How I Shed My Skin
A Memoir of Integration
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $21.49
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Henry Leyva
-
By:
-
Grimsley Jim
About this listen
In August of 1966, Jim Grimsley entered the sixth grade in the same public school he had attended for the five previous years, in his small eastern North Carolina hometown. But he knew that the first day of this school year was going to be different: For the first time he'd be in a classroom with Black children. That was the year federally mandated integration of the schools went into effect, at first allowing students to change schools through "freedom of choice", replaced two years later by forced integration.
For Jim, going to one of the private schools that almost immediately sprang up was not an option: His family was too poor to consider paying tuition, and while they shared the community's dismay over the mixing of the races, they had bigger, more immediate problems to contend with. Now, over 40 years later, Grimsley, a critically acclaimed novelist, revisits that school and those times, remembering his own personal reaction to his first real exposure to Black children and to their culture, and to his growing awareness of his own mostly unrecognized racist attitudes. How I Shed My Skin is both true and deeply moving, an important work that takes listeners inside those classrooms and onto the playing fields as, ever so tentatively, alliances were forged and friendships established.
©2015 Jim Grimsley (P)2015 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
-
White Fragility
- Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
- By: Dr. Robin DiAngelo, Michael Eric Dyson - foreword
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to 'bad people'" (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent meaningful cross-racial dialogue.
-
-
Word salad
- By Eric on 03-10-20
By: Dr. Robin DiAngelo, and others
-
Becoming
- By: Michelle Obama
- Narrated by: Michelle Obama
- Length: 19 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites listeners into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her - from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work to her time spent at the world's most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it - in her own words and on her own terms.
-
-
Didn't know what I was getting into
- By Kenneth Woodward on 12-05-18
By: Michelle Obama
-
I'm Still Here
- Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
- By: Austin Channing Brown
- Narrated by: Austin Channing Brown
- Length: 3 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Austin Channing Brown’s first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools and churches, Austin writes, “I had to learn what it means to love blackness,” a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America’s racial divide as a writer, speaker, and expert helping organizations practice genuine inclusion.
-
-
A Black woman in a middle class White America
- By Adam Shields on 05-16-18
-
Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
-
-
Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
-
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace
- A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League
- By: Jeff Hobbs
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When author Jeff Hobbs arrived at Yale University, he became fast friends with the man who would be his college roommate for four years, Robert Peace. Robert's life was rough from the beginning in the crime-ridden streets of Newark in the 1980s, with his father in jail and his mother earning less than $15,000 a year. But Robert was a brilliant student, and it was supposed to get easier when he was accepted to Yale, where he studied molecular biochemistry and biophysics.
-
-
I've Heard This Before
- By Jami on 07-27-16
By: Jeff Hobbs
-
Where the Light Fell
- A Memoir
- By: Philip Yancey
- Narrated by: Philip Yancey
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Where the Light Fell is a gripping family narrative set against a turbulent time in post-World War II America, shaped by the collision of Southern fundamentalism with the mounting pressures of the civil rights movement and '60s-era forces of social change. In piecing together his fragmented personal history and his search for redemption, Yancey gives testament to the enduring power of our hunger for truth and the possibility of faith rooted in grace instead of fear.
-
-
The full sweep
- By Amazon Customer on 10-12-21
By: Philip Yancey
-
White Fragility
- Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
- By: Dr. Robin DiAngelo, Michael Eric Dyson - foreword
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to 'bad people'" (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent meaningful cross-racial dialogue.
-
-
Word salad
- By Eric on 03-10-20
By: Dr. Robin DiAngelo, and others
-
Becoming
- By: Michelle Obama
- Narrated by: Michelle Obama
- Length: 19 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites listeners into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her - from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work to her time spent at the world's most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it - in her own words and on her own terms.
-
-
Didn't know what I was getting into
- By Kenneth Woodward on 12-05-18
By: Michelle Obama
-
I'm Still Here
- Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
- By: Austin Channing Brown
- Narrated by: Austin Channing Brown
- Length: 3 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Austin Channing Brown’s first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools and churches, Austin writes, “I had to learn what it means to love blackness,” a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America’s racial divide as a writer, speaker, and expert helping organizations practice genuine inclusion.
