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Junk
- Digging Through America's Love Affair with Stuff
- Narrated by: Alison Stewart
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
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Publisher's summary
When journalist and author Alison Stewart was confronted with emptying her late parents' overloaded basement, a job that dragged on for months, it got her thinking: How did it come to this? Why do smart, successful people hold on to old Christmas bows, chipped knickknacks, and books they will likely never reread?
Junk details Stewart's three-year investigation into America's stuff. Stewart rides along with junk removal teams like Trash Daddy, Annie Haul, and Junk Vets. She goes backstage at Antiques Roadshow and learns what makes for compelling junk-based television with the executive producer of Pawn Stars. And she even investigates the growing problem of space junk - 23,000 pieces of manmade debris orbiting the planet at 17,500 miles per hour, threatening both satellites and human space exploration.
But it's not all dire. Listeners will also learn that there are creative solutions to America's crushing consumer culture. The author visits with Deron Beal, founder of FreeCycle, an online community of people who would rather give away than throw away their no-longer-needed possessions. She spends a day at a Repair Café, where volunteer tinkerers bring new life to broken appliances, toys, and just about anything. Junk is a delightful journey through 250-mile-long yard sales, resale shops, and packrat dens, both human and rodent, that for most listeners will look surprisingly familiar.
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Story
Meet a genuine American folk hero cut from the homespun cloth of America's heartland: Sam Walton, who parlayed a single dime store in a hardscrabble cotton town into Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world. The undisputed merchant king of the late 20th century, Sam never lost the common touch. Here, finally, inimitable words. Genuinely modest, but always sure of his ambitions and achievements. Sam shares his thinking in a candid, straight-from-the-shoulder style. In a story rich with anecdotes and the "rules of the road" of both Main Street and Wall Street, Sam Walton chronicles the inspiration, heart, and optimism that propelled him to lasso the American Dream.
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Capitalism Is The Way
- By Nathan Ruff on 04-14-19
By: John Huey, and others
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It Takes Two
- Our Story
- By: Jonathan Scott, Drew Scott
- Narrated by: Drew Scott, Jonathan Scott
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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It Takes Two: Our Story shares never-before-revealed tales of the Scott brothers' childhood and rise to fame - from starting their first business at seven years old and their years modeling and acting to their first house purchase at the impressive young age of 18. They soon found their true passion in life, combining their natural gifts for entertaining with the skills they learned from buying, renovating, and selling homes.
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Not Worth the Time or $2.95
- By Sharlotte on 03-06-18
By: Jonathan Scott, and others
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My Korean Deli
- Risking It All for a Convenience Store
- By: Ben Ryder Howe
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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This sweet and funny tale of a preppy editor buying a Brooklyn deli with his Korean in-laws is about family, culture clash, and the quest for authentic experiences. It starts with a gift. When Ben Ryder Howe’s wife, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her parents’ self-sacrifice by buying them a store, Howe, an editor at the rarefied Paris Review, agrees to go along.
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Absolutely delightful!
- By Grace O'Malley on 03-19-11
By: Ben Ryder Howe
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1 Dead in Attic
- After Katrina
- By: Chris Rose
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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1 Dead in Attic is a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first harrowing year and a half of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Celebrated as a local treasure and heaped with national praise, Rose provides a rollercoaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor - in a way that only he could find in a devastated wasteland. They are stories of the dead and the living, stories of survivors and believers, stories of hope and despair.
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Still Makes Me Hurt
- By Gillian on 02-27-15
By: Chris Rose
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Nickel and Dimed
- On (Not) Getting By in America
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrated by: Cristine McMurdo-Wallis
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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This engrossing piece of undercover reportage has been a fixture on the New York Times best seller list since its publication. With nearly a million copies in print, Nickel and Dimed is a modern classic that deftly portrays the plight of America's working-class poor.
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Good concept, but poor execution.
- By Marco Forcone on 08-24-04
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The Duggars: 20 and Counting!
- Raising One of America's Largest Families - How They Do It
- By: Michelle Duggar, Jim Bob Duggar
- Narrated by: Michelle Duggar
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The Duggars: 20 and Counting! is a behind-the-scenes look at the supersize family that fascinates millions of television viewers around the world. From Idaho to Istanbul, people want to know how Arkansas parents Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar efficiently and lovingly manage 19 happy, home-schooled children without going into debt—or losing their minds!
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entertaining
- By Marina brooks on 09-09-24
By: Michelle Duggar, and others
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The Glitter Plan
- How We Started Juicy Couture for $200 and Turned It into a Global Brand
- By: Pamela Skaist-Levy, Booth Moore, Gela Nash-Taylor
- Narrated by: Rose Itzcovitz
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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While working together at a Los Angeles boutique, Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor became fast and furious friends over the impossibility of finding the perfect T-shirt. Following their vision of comfortable, fitted T-shirts, they set up shop in Gela’s one-bedroom Hollywood apartment with $200 and one rule: Whatever they did, they both had to be obsessed by it. Pam and Gela eventually sold their company to Liz Claiborne for $50 million, but not before they created a whole new genre of casual clothing that came to define California cool.
