbook Perfect Discussion of the Problem
- By Cynthia on 07-28-12
By: David K. Shipler
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Just Like Us
- The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America
- By: Helen Thorpe
- Narrated by: Paula Christensen
- Length: 15 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Just Like Us tells the story of four high school students whose parents entered this country illegally from Mexico. All four of the girls have grown up in the United States, and all four want to live the American dream, but only two have documents. As the girls attempt to make it into college, they discover that only the legal pair see a clear path forward. A coming-of-age story about girlhood and friendship, as well as the resilience required to transcend poverty, Just Like Us is also a book about identity.
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I wanted to listen but...
- By PurpleSage on 03-22-14
By: Helen Thorpe
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My Two Moms
- Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family
- By: Zach Wahls, Bruce Littlefield
- Narrated by: Kris Koscheski
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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On January 31, 2011, Zach Wahls addressed the Iowa House Judiciary Committee in a public forum regarding civil unions. The 19-year-old son of a same-sex couple, Wahls proudly proclaimed, "The sexual orientation of my parents has had zero effect on the content of my character." Hours later, his speech was posted on YouTube, where it went viral, quickly receiving more than two million views. By the end of the week, everyone knew his name and wanted to hear more from the boy with two moms.
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You will not regret listening to this.
- By V. Brown on 06-07-12
By: Zach Wahls, and others
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Factory Girls
- From Village to City in a Changing China
- By: Leslie T. Chang
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 14 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America's shores remade our own country a century ago.
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Living in Shenzhen - and What A Disappointment
- By Abstraction on 03-01-10
By: Leslie T. Chang
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A Knock at Midnight
- A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom
- By: Brittany K. Barnett
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Brittany K. Barnett was only a law student when she came across the case that would change her life forever - that of Sharanda Jones, single mother, business owner, and, like Brittany, Black daughter of the rural South. A victim of America’s devastating war on drugs, Sharanda had been torn away from her young daughter and was serving a life sentence without parole - for a first-time drug offense.
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Riveting Listen, Inspiring, Change Your Mind
- By elena on 11-18-20
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Hidden Girl
- The True Story of a Modern-Day Child Slave
- By: Shyima Hall, Lisa Wysocky
- Narrated by: Robin Eller
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Shyima Hall was born in Egypt on September 29, 1989, the seventh child of desperately poor parents. When she was eight, her parents sold her into slavery. Shyima then moved two hours away to Egypt's capitol city of Cairo to live with a wealthy family and serve them eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. When she was ten, her captors moved to Orange County, California, and smuggled Shyima with them. Two years later, an anonymous call from a neighbor brought about the end of Shyima's servitude - but her journey to true freedom was far from over.
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story
- By Don on 09-26-14
By: Shyima Hall, and others
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A Mighty Long Way
- My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
- By: Carlotta Walls Lanier
- Narrated by: Peter Fernandez, Lizan Mitchell
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
In 1951, Carlotta Walls Lanier was one of the nine African-American students to integrate Little Rock High School, and the first to earn a diploma. Here she provides a firsthand account of her experiences - including the bombing that rocked her home, the constant threats she and her classmates faced, and the pressure and bullying her parents endured.
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Very insightful book
- By karen feek on 01-05-21
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Confucius Never Said
- By: Helen Raleigh
- Narrated by: Helen Raleigh
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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This book is a four-generation family journey from repression and poverty in China to freedom and prosperity in the United States. Their lives overlap with many significant historical events taking....
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Wake up America
- By K and J on 12-14-19
By: Helen Raleigh
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It Was All a Dream
- A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America
- By: Reniqua Allen
- Narrated by: Shayna Small
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Reniqua Allen tells the stories of Black millennials searching for a better future in spite of racist policies that have closed off traditional versions of success. Many watched their parents and grandparents play by the rules, only to sink deeper and deeper into debt. They witnessed their elders fight to escape cycles of oppression for more promising prospects, largely to no avail. Today, in this post-Obama era, they face a critical turning point. Interweaving her own experience, Allen shares surprising stories of hope and ingenuity.
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Great statistics and facts
- By Eve on 05-18-19
By: Reniqua Allen
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Almost unlistenable
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WoW
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Appalachia has played a complex and often contradictory role in the unfolding of American history. Created by urban journalists in the years following the Civil War, the idea of Appalachia provided a counterpoint to emerging definitions of progress. Early 20th-century critics of modernity saw the region as a remnant of frontier life, a reflection of simpler times that should be preserved and protected.
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When Alan Maimon got the assignment in 2000 to report on life in rural Eastern Kentucky, his editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal told him to cover the region "like a foreign correspondent would." And indeed, when Maimon arrived in Hazard, Kentucky, fresh off a reporting stint for the New York Times's Berlin bureau, he felt every bit the outsider. He had landed in a place in the vice grip of ecological devastation and a corporate-made opioid epidemic - a place where vote-buying and drug-motivated political assassinations were the order of the day.