-
-
A Black woman in a middle class White America
- By Adam Shields on 05-16-18
-
Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
-
-
Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
-
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace
- A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League
- By: Jeff Hobbs
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When author Jeff Hobbs arrived at Yale University, he became fast friends with the man who would be his college roommate for four years, Robert Peace. Robert's life was rough from the beginning in the crime-ridden streets of Newark in the 1980s, with his father in jail and his mother earning less than $15,000 a year. But Robert was a brilliant student, and it was supposed to get easier when he was accepted to Yale, where he studied molecular biochemistry and biophysics.
-
-
I've Heard This Before
- By Jami on 07-27-16
By: Jeff Hobbs
-
Where the Light Fell
- A Memoir
- By: Philip Yancey
- Narrated by: Philip Yancey
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Where the Light Fell is a gripping family narrative set against a turbulent time in post-World War II America, shaped by the collision of Southern fundamentalism with the mounting pressures of the civil rights movement and '60s-era forces of social change. In piecing together his fragmented personal history and his search for redemption, Yancey gives testament to the enduring power of our hunger for truth and the possibility of faith rooted in grace instead of fear.
-
-
The full sweep
- By Amazon Customer on 10-12-21
By: Philip Yancey
-
Swing Time
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Pippa Bennett-Warner
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: About rhythm and time, about Black bodies and Black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either. Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.
-
-
Enthralling and instructive. A novel of the highest caliber
- By Richmond Surrey on 07-27-17
By: Zadie Smith
-
My Seven Black Fathers
- A Young Activist's Memoir of Race, Family, and the Mentors Who Made Him Whole
- By: Will Jawando
- Narrated by: Will Jawando
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Will Jawando tells a deeply affirmative story of hope and respect for men of color. As a boy growing up outside DC, Will, who went by his Nigerian name, Yemi, never quite fit in. He was a Black kid with a divorced white mother, a frayed relationship with his biological father, and teachers who scolded him for being disruptive in class. Eventually, he became close to Kalfani, a kid he looked up to. Years after he got the call that Kalfani was dead, another casualty of gun violence, Will looks back on the extraordinary mentors that enabled him to thrive.
-
-
A Must Read Narrative
- By BarryCappa on 10-25-22
By: Will Jawando
-
While the World Watched
- A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age During the Civil Rights Movement
- By: Carolyn Maull McKinstry
- Narrated by: Felicia Bullock
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fifteen-year-old Carolyn Maull McKinstry was just a few feet away when the Klan - planted bomb that killed four of her friends exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was one of the seminal moments in the Civil Rights movement, a sad day in American history…and the turning point in a young girl's life.
-
-
Look Back and Live With Greater Understanding
- By jerrie Will on 05-07-21
-
Losing My Cool
- How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture
- By: Thomas Chatterton Williams
- Narrated by: Thomas Chatterton Williams
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Into Williams's childhood home-a one-story ranch house-his father crammed more books than the local library could hold. "Pappy" used some of these volumes to run an academic prep service; the rest he used in his unending pursuit of wisdom. His son's pursuits were quite different: "money, hoes, and clothes."
-
-
The book is awful and so is anyone who praises it.
- By jason on 04-21-12
-
The Dove in the Belly
- By: Jim Grimsley
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the University of North Carolina, Ronny's made some friends, kept his secrets, survived dorm life, and protected his heart. Until he can't. Ben is in some ways Ronny's opposite; he's big and solid where Ronny is small and slight. Ben's at UNC on a football scholarship. Confident, with that easy jock swagger and an explosive temper always simmering. He has a steady stream of girlfriends. Ben's aware of the overwhelming effect he has on Ronny. It's like a sensation of power. So easy to tease Ronny, throw playful insults, but it all feels somehow...loaded.
