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Out of Africa & Shadows on the Grass
- Narrated by: Susan Lyons
- Length: 16 hrs and 35 mins
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Publisher's summary
Out of Africa:
In this audiobook, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives; of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom; of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her; of primitive festivals; of big game that were her near neighbors - lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes; and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful.
Shadows on the Grass:
Isak Dineson takes up the absorbing story of her life in Kenya begun in the unforgettable Out of Africa, which she published under the name of Karen Blixon. With warmth and humanity, these four stories illuminate her love for the African people, their dignity and traditions, and the beauty and wildness of the landscape. The first three were written in the 1950s and the last, "Echoes from the Hills", was written especially for this volume in the summer of 1960, when the author was in her 70s. In all they provide a moving final chapter to her African reminiscences.
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Splendid
- By Shady on 06-21-23
By: Sebastian Barry
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The Celtic Twilight
- By: William Butler Yeats
- Narrated by: Jack Chekijian
- Length: 4 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the best-known collections of W. B. Yeats' prose, The Celtic Twilight explores the old connection between the Irish people and the magical world of fairies. Yeats, by traveling the land in the early 20th century and talking to the common people about their experiences with the creatures, yielded a colorful overview of Celtic fairy folklore.
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A compilation of Irish folklore in prose
- By MolllyT on 07-26-16
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Green City in the Sun
- By: Barbara Wood
- Narrated by: Edie Tusor
- Length: 27 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1917 Dr. Grace Treverton arrives in Kenya determined to bring modern medicine to the African natives. Her brother, Sir Valentine Treverton, has his own dream for the British protectorate: to establish an agricultural empire to rival any in England. The aspirations of the wealthy Trevertons collide with those of the Mathenge tribe, an African family that has lived on the land for years. Grace soon finds a deadly rival in Mama Wachera, an African medicine woman who fights to maintain native traditions against the encroaching whites.
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Beautifully written
- By nancy wanty on 12-18-23
By: Barbara Wood
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Mark Twain - The Complete Novels
- By: Mark Twain
- Narrated by: Lee Howard
- Length: 58 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Here you will find the complete novels of Mark Twain: 1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Starts at Chapter 1, 2. The Prince and the Pauper Starts at Chapter 37, 3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Starts at Chapter 70, 4. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Starts at Chapter 113, 5. The American Claimant Starts at Chapter 158, 6. Tom Sawyer Abroad Starts at Chapter 184, 7. Pudd'nhead Wilson Starts at Chapter 197, 8. Tom Sawyer, Detective Starts at Chapter 219, 9. A Horse's Tale Starts at Chapter 230, 10. The Mysterious Stranger Starts at Chapter 245.
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Content; GREAT! Performance.. .not so much😁
- By brian deis on 01-09-20
By: Mark Twain
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Doctor Zhivago
- By: Boris Pasternak, Larissa Volokhonsky - translator, Richard Pevear - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 23 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is a new translation of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago’s love for the tender and beautiful Lara.
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Russian Philosophical Feast
- By Syd Young on 02-16-13
By: Boris Pasternak, and others
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Birds Without Wings
- By: Louis de Bernieres
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 23 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Birds Without Wings is the story of a small town in Anatolia in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire told in the richly varied voices of the men and women (Armenians, Christians, and Muslims) whose lives are intertwined and rooted there: Iskander, the potter and local fount of wisdom; Philotei, the Christian girl of legendary beauty, courted almost from infancy by Ibrahim the goatherd, a great love that culminates in tragedy and madness; and many more.
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Not for the faint of heart
- By a on 01-03-05
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The Virginian
- A Horseman of the Plains
- By: Owen Wister
- Narrated by: Robert G. Slade
- Length: 14 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In this romantic and raw adventure set in the untamed wilderness of Wyoming of 1886, an anonymous college graduate ventures out west where he encounters gun fights, lynching, cattle rustlers, high-stake poker games, Indian attacks, and a brave, honest and imposing cowboy known simply as the Virginian. Presented as the archetypal, ideal hero of the "western" genre (which was novelized for the very first time in this same book), the Virginian, a foreman at Shiloh Ranch, carries a strong sense of justice.
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A Good Book of Perpetual Period Small Talk
- By wbiro on 02-06-21
By: Owen Wister
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Freddy and Fredericka
- By: Mark Helprin
- Narrated by: Robert Ian Mackenzie
- Length: 25 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling, critically acclaimed author Mark Helprin's work has drawn favorable comparisons to an elite group of literary legends, including James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, and Thomas Mann. Helprin's sheer comic brilliance shines in this ingenious farce.
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Can't rate it high enough (and I'm a tough grader)
- By Annette on 09-06-05
By: Mark Helprin
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One of Ours
- By: Willa Cather
- Narrated by: Kristen Underwood
- Length: 13 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Claude Wheeler resembles the youngest son of an American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.
