Native Son
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Narrated by:
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Peter Francis James
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By:
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Richard Wright
About this listen
Now an HBO Film!
"If one had to identify the single most influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would probably have to point to Wright and the publication of Native Son." (Henry Louis Gates Jr.)
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.
Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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The Accommodation
- The Politics of Race in an American City
- By: Jim Schutze, John Wiley Price
- Narrated by: Mike Rhyner, John Wiley Price
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The powerful, long-repressed classic of Dallas history that examines the violent and suppressed history of race and racism in the city. Written by longtime Dallas political journalist Jim Schutze, formerly of the Dallas Times Herald and Dallas Observer and currently columnist at D Magazine, The Accommodation follows the story of Dallas from slavery through the civil rights movement and the city’s desegregation efforts in the 1950s and ‘60s.
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Floored
- By Anthony on 09-16-22
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Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness
- What It Means to Be Black Now
- By: Touré, Michael Eric Dyson
- Narrated by: Touré
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A provocative look at what it means to be Black today. This audiobook includes excerpts from over 100 interviews with Rev. Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Skip Gates, Melissa Harris-Perry, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Glenn Ligon, Malcolm Gladwell, Paul Mooney, NY Gov. David Paterson, Harold Ford, Jr., Soledad O'Brien, Kamala Harris, Chuck D, Questlove, and others.
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Food for Thought
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By: Touré, and others
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If You Can Keep It
- The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty
- By: Eric Metaxas
- Narrated by: Eric Metaxas
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
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If You Can Keep It is at once a thrilling review of America's uniqueness, and a sobering reminder that America's greatness cannot continue unless we truly understand what our founding fathers meant for us to be. The book includes a stirring call-to-action for every American to understand the ideals behind the "noble experiment in ordered liberty" that is America. It also paints a vivid picture of the tremendous fragility of that experiment and explains why that fragility has been dangerously forgotten.
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Exceptional book
- By Trish Legarth on 07-26-16
By: Eric Metaxas
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Story
- Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
- By: Robert McKee
- Narrated by: Robert McKee
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Abridged
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Robert McKee's screenwriting workshops have earned him an international reputation for inspiring novices, refining works in progress, and putting major screenwriting careers back on track. Quincy Jones, Diane Keaton, Gloria Steinem, Julia Roberts, John Cleese, and David Bowie are just a few of his celebrity alumni. Writers, producers, development executives, and agents all flock to his lecture series, praising it as a mesmerizing and intense learning experience.
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Only 5 Chapters
- By Stephen Buck on 02-15-11
By: Robert McKee
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To Show and to Tell
- The Craft of Literary Nonfiction
- By: Phillip Lopate
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
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Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” ( Dallas Morning News). Here, combining more than 40 years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction. A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone, and immense gift for storytelling.
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Not a guide on writing personal essays
- By A. Yoshida on 08-07-13
By: Phillip Lopate
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Becoming Faulkner
- The Art and Life of William Faulker
- By: Philip Weinstein
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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William Faulkner was the greatest American novelist of the 20th century, yet he lived a life marked by a pervasive sense of failure. Throughout his career, he remained haunted by his inability to master a series of personal and professional challenges: his less-than-heroic military career; the loss of his brother in an airplane crash; a disappointing stint as a Hollywood screenwriter; and a destructive bout with alcoholism.
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Miss.'s BCS-Bundren.Compson.Snopes/Sutpen/Sartoris
- By W Perry Hall on 05-01-14
By: Philip Weinstein
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How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Ranging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings, Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
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Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
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Capture
- Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering
- By: David A. Kessler MD
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Why do we think, feel, and act in ways we wish we did not? For decades, New York Times best-selling author Dr. David A. Kessler has studied this question with regard to tobacco, food, and drugs. Over the course of these investigations, he identified one underlying mechanism common to a broad range of human suffering. This phenomenon - capture - is the process by which our attention is hijacked and our brains commandeered by forces outside our control.
