How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)
Poetry
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Narrated by:
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Barbara Kingsolver
About this listen
In this intimate collection, the beloved author of The Poisonwood Bible and more than a dozen other New York Times best sellers, winner or finalist for the Pulitzer and countless other prizes, now trains her eye on the everyday and the metaphysical in poems that are smartly crafted, emotionally rich, and luminous.
In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with “how to” poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying.
Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us. Some poems reflect on the redemptive powers of art and poetry itself; others consider where everything begins.
Closing the book are poems that celebrate natural wonders—birdsong and ghost-flowers, ruthless ants, clever shellfish, coral reefs, deadly deserts, and 1,000-year-old beech trees—all speaking to the daring project of belonging to an untamed world beyond ourselves.
Altogether, these are poems about transcendence: finding breath and lightness in life and the everyday acts of living. It’s all terribly easy and, as the title suggests, not entirely possible. Or at least, it is never quite finished.
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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It is NOT unabridged.
- By Mark D Worthen PsyD on 09-19-15
By: Walt Whitman
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Annie Dunne
- By: Sebastian Barry
- Narrated by: Caroline Lennon
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It is 1959 in Wicklow, Ireland, and Annie and her cousin Sarah are living and working together to keep Sarah’s small farm running. Suddenly, Annie’s young niece and nephew are left in their care. Unprepared for the chaos that two children inevitably bring, but nervously excited nonetheless, Annie finds the interruption of her normal life and her last chance at happiness complicated further by the attention being paid to Sarah by a local man with his eye on the farm.
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Splendid
- By Shady on 06-21-23
By: Sebastian Barry
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The Probable Future
- By: Alice Hoffman
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people's dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window to the future - a future that she might not want to see.
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Nice, gentle story for when you feel bad.
- By Anonymous User on 05-28-17
By: Alice Hoffman
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Spoon River Anthology
- By: Edgar Lee Masters
- Narrated by: Patrick Fraley, Edward Asner
- Length: 4 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From a cemetery in a mythical small town in Illinois, the dead speak about their lives. Each free-verse monologue stands as an epitaph for the person speaking, yet the play is ultimately about life, not death. Featuring 50 performers with specially commissioned original music, this is the only audio version of this landmark classic available.
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Magnificent American poetry
- By Admiral Pike on 04-14-05
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The Blind Assassin
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Whitney on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
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Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
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Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
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Shadows on the Rock
- By: Willa Cather
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to 12-year-old Cécile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas créche.
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wonderful
- By carol perez on 05-18-21
By: Willa Cather
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Light Years
- By: James Salter
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach.
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Unfathomable Font of Blue: Life's Serial Goodbyes
- By W Perry Hall on 04-18-19
By: James Salter
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The Shell Collector
- By: Anthony Doerr
- Narrated by: Hakeem Kae Kazim
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The exquisitely crafted stories in Anthony Doerr's acclaimed debut collection take listeners from the African coast to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. Doerr explores the human condition in all its varieties - metamorphosis, grief, fractured relationships, and slowly mending hearts - and conjures nature in both its beautiful abundance and crushing power.
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Narrator not appropriate to the book.
- By Janet on 02-18-17
By: Anthony Doerr
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Small Wonder
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In her new essay collection, the beloved author of High Tide in Tucson brings to us from one of history's darker moments an extended love song to the world we still have. From its opening parable gleaned from recent news about a lost child saved in an astonishing way, the book moves on to consider a world of surprising and hopeful prospects, ranging from an inventive conservation scheme in a remote jungle to the backyard flock of chickens tended by the author's small daughter.
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Not much of a Wonder
- By Max on 10-20-06
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Unsheltered
- A Novel
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Brilliantly executed and compulsively listenable, Unsheltered is the story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum, as they navigate the challenges of surviving a world in the throes of major cultural shifts. In this mesmerizing story told in alternating chapters, Willa and Thatcher come to realize that though the future is uncertain, even unnerving, shelter can be found in the bonds of kindred - whether family or friends - and in the strength of the human spirit.
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Spring for a professional narrator, please!
- By Gail D. on 11-05-18
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The Bean Trees
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: C. J. Critt
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Clear-eyed and spirited, Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time Taylor arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has acquired a completely unexpected child, a three-year-old American Indian girl named Turtle, and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity of putting down roots.
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Barbara, can we have a "re-do?"
- By Nancy on 02-22-12
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Animal Dreams
- A Novel
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Animal Dreams is a passionate and complex novel about love, forgiveness, and one woman's struggle to find her place in the world. At the end of her rope, Codi Noline returns to her Arizona home to face her ailing father, with whom she has a difficult, distant relationship. There she meets handsome Apache trainman Loyd Peregrina, who tells her, "If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."