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Cather's writing is impeccable
- By Kelly on 12-20-19
By: Willa Cather
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Pro: It made me want to read "West With the Night"
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"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" So goes the signature introduction of New York Herald star journalist Henry Morton Stanley to renowned explorer Dr. David Livingstone, who had been missing for six years in the wilds of Africa. Into Africa ushers us into the meeting of these remarkable men. In 1866, when Livingstone journeyed into the heart of the African continent in search of the Nile's source, the land was rough, unknown to Europeans, and inhabited by man-eating tribes.
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Riveting
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His second major venture into nonfiction (after Death in the Afternoon, 1932), Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife, Pauline, journeyed in December of 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip.
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I did not expect to enjoy this
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Isak Dinesen earned international fame for Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa, and other stories that skillfully combine elements of fable, social conflict, and psychological drama. She was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. Yet the story of her life - her travels, affairs, and friendships - remains the greatest story of all.
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over-written
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West with the Night is the story of a remarkable woman molded and shaped by many things: the African jungle, a certain dog, horses, airplanes, friendships with white men and black. There is no life, no story quite like it.
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Top Notch Writing; Riveting Stories
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Pro: It made me want to read "West With the Night"
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His second major venture into nonfiction (after Death in the Afternoon, 1932), Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife, Pauline, journeyed in December of 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip.
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Brilliant writing, beautifully read
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Daphne Sheldrick, whose family arrived in Africa from Scotland in the 1820s, is the first person ever to have successfully hand-reared newborn elephants. Her deep empathy and understanding, her years of observing Kenya’s rich variety of wildlife, and her pioneering work in perfecting the right husbandry and milk formula have saved countless elephants, rhinos, and other baby animals from certain death.
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Bummer of a book.
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Beryl Markham, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, describes her childhood on a farm in Kenya, her apprenticeship as a horse trainer, and her later career as a pioneer aviator who piloted passengers and supplies in a small plane to remote corners of Africa.
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I Read this wonderful book
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As Pip unravels the truth behind his own "great expectations" in his quest to become a gentleman, the mysteries of the past and the convolutions of fate through a series of thrilling adventures serve to steer him toward maturity and his most important discovery of all - the truth about himself.
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This Dickens guy has promise
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Visions of Inequality takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today.
By: Branko Milanovic
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The Family Bones
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Psychology student Olivia Eriksen’s family is notorious among true-crime buffs. Faced with a legacy of psychopathy that spans generations, Olivia has spent much of her academic life trying to answer one chilling question: Nature or nurture? Although she’s kept a safe distance from her blood relatives for years, Olivia agrees to attend a weekend reunion. After all, her fiancé is eager to meet his future in-laws, and the gathering may give her a chance to interview her elusive grandfather about the family traits.
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Wow - Loved this book. Excellent writing.
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A major classic of 1930s literature, Antal Szerb's "Journey by Moonlight" is the fantastically moving and darkly funny story of a bourgeois businessman torn between duty and desire. 'On the train, everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice ...' Mihály has dreamt of Italy all his life. When he finally travels there, on his honeymoon with Erszi, he soon abandon his new wife in order to find himself, haunted by old friends from his turbulent teenage days: beautiful, kind Tamas, brash and wicked Janos, and the sexless yet unforgettable Eva.
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Amazing!
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Alexandra Fuller tells the idiosyncratic story of her life growing up white in rural Rhodesia as it was becoming Zimbabwe. The daughter of hardworking, yet strikingly unconventional English-bred immigrants, Alexandra arrives in Africa at the tender age of two. She moves through life with a hardy resilience, even as a bloody war approaches. Narrator Lisette Lecat reads this remarkable memoir of a family clinging to a harsh landscape and the dying tenets of colonialism.
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An African Childhood of Harrowing Proportions
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I have two goals this season: 1. Be named captain of the Seattle Serpents. 2. Stay single. I'm right on track . . . until she happens. Auden Sinclair.
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auden stan
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In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is a new translation of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago’s love for the tender and beautiful Lara.
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Russian Philosophical Feast
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Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum's dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human.... But the museum's directors plan to go ahead with a big bash to celebrate the new exhibition, in spite of the murders.
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Non-Perishable
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By: Douglas Preston, and others
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Awakening the Angel System Omnibus: Books 1-3
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In a Post-Apocalyptic world of Magic and Machinery, Jack Knight is an orphan who finds himself caught between a life-altering decision. Join the military and fight the demon hordes or sell his soul to the Corpos. Both options having minimal appeal to a shut-in like Jack. Thanks to the high cost of living, and his sister’s medical expenses, Jack has never given much thought to what he’d want to do with life, always living paycheck to paycheck, scrounging just enough to keep the lights on and his sister safe. However, an Angel presents him with a third option.
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False story impression
- By richard s. on 08-03-24
By: Dungeon Ducky
What listeners say about Out of Africa & Shadows on the Grass
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- MWB
- 12-23-23
A compelling story
I truly enjoyed reading this book. I read it, keeping in mind the times in which it was written and from the perspective of the author who lived during it. I would definitely recommend. A poetic narrative.