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Elementary, at best
- By Laura P on 09-19-14
By: Pamela Skaist-Levy, and others
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Comic Shop
- The Retail Mavericks Who Gave Us a New Geek Culture
- By: Dan Gearino
- Narrated by: Douglas R. Pratt
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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The early 1970s saw the birth of the modern comic book shop. Its rise was due in large part to a dynamic entrepreneur, Phil Seuling. His direct market model allowed shops to get comics straight from the publishers, bypassing middlemen. Stores could better customize their offerings and independent publishers could now access national distribution. In this way, shops opened up a space for quirky ideas to gain an audience and helped transform small-press series, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Bone, into media giants.
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A good listen.
- By Amazon Customer on 08-30-20
By: Dan Gearino
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The Unwinding
- An Inner History of the New America
- By: George Packer
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 18 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.
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Can't understand the low ratings!
- By Janet Pittman Henley on 05-27-13
By: George Packer
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The Pursuit of Happyness (Abridged)
- By: Chris Gardner
- Narrated by: Andre Blake
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Abridged
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At the age of 20, Chris Gardner arrived in San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. However, he surprised everyone and himself by setting his sights on the competitive world of high finance. Yet no sooner had he landed an entry-level position at a prestigious firm, Gardner found himself caught in a web of incredibly challenging circumstances that left him part of the city's working homeless with his toddler son.
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Very Good Story!
- By Lito Da Critic on 06-02-06
By: Chris Gardner
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Downsizing the Family Home
- What to Save, What to Let Go
- By: Marni Jameson
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean, Fred Stella
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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It's a rite of passage almost no one will escape: the difficult, emotional journey of downsizing your or your aging parents' home. Here, nationally syndicated home columnist Marni Jameson sensitively guides listeners through the process, from opening that first closet, to sorting through a lifetime's worth of possessions, to selling the homestead itself.
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Disappointed
- By Steve BOWMAN on 10-06-17
By: Marni Jameson
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Glass House
- The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town
- By: Brian Alexander
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster's citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st century, and wrecked the company.
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What really happened to the American Dream?
- By Bill on 05-10-17
By: Brian Alexander
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Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It
- By: Craig Taylor
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck, Stephen Crossley, Sartaj Garewell, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Here are the voices of London - rich and poor, native and immigrant, women and men. From the woman whose voice announces the stations on the London Underground to the man who plants the trees along Oxford Street; from a Pakistani currency trader to a Guardsman at Buckingham Palace - together, these voices paint a vivid, epic and wholly fresh portrait of 21st Century London.
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An interesting look at what makes London tick.
- By tim on 12-11-12
By: Craig Taylor
What listeners say about Junk
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- ChrisBlack
- 04-20-16
it's inspired me to clear out my garage
what struck me most was knowing on every level that if you don't love something that is stored in your place , it's time for it to go. If you aren't around, someone else will have to deal with it. I had to for my parents and I don't want to give a chore to a family member of mine one day.
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- Cynthia
- 05-23-16
A Trashy Listen! (pun intended)
I've been fascinated by the business of junk since I was 11, when I (first) read Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (1943). In 1915 New York, Francie Nolan - who was my age! - and her younger brother, Neely, kept the family afloat collecting and selling metal to a lascivious and ominously named "junkie", Carney. In this century, I've wondered just what people keep at Public Storage units, cleverly tucked underneath raised freeways in Los Angeles; and the economics of "1-800-Got-Junk" trucks I see, without fail, every three years at my neighbors' home, sent by the city council of my small town to fix an elder's recurrent hoarding problem.
Alison Stewart's "Junk: Digging Through America's Love Affair With Stuff" (2016) explains "the industry" in a fun listen. There's 250 mile long yard sale that US Route 411 becomes. I'm pretty sure from Stewart's description, stuff just moves south down the road from seller to buyer, who becomes next year's seller. Maybe when it gets to Tennessee, someone from Alabama buys it and it starts over again? There's the junk model - some companies are simply charge based on square yardage hauled, while others might pay for stuff that can be recycled. It just depends.
Stewart explores the idea of "What's one man's junk is another man's treasure." Stewart was thrilled to find a very old paper from her Alma Mater, Brown, to give as a gift. The recipient was even more thrilled than Stewart - and the seller was happy to get a buck or two for something a quirky well educated great aunt had left behind.
It seems to be that people who attach value to everything can't give things up - which is how Stewart ended up with a daunting basement full of junk to clean up when her elegant, well educated and seemingly non-hoarding parents died. Stewart tried doing it herself before she got professional help. Stewart wasn't having trouble letting go - she didn't need a therapist. She needed someone who could sort the stuff and send it on its way to be donated or discarded.
I thought the section about space junk was really fascinating. Even (literally) living in the shadow of NASA's JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and with a fan girl's devotion to the space program, I had no idea of the sheer volume of debris waiting to take out an unfortunately launched rocket, a haplessly orbiting satellite, or even a space station populated with the world's best and brightest.
When I went to write this review, I realized I'd actually been listening to Stewart for years on NPR. I remember some of her pieces, and I think she's a good and thoughtful journalist. She's the perfect narrator for her own book.
I do wish her first book "First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School" (2013) was available on Audible. It looks even more interesting than "Junk."
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9 people found this helpful