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On Becoming an American Writer
- Essays and Nonfiction
- Narrated by: Cary Hite
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
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Publisher's summary
Discover the unique mind and humane vision of an under-recognized American author. Encompassing themes of race, education, fame, law, and America’s past and future, these essays are James Alan McPherson at his most prescient and invaluable.
Born in segregated 1940s Georgia, McPherson graduated from Harvard Law School only to give up law and become a writer. In 1978, he became the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But all the while, McPherson was also writing and publishing nonfiction that stand beside contemporaries such as James Baldwin and Joan Didion, as this collection amply proves.
These essays range from McPherson’s profile of comedian Richard Pryor on the cusp of his stardom; a moving tribute to his mentor, Ralph Ellison; a near-fatal battle with viral meningitis; and the story of how McPherson became a reluctant landlord to an elderly Black woman and her family.
There are meditations on family as the author travels to Disneyland with his daughter, on the nuances of a neighborhood debate about naming a street after Malcolm X or Dr. Martin Luther King, and, throughout, those connections that make us most deeply human—including connections between writer and listener.
This collection is for anyone seeking a better understanding of our world and a connection to a wise and wickedly funny writer who speaks with forceful relevance and clarity across the decades.
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- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 20 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights-era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin.
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This is an important book.
- By Amazon Customer on 05-29-20
By: Susan Neiman
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My Grandfather's Son
- A Memoir
- By: Clarence Thomas
- Narrated by: Clarence Thomas
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Provocative, inspiring, and unflinchingly honest, My Grandfather's Son is the story of one of America's most remarkable and controversial leaders, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, told in his own words.
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Wonderful read
- By Amazon Customer on 10-17-21
By: Clarence Thomas
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Notes of a Native Son
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of Black life and Black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era.
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Masterful Essayist
- By Andre on 09-30-16
By: James Baldwin
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Afropean
- Notes from Black Europe
- By: Johny Pitts
- Narrated by: Johny Pitts
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the face of growing racial discrimination, anti-immigrant sentiment and the spectre of terrorism looming large over an economically stricken continent, Afropean is an on-the-ground documentary of areas where Europeans of African descent are juggling their multiple allegiances and forging new identities: too indelibly woven into Europe to identify with Africa and yet struggling with outdated ideas of what it means to be European.
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Excellent
- By Suzie M on 04-04-24
By: Johny Pitts
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The Myth of the American Dream
- Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety and Power
- By: D.L. Mayfield
- Narrated by: Nan McNamara
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Affluence, autonomy, safety, and power. These are the central values of the American dream. But are they actually compatible with Jesus' command to love our neighbor as ourselves? In essays grouped around these four values, D. L. Mayfield asks us to pay attention to the ways they shape our own choices, and the ways those choices affect our neighbors. Where did these values come from? How have they failed those on the edges of our society? And how can we disentangle ourselves from our culture's headlong pursuit of these values and live faithful lives of service to God and our neighbors?
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Sooooo good. Powerful
- By D. Frazier on 08-19-21
By: D.L. Mayfield
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We Have Overcome
- An Immigrant's Letter to the American People
- By: Jason D. Hill
- Narrated by: Jared Wright
- Length: 4 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The dominant narrative, repeated in the media and from the angry mouths of politicians and activists, is the exact opposite of the reality. They paint a portrait of an America rife with racial and ethnic division, where minorities are mired in a poverty worse than slavery, and white people stand at the top of an unfairly stacked pyramid of privilege. Jason D. Hill corrects the narrative in this powerfully eloquent book. Dr. Hill came to America at the age of twenty from Jamaica and, rather than being faced with intractable racial bigotry, Hill found a land of bountiful opportunity.
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A message of hope for all Americans
- By No Regrets on 06-25-20
By: Jason D. Hill
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Life Beyond Measure
- Letters to My Great-Granddaughter
- By: Sidney Poitier
- Narrated by: Sidney Poitier
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sidney Poitier is one of the most revered actors in the history of Hollywood. He has overcome enormous obstacles in extraordinary times and is a role model for many Americans because of his convictions, bravery, and grace. Poitier reflects on his amazing life in Life Beyond Measure, offering inspirational advice and personal stories in the form of extended letters to his great-granddaughter.
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Mix of family history and life advice.
- By Adam Shields on 10-31-19
By: Sidney Poitier
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1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
- A Memoir
- By: Ai Weiwei, Allan H. Barr - translator
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp.
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This book changed my life
- By Johnny Nopolis on 08-16-22
By: Ai Weiwei, and others
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Manifesto
- On Never Giving Up
- By: Bernardine Evaristo
- Narrated by: Bernardine Evaristo
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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From the best-selling and Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifesto on unstoppability, creativity, and activism.
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Glorious performance and inspiring story
- By Maggi Morehouse on 01-25-22
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Butterfly in the Typewriter
- The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of a Confederacy of Dunces
- By: Cory MacLauchlin
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
The saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. In Butterfly in the Typewriter, Cory MacLauchlin draws on scores of new interviews with friends, family, and colleagues as well as full access to the extensive Toole archive at Tulane University, capturing his upbringing in New Orleans, his years in New York City, his frenzy of writing in Puerto Rico, his return to his beloved city, and his descent into paranoia and depression.
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Worth it! Good biography. Informative.
- By French Quarter on 07-09-13
By: Cory MacLauchlin
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Known and Strange Things
- Essays
- By: Teju Cole
- Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices. Minute after minute, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.
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A Book that Teaches and Shares
- By Carolyn J. on 10-08-17
By: Teju Cole