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- Carol Anne
- 08-17-24
A heartwarming story of love and loyalty.
I loved her descriptions of both nature and people. She has great insight and a wonderful command of the English language!
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- Susan G. Brink
- 08-31-19
Superb
A marvelous story teller and human being, Karen Blixen brings alive her time in Kenya after WW I. Her generosity of character and superb descriptions of her friends and servants...Somalians, Masai, Kikuyu and Europeans...enriches the reader and shatters preconceptions.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-01-24
Lucid Tales for the End of An Age
A brilliant, special book, worthy especially now of rereading. I have owned this book for many years and reread it endlessly. One of the greatest writers in English, rooted mystically deep and direct to the ancient craft of the tale to be listened to.
The perfect narrator for this book. You can imagine it's really Karen.
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- barbara
- 02-23-19
Insanely unwoke and colonialist but beautiful
This is such a period piece, written by a titled and entitled European who was nonetheless pretty enlightened for her time and class. The author clearly cares about the people who work on her coffee plantation, and takes pains to adjudicate disputes fairly and equitably. She does her best, within the context of the insane colonialist attitudes in which she and the British colonialist government are steeped, to care for her workers and their families. Yet her continual references to "my houseboys" and "my squatters," and the ways in which she attempts to sum up the attitudes and behaviors of entire tribes based on the few she knows, and the horrifying observations about the mental capacities of certain tribes can't help but be severely cringe-worthy. Her description of and buy-in to some of the repressive laws of British colonial Kenya banning certain Kikuyu dances and making it illegal for the Masai to possess spears, for example, bring to mind the worst and most limited white fear-mongering pith-helmeted petty bureaucrats set on trying to control their subjects. It's painful to consider the ways in which colonial governments of that era messed up tribal boundaries and tribal relations, which had worked fine for millennia prior to the arrival of the rapacious white man.
Dineson is at her best when describing wildlife and nature. She has a great eye for the beauty and majesty of the land and its flora and fauna. She is an impressive European female of her era, to be running a farm on her own, killing lions, and working, for a time, running goods for the British government in WWI. Still, this reader, admittedly an animal lover, was nauseated by her wanton killing of wildlife (such as the time she shot an iguana "because I might be able to use its beautiful skin for something" only to discover that its skin turned grey the moment it died). I know those were different times, but the big game hunter mentality is utterly disgusting to me, and there's a lot of that sort of thing in this book.
There's only one mention of her husband, who lived in Europe, and much gushing about Dennis Finch Hatton and others. But the book is really a collection of vignettes about the farm, its workers, and nature.
I'm glad I listened, but at times it was very painful and I almost gave it up. The narrator has a rather piercing upper-class-sounding English inflection, which didn't help. Still, the beauty of the narrative and the fascination for this out-dated way of life are compelling enough to make me glad I stuck with it.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Elise
- 07-29-24
Cadence of the Narrator
I have listened to these books about seven times and never tire of hearing them. Blixen’s poetic sincere writing style and the narrator’s voice join hands perfectly.
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- Lindsay Lovinger Watkins
- 04-22-16
It had my heart from page one!
I could only hope my own life could be rich. I highly recommend filling your life with these stories!
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7 people found this helpful
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- Michael
- 12-08-19
Pleasant Vignettes
This is a collection of many vignettes of a Danish woman's seventeen years on a coffee plantation in Kenya from 1913 to 1930. The vignettes are not quite chronological. The book as a whole explores the Kenyan environment and animals and various contrasts between European and Kenyan thought and customs.
The stories are well written, sometimes interesting, sometimes touching, sometimes beautiful, sometimes limited by cultural stereotypes, often dark, sometimes uplifting. I enjoyed this quite a bit, but I suspect it might be dull to some.
I found the narration excellent.
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2 people found this helpful
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- BillieJ
- 10-25-18
A life well lived.
Years ago when I first read her words they awoke in me a desire to remember her and those wonderful people each of whom were her family while she drank in Africa. It has given me much to strive for in my own life and to take in all those I’m blessed to know. This Audible production was a joy as it accompanied me through days of routines, driving and quiet rain. I’m most grateful to have been touched so thoroughly.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Jenifer Cook
- 07-21-20
Lovely book for its time
A gently written and poignant tale from an earlier time, painting a picture of a beautiful place being spoiled by ignorant colonialism. Even though the author was a colonizer herself, her love for the place and the people where she farmed in Kenya shines through some of her outdated ideas. The use of the term "squatter" for the original inhabitants of her farm is particularly grating, even though it was common parlance at the time. Like George Catlin's portraits and descriptions of Native American society, this book leaves me once again wondering how different this world would look if Europeans had never left Europe. I liked the reader's delivery very much. For me she seemed to capture the spirit of the author, admiring, insightful, wistful, but not sad or depressing.
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