
How to Say Babylon
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Safiya Sinclair
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By:
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Safiya Sinclair
About this listen
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
A New York Times Notable Book
Best Book of the Year for The Washington Post* The New Yorker * Time * The Atlantic * Los Angeles Times * NPR * Harper’s Bazaar * Vulture * Town & Country * San Francisco Chronicle * Christian Science Monitor * Mother Jones * Barack Obama
A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick
“Impossible to put down...Each lyrical line sings and soars, freeing the reader as it did the writer.” —People
With echoes of Educated and The Glass Castle, How to Say Babylon is a “lushly observed and keenly reflective chronicle” (The Washington Post), brilliantly recounting the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid religious upbringing and navigate the world on her own terms.
Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and a militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, was obsessed with the ever-present threat of the corrupting evils of the Western world outside their home, and worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure. For him, a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.
Safiya’s extraordinary mother, though loyal to her father, gave her the one gift she knew would take Safiya beyond the stretch of beach and mountains in Jamaica their family called home: a world of books, knowledge, and education she conjured almost out of thin air. When she introduced Safiya to poetry, Safiya’s voice awakened. As she watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under relentless domesticity, Safiya’s rebellion against her father’s rules set her on an inevitable collision course with him. Her education became the sharp tool to hone her own poetic voice and carve her path to liberation. Rich in emotion and page-turning drama, How to Say Babylon is “a melodious wave of memories” of a woman finding her own power (NPR).
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- The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
- By: Camille T. Dungy
- Narrated by: Camille T. Dungy
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.
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Like medicine...
- By Broderek on 06-17-23
By: Camille T. Dungy
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Anna
- The Biography
- By: Amy Odell
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 15 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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As a child, Anna Wintour was a tomboy with no apparent interest in clothing but, seduced by the miniskirts and bob haircuts of swinging 1960s London, she grew into a fashion-obsessed teenager. Her father, an influential newspaper editor, loomed large in her life, and once he decided she should become editor-in-chief of Vogue, she never looked back.
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WONDERFUL, SPLENDID, I LOVED IT!!
- By Liz Jardine on 05-13-22
By: Amy Odell
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Into the Soul of the World
- My Journey to Healing
- By: Brad Wetzler
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Suffering from PTSD and severe depression from past trauma, battling an addiction to overprescribed psychiatric medication, and at the rock bottom of his career, journalist Brad Wetzler had nowhere to go. So he set out on a journey to wander and hopefully find himself—and the world—again. Into the Soul of the World is Wetzler’s thrilling, impactful, and heartrending memoir of healing—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. An adventure journalist at heart, Wetzler mixes travelogue with empowering insights about his inner journey to better care for his own mental health.
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Wonderful story well told (and read)
- By Pamela Olson on 05-25-23
By: Brad Wetzler
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The Witching Year
- A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft
- By: Diana Helmuth
- Narrated by: Diana Helmuth
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Diana Helmuth, thirty-three, is skeptical of organized religion. She is also skeptical of disorganized religion. But, more than anything, she is tired of God being dead. So, she decides to try on the fastest-growing, self-directed faith in America: Witchcraft. The result is 366 days of observation, trial, error, wit, and back spasms. Witches today are often presented as confident and finished, proud and powerful. Diana is eager to join them. She wants to follow all the rules, memorize all the incantations, and read all the liturgy. But there’s one glaring problem.
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Not for me
- By Moria Vulcanus on 01-06-25
By: Diana Helmuth
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Twilight Man
- Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire
- By: Liz Brown
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot, Liz Brown
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The unbelievable true story of Harrison Post - the enigmatic lover of one of the richest men in 1920s Hollywood - and the battle for a family fortune.
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Butte amateur historian
- By Josh M. Peck on 09-30-21
By: Liz Brown
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Every Breath You Take
- A True Story of Obsession, Revenge, and Murder
- By: Ann Rule
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 20 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Although happily ensconced in a loving second marriage and a new family of quadruplets, Sheila Blackthorne Bellush never truly escaped the enslavement of her ex-husband, multimillionaire Allen Blackthorne, a handsome charmer - and a violent, controlling sociopath who terrorized her for a decade after their divorce. When Sheila was slain in her home, in the presence of her four toddlers, authorities raced to link the crime to Blackthorne, the man who vowed to monitor Sheila's every move in his obsessive quest for power and revenge.
