Holy Land
A Suburban Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Rich Miller
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By:
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D.J. Waldie
About this listen
Since its original publication in 1996, Holy Land has become an American classic. In "quick, translucent prose" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, D. J. Waldie recounts growing up in Lakewood, California, a prototypical post-World War II suburb. Laid out in 316 sections as carefully measured as a grid of tract houses, Holy Land is by turns touching, eerie, funny, and encyclopedic in its handling of what was gained and lost when thousands of blue-collar families were thrown together in the suburbs of the 1950s. An intensely realized and wholly original memoir about the way in which a place can shape a life, Holy Land is ultimately about the resonance of choices - how wide a street should be, what to name a park - and the hopes that are realized in the habits of everyday life.
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
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Over My Dead Body
- Unearthing the Hidden History of American Cemeteries
- By: Greg Melville
- Narrated by: Will Tulin
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to hour upon hour of pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a rich story the place told of his town and its history. Thus was born Melville’s lifelong curiosity with how, where, and why we bury and commemorate our dead. Melville’s Over My Dead Body is a lively (pun intended) and wide-ranging history of cemeteries, places that have mirrored the passing eras in history but have also shaped it.
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excellent read!
- By KJ on 03-05-23
By: Greg Melville
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The Big Roads
- The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways
- By: Earl Swift
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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From author Earl Swift comes the surprising history of the U.S. interstate system, a fascinating route through the dreams, discoveries, and protests that shaped these mighty roads.
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Lessons from The Big Roads
- By Joshua Kim on 05-06-12
By: Earl Swift
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Floodpath
- The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of 20th Century America and the Making of Modern Los Angeles
- By: Jon Wilkman
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Driven by eyewitness accounts and combining urban history with a life-and-death drama and a technological detective story, Floodpath grippingly reanimates the reality behind LA noir fictions like the classic film Chinatown. In an era of climate change, increasing demand on water resources, and a neglected American infrastructure, the tragedy of the St. Francis Dam has never been more relevant.
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Incredible story
- By C. Jackson on 04-07-21
By: Jon Wilkman
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West of the West
- Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State
- By: Mark Arax
- Narrated by: Mark Arax
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Teddy Roosevelt once exclaimed, "When I am in California, I am not in the West. I am west of the West", and in this book, Mark Arax spends four years travelling up and down the Golden State to explore its singular place in the world. This is California beyond the clichés. This is California as only a native son, deep in the dust, could draw it.
By: Mark Arax
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Chicago's Great Fire
- The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City
- By: Carl Smith
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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From an acclaimed historian, the full and authoritative story of one of the most iconic disasters in American history, told through the vivid memories of those who experienced it. Carl Smith’s compelling narrative at last gives this epic event its full and proper place in our national chronicle.
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Fairly good
- By Jennett M. Harrell on 07-24-24
By: Carl Smith
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A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear
- The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears)
- By: Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road. When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness.
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Author's Political Biases Shine Through
- By Frank on 12-20-20
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House Lessons
- Renovating a Life
- By: Erica Bauermeister
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In this mesmerizing memoir-in-essays, New York Times best-selling author Erica Bauermeister renovates a trash-filled house in eccentric Port Townsend, Washington, and in the process takes listeners on a journey to discover the ways our spaces subliminally affect us. A personal, accessible, and literary exploration of the psychology of architecture, this book is designed for homeowners, remodelers, and those who are simply curious about how our built environments shape who we become.
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Wonderful book for anyone home shopping
- By ERICK on 09-04-20
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Washed Away
- How the Great Flood of 1913, America’s Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever
- By: Geoff Williams
- Narrated by: Jim Vann
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The incredible story of a flood of near-Biblical proportions - its destruction, its heroes and victims, and how it shaped America’s natural-disaster policies for the next century. The storm began March 23, 1913, with a series of tornadoes that killed 150 people and injured 400. Then the freezing rains started and the flooding began. It was the nation’s most widespread flood ever - more than 700 people died, hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings were destroyed, and millions were left homeless.
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I love these historical narratives
- By Kim Hamacher on 07-28-15
By: Geoff Williams
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The Cubans
- Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times
- By: Anthony DePalma
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean, Anthony DePalma
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Cubans today, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, are hesitantly embracing the future. In his new book, Anthony DePalma, a veteran reporter with years of experience in Cuba, focuses on a neighborhood across the harbor from Old Havana to dramatize the optimism as well as the enormous challenges that Cubans face: a moving snapshot of Cuba with all its contradictions as the new regime opens the gate to the capitalism that Fidel railed against for so long.
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The real Cuba
- By Tinkerbell on 10-11-20
By: Anthony DePalma
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Broken Glass
- Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece
- By: Alex Beam
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1945, Edith Farnsworth asked the German architect Mies van der Rohe, already renowned for his avant-garde buildings, to design a weekend home for her outside of Chicago. Edith was a woman ahead of her time—unmarried, she was a distinguished medical researcher, as well as an accomplished violinist, translator, and poet. The two quickly began spending weekends together, talking philosophy, Catholic mysticism, and, of course, architecture over wine-soaked picnic lunches.
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Tedious and disappointing
- By Deborah McGarr Hutchins on 02-03-23
By: Alex Beam
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Fire in Paradise
- By: Alastair Gee, Dani Anguiano
- Narrated by: T. Ryder Smith
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts.
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A gripping view of an American tragedy
- By Kalutha on 06-30-20
By: Alastair Gee, and others