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She reads my heart
- By Sue Spahr Hodges on 08-03-18
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High Tide in Tucson
- Essays from Now or Never
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 2 hrs and 47 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse as modern motherhood, the history of private property, and the suspended citizenship of humans in the animal kingdom.
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Good book, but not unabridged...
- By Kathy Roberts Forde on 04-20-20
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The Lacuna
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 19 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Born in the United States, but reared in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers and, one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed muralist Diego Rivera. When he goes to work for Rivera, his wife, exotic artist Kahlo, and exiled leader Lev Trotsky, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution.
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Great Writers need Great Narrators
- By Gypsy Wife on 12-04-09
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Small Wonder
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In her new essay collection, the beloved author of High Tide in Tucson brings to us from one of history's darker moments an extended love song to the world we still have. From its opening parable gleaned from recent news about a lost child saved in an astonishing way, the book moves on to consider a world of surprising and hopeful prospects, ranging from an inventive conservation scheme in a remote jungle to the backyard flock of chickens tended by the author's small daughter.
-
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Not much of a Wonder
- By Max on 10-20-06
-
Unsheltered
- A Novel
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Brilliantly executed and compulsively listenable, Unsheltered is the story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum, as they navigate the challenges of surviving a world in the throes of major cultural shifts. In this mesmerizing story told in alternating chapters, Willa and Thatcher come to realize that though the future is uncertain, even unnerving, shelter can be found in the bonds of kindred - whether family or friends - and in the strength of the human spirit.
-
-
Spring for a professional narrator, please!
- By Gail D. on 11-05-18
-
The Bean Trees
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: C. J. Critt
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Clear-eyed and spirited, Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time Taylor arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has acquired a completely unexpected child, a three-year-old American Indian girl named Turtle, and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity of putting down roots.
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Barbara, can we have a "re-do?"
- By Nancy on 02-22-12
-
Animal Dreams
- A Novel
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Animal Dreams is a passionate and complex novel about love, forgiveness, and one woman's struggle to find her place in the world. At the end of her rope, Codi Noline returns to her Arizona home to face her ailing father, with whom she has a difficult, distant relationship. There she meets handsome Apache trainman Loyd Peregrina, who tells her, "If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."
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She reads my heart
- By Sue Spahr Hodges on 08-03-18
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High Tide in Tucson
- Essays from Now or Never
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 2 hrs and 47 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse as modern motherhood, the history of private property, and the suspended citizenship of humans in the animal kingdom.
-
-
Good book, but not unabridged...
- By Kathy Roberts Forde on 04-20-20
-
The Lacuna
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 19 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born in the United States, but reared in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers and, one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed muralist Diego Rivera. When he goes to work for Rivera, his wife, exotic artist Kahlo, and exiled leader Lev Trotsky, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution.
-
-
Great Writers need Great Narrators
- By Gypsy Wife on 12-04-09
-
Holding the Line
- Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver, Jennifer Jill Araya
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Holding the Line, Barbara Kingsolver's first nonfiction book, is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment that occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters.
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Didn’t finish - not interested
- By Amazon Friend on 07-23-24
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Flight Behavior
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 16 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at 17. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media.
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A poignant literary work of art.
- By criswithcurls on 02-08-13
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Prodigal Summer
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 15 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives in southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches them from an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and her solitary life.
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Amazing!
- By Lily on 10-12-08
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Homeland and Other Stories
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 2 hrs and 59 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Barbara Kingsolver has written these five short stories with the same wit and sensitivity that characterize her highly praised and beloved novels Animal Dreams and The Bean Trees. Spreading her characters over a variety of colorful landscapes, she tells stories of hope, momentary joy, and powerful endurance.
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Another great book by Kingsolver!
- By Rosemarie on 01-09-12
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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
- A Year of Food Life
- By: Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Barbara Kingsolver and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally-produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of their experiment.
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mixed feelings
- By pterion on 11-15-07
By: Barbara Kingsolver, and others
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A Sand County Almanac
- And Sketches Here and There
- By: Aldo Leopold, Barbara Kingsolver - introduction
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 4 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
First published in 1949 and praised in the New York Times Book Review as "full of beauty and vigor and bite", A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land.
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Great in some ways; in others, wtf!
- By RG on 06-22-20
By: Aldo Leopold, and others
What listeners say about How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Lee Moderow
- 05-20-21
A Joy to Read
Different than what I normally read but lovely none the less. It flows like a river and drew me in
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Frank H
- 05-05-21
Superb
Stunning - both subject matter, form and style. Nature, the Climate, the joys and perils we face - all current issues to think about are documented poetically in this writing.
Kingsolver's own reading is our gift. I plan to purchase this hard copy as gifts for others who care - some who will act - and, for those who remain indfferent.
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