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reader
- By Ronda on 12-28-20
By: Ann Rule
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Hollywood Ending
- Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence
- By: Ken Auletta
- Narrated by: Jonathan Coleman
- Length: 19 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty years ago, Ken Auletta wrote an iconic New Yorker profile of the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, who was then at the height of his powers. The profile made waves for exposing how volatile, even violent, Weinstein was to his employees and collaborators. But there was a much darker story that was just out of reach: rumors had long swirled that Weinstein was a sexual predator. Auletta confronted Weinstein, who denied the claims. Since no one was willing to go on the record, Auletta and the magazine concluded they couldn’t close the case.
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Compelling but too long, with some strange errors
- By bugsmeany on 11-16-22
By: Ken Auletta
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The Abundance of Less
- Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan
- By: Andy Couturier
- Narrated by: Adam Riley
- Length: 14 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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The Abundance of Less captures the texture of sustainable lives well lived in these ten profiles of ordinary—yet exceptional—men and women who left behind mainstream existences in urban Japan to live surrounded by the luxuries of nature, art, friends, delicious food, and an abundance of time. Drawing on traditional Eastern spiritual wisdom and culture, these pioneers describe the profound personal transformations they underwent as they escaped the stress, consumerism, busyness, and dependence on technology of modern life.
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a life changing book!
- By Diana K on 11-04-19
By: Andy Couturier
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The Color of Everything
- A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within
- By: Cory Richards
- Narrated by: Cory Richards
- Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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The Color of Everything is a thrilling tale of risk and adventure, written by a man who has done it all: he’s stood at the top of the world, climbed imposing mountain faces alone in the dark and become the only American to summit an 8,000-meter peak in winter. But it is also the story of a tumultuous life--a stirring, lyrical memoir that captures the profound musings of a brilliant and unquiet mind grappling with the meaning of success, the cost of fame, addiction, and whether it is possible to outrun your demons.
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Best book in this genre since Into Thin Air
- By E. Vaughan on 12-04-24
By: Cory Richards
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If You Really Loved Me
- By: Ann Rule
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 20 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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David Brown was the consummate entrepreneur: a computer wizard and millionaire by age thirty-two. When his beautiful young wife was shot to death as she slept, Brown's fourteen-year-old daughter, Cinnamon, confessed to killing her stepmother. The California courts sentenced her harshly: twenty-four years to life. But in the wake of Cinnamon's murder conviction, thanks in part to two determined lawmen, the twisted private world of David Brown himself unfolded with astonishing clarity—revealing a trail of perverse love, twisted secrets, and evil mind games.
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Needs Editing!
- By CMC on 09-05-22
By: Ann Rule
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Personality and Power
- Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe
- By: Ian Kershaw
- Narrated by: Matt Bates
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of the leading historians of twentieth-century Europe and the author of the definitive biography of Hitler, Personality and Power is a masterful reckoning with how character conspired with opportunity to create the modern age’s uniquely devastating despots—and how and why other countries found better paths. The modern era saw the emergence of individuals who had command over a terrifying array of instruments of control, persuasion and death. Whole societies were reshaped and wars were fought, often with a merciless contempt for the most basic norms.
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Great book, but needs work on human groups
- By Thomas F. Winterbottom on 12-07-22
By: Ian Kershaw
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Lee Miller
- A Life
- By: Carolyn Burke
- Narrated by: Ann Richardson
- Length: 18 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Carolyn Burke reveals Miller as a multifaceted woman: both model and photographer, muse and reporter, sexual adventurer and mother, and, in later years, gourmet cook - the last of the many dramatic transformations she underwent during her lifetime. A sleek blond bombshell, Miller was part of a glamorous circle in New York and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s as a leading Vogue model, close to Edward Steichen, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, and Pablo Picasso. Then, during World War II, she became a war correspondent - one of the first women to do so.
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A Unique and Beautiful Person
- By Cindy A. Ossias on 03-21-24
By: Carolyn Burke
My words cannot describe
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excellent read
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Amazing life of resilience and strength
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Best book of 2023
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Insightful. Heartbreaking triumph. All words that come to mind when thinking of her story
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A 16 hour poem
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Stupendous! Amazing!
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Beautiful, wrenching and redemptive
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Brave. Bold. Beautifully wrought, written, told.
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Excellent. The book was riveting and inspirational.
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