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Master of Deception
- A Son Searches for His Father in the House of Illusion
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
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Publisher's summary
Master of Deception tells of a son’s search for his father amid the fabric of family, guilt, renunciation, and hidden history in the borderlands of 1950s stage show and trailer park culture.
In the tradition of Geoffrey Wolf’s The Duke of Deception and Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle, John-Ivan Palmer’s Master of Deception takes listeners on the road with his magician father and his mother, the lovely assistant, as they travel from Elks Lodges to County Fairs, performing alongside contortionists, ventriloquists, and every manner of screwball act that passed for variety entertainment before television drove us all indoors and away from one another. From dressing rooms across America, John learned to stay invisible among other acts while his parents performed, making friends with janitors, night watchmen, elevator operators, and cooks who gave him leftover tortes and parfaits. They were as exotic to him as the Master of Deception was to them. When they were in one place long enough for John to attend to school, he was instructed to follow the other kids and just sit down at a desk. Before they knew who John was, his family would be gone. But even at home (in their trailer), his father remained aloof and unknowable.
"Growing up confined to the back seat had allowed me to study every wave of my father’s hair, the arch of his ears, the stubble on his jaw, but nothing of what was beneath. It was only after he vanished from worldly existence that it occurred to me that whatever was beneath might be something I could know. And I would soon learn there was a reason for his silence, which in turn became a reason for mine as an invisible dressing room kid."
Palmer’s depiction of his upbringing is a brilliant and atmospheric evocation of a disappeared America paired with the emotional gravity of a son’s search for who is father really is. At the center of it is the story of his unusual family, who were themselves part of a much larger and more unusual community of variety performers, most of them more at home among each other than the non-performing world. The questions of Palmer’s young life defined the path of his adult life, and, as he proceeded to find his own way in this world, he began to find unexpected answers about his father’s and what made him who he was.
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Story
Tim Cotton has been a police officer for more than 30 years. The writer in him has always been drawn to the stories of the people he has met along the way. Dealing with the standard issue ne’er-do-wells as a patrol officer, homicide detective, polygraph examiner, and later as the lieutenant in charge of the criminal investigation division certainly provides an interesting backdrop - but more often he writes about the regular folks he encounters, people who need his help, or those who just want to share a joke or even a sad story.
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The small stories are the important stories
- By Hilary A Harston on 02-14-21
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Who Is Vera Kelly?
- By: Rosalie Knecht
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA. Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns the Cold War makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows.
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not a whole lot of spycraft just a good story
- By Kirra Krussman on 01-19-19
By: Rosalie Knecht
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A Different Drummer
- By: William Melvin Kelley
- Narrated by: Jay Smooth
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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June 1957. One hot afternoon in the backwaters of the Deep South, a young black farmer named Tucker Caliban salts his fields, shoots his horse, burns his house, and heads north with his wife and child. His departure sets off an exodus of the state’s entire black population, throwing the established order into brilliant disarray. Told from the points of view of the white residents who remained, A Different Drummer stands, decades after its first publication in 1962, as an extraordinary and prescient triumph of satire and spirit.
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A wonderful and moving story
- By E. on 10-25-19
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The Ride of Our Lives
- Roadside Lessons of an American Family
- By: Mike Leonard
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Mike Leonard is a lucky man. It’s not everyone who gets parents like Jack and Marge. At 87, Jack is a pathological optimist with an inexhaustible gift of gab. Marge, Jack’s bride of 60 years, though cut from the same rough bolt of Irish immigrant cloth, is his polar opposite - pessimistic and proud of it. What was their son, Mike, thinking when he took a sabbatical from his job with NBC News so he could pile these two world-class originals along with three of his grown kids and a daughter-in-law into a pair of rented RVs and hit the road for a month?
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Hilarious!!!
- By TurtlesRMe on 03-06-07
By: Mike Leonard
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What Storm, What Thunder
- By: Myriam J.A. Chancy
- Narrated by: Ella Turenne
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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The Earth had buckled, and, in that movement, all that was not in its place fell upon the Earth’s children, upon the blameless as well as the guilty, without discrimination. At the end of a long sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster
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We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
- By AuthorAnnaBella on 03-15-22
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Too Close to the Falls
- A Memoir
- By: Catherine Gildiner
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the childhood of Catherine McClure Gildiner. It is the middle of the 1950s in Lewiston, New York, a small and sleepy American town very near Niagara Falls. No one is divorced. Mothers wear high heels to the beauty salon and children pop Pez candy and swing from vines over a local gorge. But at the tender age of four, it becomes clear to her Cathy's parents that their rambunctious daughter is no ordinary child and they soon put her "to work" at her father's pharmacy.
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Brilliant and funny and touching.
- By Kindle Customer on 11-07-19
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What You Have Heard Is True
- A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
- By: Carolyn Forché
- Narrated by: Carolyn Forché
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman’s radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life.
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Beautiful story
- By Norhilda on 05-09-19
By: Carolyn Forché
What listeners say about Master of Deception
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Shelly Krueger
- 09-02-20
So good!!!!!
Packed full of information, I learned so much! I wouldn’t know where to start that is how well this was written. There were several parts where I laughed out loud. Gave great insight as to what it really meant to be in entertainment back then. In addition, by sharing his story you were able to see it from a child’s POV. Loved it.
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