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It is 1970. "Bean" Holladay is 12 and her sister, Liz, is 15 when their artistic mother, Charlotte, a woman who flees every place she’s ever lived at the first sign of trouble," takes off to find herself." She leaves her girls enough money for food to last a month or two. But when Bean gets home from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz board a bus from California to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying antebellum mansion that’s been in the family for generations.
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A Bronze Star
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The Captivity of the Oatman Girls
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On the North American continent, Native American tribes carried out abductions against the new European settlers from the time they first set foot on eastern shores. Some of the women taken in the colonial to early American period went on to become respected figures in their new environments, while others lived out their lives as slaves.
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Worst narrator ever, couldn’t listen more than 10 minutes
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An Outlaw and a Lady
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The daughter of a Pentecostal evangelist and a race-car driver, Jessi Colter played piano and sang in church before leaving Arizona to tour with rock n' roll pioneer Duane Eddy, whom she married. Colter became a successful recording artist, appearing on American Bandstand and befriending stars such as the the Everly Brothers and Chet Atkins while her songs were recorded by Nancy Sinatra, Dottie West, and others. Her marriage to Eddy didn't last, however, and in 1969 she married the electrifying Waylon Jennings.
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Thank you Jessi
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History of Appalachia
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For more than 20 years historians have expressed the critical need for a single-volume history of Appalachia in Virginia. Responding to this demand, the author of this text has woven together the various strands of the Appalachian experience into a sweeping whole.
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What listeners say about Hill Women
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Becky
- 09-26-23
A tale of our family’s beginnings!
I married an Owsley over 50 years ago and first heard about Owsley county about 20 years later when a friend was doing genealogy for us. It peaked my interest and that of my children. In the last several years 2 of my kids have visited the area. This amazing book, however is the first real peak we’ve had into the fascinating story of the people that shaped us. I enjoyed every word and cried more than a little bit with the family’s losses and the hill people’s struggles. Thank you so much for giving this next generation of Owsley’s a glimpse of what they came from and a vision of what they may strive for. Rebecca Owsley
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- 2manyparrots
- 08-06-24
Disappointing
I enjoyed the book until the author started her Ivy League education. From there on I felt I was being lectured to by a community organizer. I kept fast forwarding to find more actual stories, finally gave up and moved on to another selection. My family is from Tennessee poverty and we don't whine about everything like this author. Life isn't fair, you got out good for you. Nope. sorry other reviewers. This was nothing as entertaining or enlightening as Hillbilly Eegy.
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- jammie lynn roberts
- 07-06-21
Tennessee
very accurate telling the story of rural life in the appalachian mountains,felt like my family story
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1 person found this helpful
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- Abdul Azziz
- 06-10-22
Truly enjoyable
Loved the opportunity to get a glimpse of the complexity of being a women from Appalachia.
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- JRockwell
- 02-09-22
awesome story
kept seeing this book come up periodically, looked interesting. I enjoyed the book. And the narration, the deflection and the accents.
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- Janet Breslin
- 09-08-24
The importance of our roots-and her pride
One of the best books I have read about Appalachia- so good to read about how proud she was of her roots and how it made her into who she was and what she did to help her people. A positive story!!!!
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- MartyPhD
- 05-14-20
The shoulders upon which we stood..they lifted us up!
I choose to read this book because my family comes from Appalachia and I know Hill Women. I have seen their struggle, their grit, their strength, their fire and felt their love..still feel it today. I am deeply grateful that I came from that subculture. It made me very strong! When I finished my dissertation for my PhD, I dedicated it to my mother because it was her shoulders upon which I stood. She lifted me up!
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12 people found this helpful
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- Lisa Hartline
- 08-15-20
Highly recommend
great picture of Appalachian people and the struggle to provide legal services in rural areas.
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5 people found this helpful
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- WhiteFamFun
- 03-08-21
Strong Women
My mothers side of the family is from Eastern Kentucky so this story resonated with me. It also reminded me of all the stories of the women before me paving the way for me to have a better life.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Jody
- 05-29-21
Rich story, but includes some false guilt.
Rich story and excellent narration but I can’t help feeling sorry for the author.
Cassie is given so much- strong family, deep community, rich heritage, great examples of a work ethic AND the opportunity to get an education that allows her independence and great income.
Those things she acknowledges and is grateful.
Yet there are so many inconsistencies from the liberal mindset about education and success.
For example, she talks about how men having more power at Harvard and how women are still not represented as they should while JUST having transferred from Wellesley College, an all girls college that does not allow men to enroll. The hypocrisy. The liberal higher education system has lead her to feel guilty (she uses that word several times throughout)- as if being financially successful is a bad thing. No. It is not a bad thing no matter what is taught in these very expensive schools.
I can’t help feel bad for the manipulated guilt that has been placed on this generation that somehow their good decisions are wrong.
And are there things that improve in this area of the country, yes. But false guilt does not change a thing… it just steals joy.
The commitment to family is strong in this book. Hard work, community and love are painted in well articulated stories. A good read.
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1 person found this helpful