-
-
What an amazing, touching book…
- By ZippyBippy on 06-20-23
By: Jim Grimsley
-
The Newcomers
- Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom
- By: Helen Thorpe
- Narrated by: Kate Handford
- Length: 15 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Offering a nuanced and transformative take on immigration, multiculturalism, and America's role on the global stage, The Newcomers follows and reflects on the lives of 22 immigrant teenagers throughout the course of their 2015-2016 school year at Denver's South High School. Unfamiliar with American culture or the English language, the students range from the ages of 14 to 19 and come from nations struggling with drought, famine, or war.
-
-
Surprisingly great read.
- By Ellen V. Moore on 05-23-18
By: Helen Thorpe
-
Elizabeth and Hazel
- Two Women of Little Rock
- By: David Margolick
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The names Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery may not be well known, but the image of them from September 1957 surely is: a Black high-school girl, dressed in white, walking stoically in front of Little Rock Central High School, and a White girl standing directly behind her, face twisted in hate, screaming racial epithets. This famous photograph captures the full anguish of desegregation - in Little Rock and throughout the South - and an epic moment in the civil rights movement.
-
-
More stories to be told
- By Carolyn Harris-Muchell on 04-11-17
By: David Margolick
-
A Mighty Long Way
- My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
- By: Carlotta Walls LaNier, Lisa Frazier Page, Bill Clinton - foreword
- Narrated by: Carlotta Walls LaNier
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When 14-year-old Carlotta Walls walked up the stairs of Little Rock Central High School on September 25, 1957, she and eight other Black students only wanted to make it to class. But the journey of the “Little Rock Nine”, as they came to be known, would lead the nation on an even longer and much more turbulent path, one that would challenge prevailing attitudes, break down barriers, and forever change the landscape of America.
-
-
Disappointing
- By SWF in Minneapolis on 04-27-24
By: Carlotta Walls LaNier, and others
-
Ordinary Light
- A Memoir
- By: Tracy K. Smith
- Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
-
-
Simply spoken - poetic
- By CarolynneRHarris on 04-27-15
By: Tracy K. Smith
-
The Song and the Silence
- A Story About Family, Race, and What Was Revealed in a Small Town in the Mississippi Delta While Searching for Booker Wright
- By: Yvette Johnson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"Have to keep that smile", said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time Wright was a waiter in a Whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: Before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.
-
-
Exceeded every expectation
- By ZeeJ84 on 05-23-21
By: Yvette Johnson
-
Real American
- A Memoir
- By: Julie Lythcott-Haims
- Narrated by: Julie Lythcott-Haims
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bringing a poetic sensibility to her prose to stunning effect, Lythcott-Haims briskly and stirringly evokes her personal battle with the low self-esteem that American racism routinely inflicts on people of color. The only child of a marriage between an African-American father and a white British mother, she shows indelibly how so-called "micro" aggressions in addition to blunt force insults can puncture a person's inner life with a thousand sharp cuts.
-
-
Must read
- By Anonymous User on 07-16-18
-
Hunger of Memory
- The Education of Richard Rodriguez
- By: Richard Rodriguez
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum. Here is the poignant journey of a "minority student" who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation - from his past, his parents, his culture - and so describes the high price of "making it" in middle-class America.
-
-
Great book
- By Latarsha on 08-06-18
Related to this topic
-
Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
-
-
Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
-
A Mighty Long Way
- My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
- By: Carlotta Walls LaNier, Lisa Frazier Page, Bill Clinton - foreword
- Narrated by: Carlotta Walls LaNier
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When 14-year-old Carlotta Walls walked up the stairs of Little Rock Central High School on September 25, 1957, she and eight other Black students only wanted to make it to class. But the journey of the “Little Rock Nine”, as they came to be known, would lead the nation on an even longer and much more turbulent path, one that would challenge prevailing attitudes, break down barriers, and forever change the landscape of America.