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Confused
- By TS on 05-17-16
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The N Word
- Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why
- By: Jabari Asim
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2003, the book Nigger started an intense conversation about the uses and implications of that epithet. The N Word moves beyond that short, provocative book by revealing how the word has both reflected and spread the scourge of bigotry in America.
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Good points, long winded
- By Amazon Customer on 02-06-21
By: Jabari Asim
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What listeners say about Native Son
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Valerie
- 06-17-15
Pay attention to this book
If the people of America had paid true attention to this book when it was published 75 years ago (many read it - a best seller) - I believe we would not have the ongoing human blights of racism, gender discrimination and increasingly gross economic division. It is beautifully narrated and exquisitely written. It is prophetic. Are we ready to listen, read, and pay attention in 2015?
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23 people found this helpful
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- Julie W. Capell
- 07-08-12
Listen to this while you read Erasure
Try this for a great combo: Listen to Native Son as an audio book while simultaneously reading Percival Everett’s Erasure. Even though the books are set fifty years apart, and some things have changed profoundly in this country in the intervening years in terms of race relations, I was astounded at how much has not changed. The protagonists of the two books are both black men in America. Native Son’s Bigger Thomas is an uneducated, poor, thuggish young man trying to get by in the segregated Chicago of the 1940s. Erasure’s protagonist, Monk Ellison, (note to self: re-read Ellison’s Invisible Man next) is a current-day university professor from a wealthy family that gave him every advantage imaginable. Despite these surface differences, both men’s lives are severely limited by the strictures and expectations placed on them by their respective time periods. And although Native Son was overlong and preachy, I found that the injustices depicted in the book echoed in Erasure, as they do in the everyday lives of many Black Americans. African American males still have much higher rates of unemployment than any other group of Americans—worse even than the employment rate of white felons. Black males in America are less likely to graduate from high school, more likely to be arrested, and more likely to go to prison. Native Son lays these and other injustices bare . . . if only we could say we had erased these problems in the years since it was written.
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13 people found this helpful
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- Pegmag
- 08-29-18
read (listen to) this book
I feel weak and sad. Powerful and well written and performed. I'll be thinking about Bigger for a long time
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- TyCent
- 07-09-18
The power of beliefs
This book illustrates the devastation and terror that comes from negative beliefs. Very raw conflicting and painful to read at some points. A chilling story of opposing view on race.
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- Dante'
- 05-05-16
Awesome listen
I could see the way he clinched the weapon, felt the cold. What an amazing narration it was really, really awesome!
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- C. Glover
- 03-23-18
A true great
This book is a wonder and should be required reading. Read the book 1st then listen to it. Let the message of the novel filter into your consciousness. It’s worth it.
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- Bee
- 06-26-16
A literary but controversial masterpiece
Wright is an excellent writer. Native Son is a complicated story full of Wrights opinion about race in the 1940s. I can guess that Biggers behaviors scared people, especially whites who might feel that every Black person harbors anger and hatred enough to kill them in their sleep. I felt sad that there were no Black hero's in the story. Sadly this story could be written in a very similar way even today. I recommend this book but with caution. People should recognize the causes of this young man's disfunction and consider solutions that will end the deprivation that leads to it. These were no thrill killings. Hard to reconcile though. Wright clearly had an objective which he met through the extensive dialogic.
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- Alexander Baptiste
- 09-09-16
Dramatic events paint a stark racial landscape
I appreciated gaining some historical perspective on race relations through dynamic storytelling that painted a horrific picture with enticing foreshadowing of worse things to come in the narrative. I found myself wishing the female characters would be fuller, and less as props to tell Bigger's story so one-dimensionally, but I suppose this was a product of the time.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-13-18
Great story
Great story. I was very excited about listening every day. I would highly recommend this book.
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- Matthew Spino
- 02-13-17
Section 253 is out of place.
Any additional comments?
There is a section, 253, that is very much out of place in the audio. It appears that those two or so pages of the text between 252 and 254 do not have an audio version.
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