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Private Revolutions
- Four Women Face China's New Social Order
- Narrated by: Crystal Yu, Gabby Wong, Kae Alexander, Naomi Yang, Yuan Yang
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
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Publisher's summary
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE PICK
“Riveting . . . a powerful snapshot of four young Chinese women attempting to assert control over the direction of their lives.”—The New York Times Book Review
“As powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary.”—British Vogue
A sweeping yet intimate portrait of modern China told through the lives of four ordinary women striving for a better future in a highly unequal society
While serving as the deputy Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times, Chinese-British journalist Yuan Yang began to notice common threads in the lives of her Chinese peers—women born during China’s turn toward capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, who, despite the country's enormous economic gains during their lifetimes, were coming up against deeply entrenched barriers as they sought to achieve financial stability.
The product of seven years of intimate, in-depth reporting, this transporting and indelible book traces the journey of four such women as they try to make better lives for themselves and their families in the new Chinese economy. June and Siyue are among the few in their villages to graduate high school. Each makes her way to Beijing, June as a young professional and Siyue an entrepreneur. Like Siyue, Leiya lives with her grandparents in their village while her parents send money home; yearning for a different life than those of the women she sees around her, Leiya soon joins her parents in Shenzhen as an underage factory worker. Born to an urban middle-class family, Sam is outraged when her eyes are opened the poor treatment of workers, and becomes a labor activist, increasingly under threat by the authorities.
As the women grapple with government policies that threaten their businesses, their children's access to education, their choice of where to make a home, and, in Sam’s case, their lives, a vivid, damning, and urgent picture emerges of the previously unseen human cost of China’s rising economic tide—and the courage and perseverance of those caught in the swell.
Critic reviews
“A portrait both sweeping and intimate—as much a study of a radically changing society as of four very different people.”—The New York Times
“The riveting book that results from Yang’s persistence is a powerful snapshot of four young Chinese women attempting to assert control over the direction of their lives, escape the narrow confines of their patriarchal rural roots and make it in the big city . . . Yang’s reportage offers up raw human stories . . . because she documents each woman’s journey from childhood, including encounters with casual sexism, intermittent personal violence and the impossible weight of parental expectations, we can appreciate just how far they have come as adults —and just how far they have to fall.”—New York Times Book Review
“The prose is as powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary, tackling the censorship and economic voraciousness plaguing China today head on.”—British Vogue
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Bibliophiles rejoice!!!
- By Leila Jaafari on 10-11-24
By: Evan Friss
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State of Paradise
- A Novel
- By: Laura van den Berg
- Narrated by: Megan Tusing
- Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Along with her husband, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author returns to her mother's house in the Florida town where she grew up. As the summer heat sets in, she wrestles with family secrets and memories of her own troubled youth. Her mercurial sister spends a growing amount of time using MIND’S EYE, a virtual reality device provided to citizens of the town by ELECTRA during the doldrums of a recent pandemic. But it’s not just the ominous cats, her mother’s burgeoning cult, or the fact that her belly button has become an increasingly deep cavern—something is off in the town.
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Fantastic, philosophical, reflects the times
- By Laurel Waterson on 11-01-24
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The City in Glass
- By: Nghi Vo
- Narrated by: Susan Dalian
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot. And then the angels come, and the city falls. Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.
By: Nghi Vo
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Consent
- A Memoir
- By: Jill Ciment
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens
- Length: 4 hrs
- Unabridged
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In this close-up look at the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s, when she was seventeen and he was forty-seven and married with two children, Ciment not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1990s memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself if she told the whole truth when she wrote about their passion back then, and what truth looked like to her in the even longer-ago era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love.
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Very thought provoking
- By Donna WEnsell on 07-12-24
By: Jill Ciment
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Godwin
- A Novel
- By: Joseph O'Neill
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton, Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 12 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the United Kingdom, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Lionel Messi.
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Not Netherland.
- By Amazon Customer on 10-31-24
By: Joseph O'Neill
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Guilty Creatures
- Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida
- By: Mikita Brottman
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Mike and Denise Williams had a tight knit, seemingly unbreakable bond with childhood friends, Brian and Kathy Winchester. The two couples were devout, hardworking Baptists who lived perfect, quintessentially Southern lives. Their friendship seemed ironclad. That is, until December 16, 2000, when Denise’s husband Mike disappeared while duck hunting on Lake Seminole. After no body was found, everyone assumed that Mike had drowned in a tragic accident, his body eaten by alligators. But things took an unexpected turn when Brian Winchester divorced his wife and married Denise.
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Mostly Filler
- By Bootless on 08-15-24
By: Mikita Brottman
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Things Don't Break on Their Own
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Easter Collins
- Narrated by: Christina Cole, Emily Lucienne, Nathalie Buscombe
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty-five years ago, a young girl left home to walk to school. Her younger sister soon followed. But one of them arrived, and one of them didn’t. Her sister’s disappearance has defined Willa’s life. Everyone thinks her sister is dead, but Willa knows she isn’t. Because there are some things that only sisters know about each other—and some bonds only sisters can break. When Willa is invited to a party thrown by her first love, she has no reason to expect it will be anything other than an ordinary evening But nothing about Willa’s life has been ordinary since the day her sister disappeared.
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So Very Good
- By debhud on 07-17-24