-
-
Disappointing
- By SWF in Minneapolis on 04-27-24
By: Carlotta Walls LaNier, and others
-
Ordinary Light
- A Memoir
- By: Tracy K. Smith
- Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
-
-
Simply spoken - poetic
- By CarolynneRHarris on 04-27-15
By: Tracy K. Smith
-
The Song and the Silence
- A Story About Family, Race, and What Was Revealed in a Small Town in the Mississippi Delta While Searching for Booker Wright
- By: Yvette Johnson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"Have to keep that smile", said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time Wright was a waiter in a Whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: Before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.
-
-
Exceeded every expectation
- By ZeeJ84 on 05-23-21
By: Yvette Johnson
-
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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
How she stressed Creole, but I guess it was a badge if honor not being regular black.
- By Satisfied customer on 05-21-24
-
Bad Boy
- By: Walter Dean Myers
- Narrated by: Joe Morton
- Length: 4 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Into a memoir that is gripping, funny, heartbreaking, and unforgettable, Walter Dean Myers richly weaves the details of his Harlem childhood in the 1940s and 1950s: a loving home life with his adopted parents, Bible school, street games, and the vitality of his neighborhood. Although Walter spent much of his time either getting into trouble or on the basketball court, secretly he was a voracious reader and an aspiring writer.
-
-
Tough times
- By Megan on 01-30-12
-
Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
-
-
Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
-
A Mighty Long Way
- My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
- By: Carlotta Walls LaNier, Lisa Frazier Page, Bill Clinton - foreword
- Narrated by: Carlotta Walls LaNier
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When 14-year-old Carlotta Walls walked up the stairs of Little Rock Central High School on September 25, 1957, she and eight other Black students only wanted to make it to class. But the journey of the “Little Rock Nine”, as they came to be known, would lead the nation on an even longer and much more turbulent path, one that would challenge prevailing attitudes, break down barriers, and forever change the landscape of America.
-
-
Disappointing
- By SWF in Minneapolis on 04-27-24
By: Carlotta Walls LaNier, and others
-
Ordinary Light
- A Memoir
- By: Tracy K. Smith
- Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
-
-
Simply spoken - poetic
- By CarolynneRHarris on 04-27-15
By: Tracy K. Smith
-
The Song and the Silence
- A Story About Family, Race, and What Was Revealed in a Small Town in the Mississippi Delta While Searching for Booker Wright
- By: Yvette Johnson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"Have to keep that smile", said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time Wright was a waiter in a Whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: Before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.
-
-
Exceeded every expectation
- By ZeeJ84 on 05-23-21
By: Yvette Johnson
-
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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
How she stressed Creole, but I guess it was a badge if honor not being regular black.
- By Satisfied customer on 05-21-24
-
Bad Boy
- By: Walter Dean Myers
- Narrated by: Joe Morton
- Length: 4 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Into a memoir that is gripping, funny, heartbreaking, and unforgettable, Walter Dean Myers richly weaves the details of his Harlem childhood in the 1940s and 1950s: a loving home life with his adopted parents, Bible school, street games, and the vitality of his neighborhood. Although Walter spent much of his time either getting into trouble or on the basketball court, secretly he was a voracious reader and an aspiring writer.
-
-
Tough times
- By Megan on 01-30-12
-
Dreams in a Time of War
- A Childhood Memoir
- By: Ngugi wa'Thiong'o
- Narrated by: Hakeem Kae-Kazim
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Of Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, Ngugi wa Thiongo was born in 1938 in the backlands of his country (Kiambu district) to a father whose four wives bore him two dozen or so children. Ngugi was the fifth child of the third wife. His father was a peasant farmer forced to become a squatter after the British Imperial Act of 1915. Before going off to school, he had what was then considered a bizarre and inexplicable thirst for learning....
-
-
An escape through education
- By Tango on 06-17-12
-
Without You, There Is No Us
- My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite
- By: Suki Kim
- Narrated by: Janet Song
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields - except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST).
-
-
The King and I meets Mary Poppins
- By Michael on 02-22-15
By: Suki Kim
-
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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
I wanted to listen but...
