
Necessary Trouble
Growing Up at Midcentury
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Narrated by:
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Drew Gilpin Faust
To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions—not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans’ lives.
To be a privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was to be expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For young Drew Gilpin Faust, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial privilege proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become “well adjusted" and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was the necessary price of survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, Faust forged a path of her own—one that would eventually lead her to become a historian of the very conflicts that were instrumental in shaping the world she grew up in.
Culminating in the upheavals of 1968, Necessary Trouble captures a time of rapid change and fierce reaction in one young woman’s life, tracing the transformations and aftershocks that we continue to grapple with today.
©2023 Drew Gilpin Faust (P)2023 Dreamscape MediaListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
"This memoir by the distinguished historian and past president of Harvard is ably narrated by the author.... Listeners learn about her unhappy but privileged childhood in Virginia, which prompted her decision to dedicate her life to social justice." (AudioFile)
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As a highly introspective young woman of the South with a growing awareness of the inequities of black-white racial societal norms, I give her enormous credit for her lifelong determination to help right those wrongs.
Tremendous and valuable, historical perspective!
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A moving memoir that is also an amazing lesson in the fraught American history of the 1960s
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Sometimes we need to learn personal stories of the past to remember how much impact one person can have.
Excellent read! Well done!
Inspiring!
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First hand memory
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Memoirs are so aptly suited to audiobooks, and I love the fact that Ms. Faust narrated her life. She’s not the best narrator, but I know it rings true.
Left Me Wanting More (and Less)
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Her upbringing mirrored mine her stepping out of that small sheltered life was courageous .
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Challenging
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So much truth in history lived and retold.
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struggles and triumphs of mid century women
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Gilpin Faust's early activism showed an empathy that was way beyond her years.
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