- By PurpleSage on 03-22-14
By: Helen Thorpe
-
While the World Watched
- A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age During the Civil Rights Movement
- By: Carolyn Maull McKinstry
- Narrated by: Felicia Bullock
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fifteen-year-old Carolyn Maull McKinstry was just a few feet away when the Klan - planted bomb that killed four of her friends exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was one of the seminal moments in the Civil Rights movement, a sad day in American history…and the turning point in a young girl's life.
-
-
Look Back and Live With Greater Understanding
- By jerrie Will on 05-07-21
-
River Town
- Two Years on the Yangtze
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 14 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident.
-
-
Peter Berkrot Again?
- By Abstraction on 07-10-11
By: Peter Hessler
-
Acts of Faith
- The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation
- By: Eboo Patel
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Acts of Faith is a remarkable account of growing up Muslim in America and coming to believe in religious pluralism, from one of the most prominent faith leaders in the United States. Eboo Patel's story is a hopeful and moving testament to the power and passion of young people - and of the world-changing potential of an interfaith youth movement.
-
-
Waited three years for this audiobook
- By Eva on 08-29-13
By: Eboo Patel
-
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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
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.
-
-
Very insightful book
- By karen feek on 01-05-21
-
Finding Fish
- A Memoir
- By: Antwone Q. Fisher
- Narrated by: Thomas Penny
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
This book will not disappoint you.
- By Joseph on 10-16-16
-
Born Bright
- A Young Girl's Journey from Nothing to Something in America
- By: C. Nicole Mason
- Narrated by: Robin Eller
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born Bright, C. Nicole Mason's powerful memoir, is a story of reconciliation, constrained choices, and life on the other side of the tracks. Born in the 1970s in Los Angeles, California, Mason was raised by a beautiful but volatile 16-year-old single mother. Early on, she learned to navigate between an unpredictable home life and school, where she excelled. By high school, Mason was seamlessly straddling two worlds.
-
-
Solid Book
- By Daryl on 11-06-16
By: C. Nicole Mason
-
Under Red Skies
- Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China
- By: Karoline Kan
- Narrated by: Allison Hiroto
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A deeply personal and shocking look at how China is coming to terms with its conflicted past as it emerges into a modern, cutting-edge superpower.
-
-
An intimate view of real life in China
- By Lonnie G. Hardy, Jr. on 08-15-19
By: Karoline Kan
-
A Prayer for Owen Meany
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 27 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Of all of John Irving's books, this is the one that lends itself best to audio. In print, Owen Meany's dialogue is set in capital letters; for this production, Irving himself selected Joe Barrett to deliver Meany's difficult voice as intended. In the summer of 1953, two 11-year-old boys – best friends – are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is extraordinary and terrifying.
-
-
Outstanding
- By Alan on 03-28-11
By: John Irving
-
How to Be Black
- By: Baratunde Thurston
- Narrated by: Baratunde Thurston
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beyond memoir, this guidebook offers practical advice on everything from "How to Be the Black Friend" to "How to Be the (Next) Black President" to "How to Celebrate Black History Month". This is a humorous, intelligent, and audacious guide that challenges and satirizes the so-called experts, purists, and racists who purport to speak for all Black people. With honest storytelling and biting wit, Baratunde plots a path not just to blackness, but one open to anyone interested in simply "how to be".
-
-
Funny yet insightful!
- By Theodore on 02-15-12
What listeners say about How I Shed My Skin
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- David L. Ollison
- 04-20-21
My heart, my town...
A glimpse into the past, my past. I lived each word, each description; but from the other side. I remember my trying to find my place in a world so big; but a county so small. Jimmy, as we all called him captured the setting with its challenged outcome-how far had we gotten from our Jones County upbringings? Was what we had become better than what we started with? There is a mixture of all of it that we fight each day. But, through it all there is something that draws us back to the slow moving coffee colored water of the Trent River and the no stoplight town. I am dabbing my eyes as I remember the red headed boy with the bell bottoms that most Black folk loved. Thanks for the journey....
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!