Random Family
Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
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Narrated by:
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Roxana Ortega
About this listen
This New York Times best-seller intimately depicts urban life in a gripping book that slips behind cold statistics and sensationalism to reveal the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour.
In her extraordinary best seller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses listeners in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George; and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies. Jessica and Boy George ride the wild adventure between riches and ruin while Coco and Cesar stick closer to the street, all four caught in a precarious dance between survival and death. Friends get murdered; the DEA and FBI investigate Boy George; Cesar becomes a fugitive; Jessica and Coco endure homelessness, betrayal, the heartbreaking separation of prison, and, throughout it all, the insidious damage of poverty.
Charting the tumultuous cycle of the generations - as girls become mothers, boys become criminals, and hope struggles against deprivation - LeBlanc slips behind the cold statistics and sensationalism and comes back with a riveting, haunting, and true story.
©2016 Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (P)2016 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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In the tradition of New York Times best sellers What Remains by Carole Radziwill and Oh the Glory of It All by Sean Wilsey, Christina McDowell's unflinching memoir is a brutally honest, cautionary tale about one family's destruction in the wake of the Wall Street implosion.
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Mixed reaction
- By Margaret on 07-09-15
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Fairyland
- A Memoir of My Father
- By: Alysia Abbott
- Narrated by: Alysia Abbott
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and 80s San Francisco with an openly gay father. After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation - few of whom are raising a child. Steve throws himself into San Francisco's vibrant cultural scene.
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Great representation of the time
- By AvidReader22 on 06-07-19
By: Alysia Abbott
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Mislaid
- A Novel
- By: Nell Zink
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The couple are mismatched from the start - she's a lesbian, he's gay - but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.
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Misbegotten, mishandled, misfired novel
- By Julie W. Capell on 02-07-16
By: Nell Zink
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The Pursuit of Happyness (Abridged)
- By: Chris Gardner
- Narrated by: Andre Blake
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Abridged
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At the age of 20, Chris Gardner arrived in San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. However, he surprised everyone and himself by setting his sights on the competitive world of high finance. Yet no sooner had he landed an entry-level position at a prestigious firm, Gardner found himself caught in a web of incredibly challenging circumstances that left him part of the city's working homeless with his toddler son.
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Very Good Story!
- By Lito Da Critic on 06-02-06
By: Chris Gardner
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The Upside
- A Memoir
- By: Abdel Sellou
- Narrated by: Ray Chase
- Length: 5 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1992, Count Phillippe Pozzo di Borgo, on the heels of his wife's diagnosis with a terminal illness, suffered a paragliding accident that left him a quadriplegic. Forty-two years old, trapped inside his luxurious Paris town house, he was an outcast for the first time in his life. Abdel, an unemployed Algerian immigrant who had been an outcast for his entire existence, would become Phillipe's unlikely caretaker. Quick-thinking, unsentimental, and more than a little wild, Abdel surprises both himself and his employer.
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loved it
- By RockyDog on 01-31-19
By: Abdel Sellou
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Hardly Knew Her
- By: Laura Lippman
- Narrated by: Linda Emond, Francois Battiste
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Each of these ingenious tales is a gem, sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous, always filled with delightfully unanticipated twists and reversals. For people who have yet to listen to Lippman, get ready to experience the spellbinding power of "one of today's most pleasing storytellers" ( San Diego Union-Tribune). As for longtime devotees of her multiple award-winning novels, you'll discover that you hardly know her.
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I Love Laura Lippman
- By Joy on 07-15-11
By: Laura Lippman
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In the Country We Love
- My Family Divided
- By: Diane Guerrero, Michelle Burford
- Narrated by: Diane Guerrero
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Diane Guerrero, the television actress from the megahit Orange Is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, was just 14 years old on the day her parents were detained and deported while she was at school. Born in the US, Guerrero was able to remain in the country and continue her education, depending on the kindness of family friends who took her in and helped her build a life and a successful acting career for herself, without the support system of her family.
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Moves very slowly
- By Laura S. on 07-23-16
By: Diane Guerrero, and others
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Breaking Night
- A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard
- By: Liz Murray
- Narrated by: Liz Murray
- Length: 14 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Liz Murray was born to loving but drug-addicted parents in the Bronx. In school she was taunted for her dirty clothing and lice-infested hair, eventually skipping so many classes that she was put into a girls' home. At age 15, Liz found herself on the streets when her family finally unraveled. She learned to scrape by, foraging for food and riding subways all night to have a warm place to sleep. Then, when Liz's mother died of AIDS, she decided to take control of her own destiny.
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unbelievably inspiring
- By Amazon Customer on 03-17-12
By: Liz Murray
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Wasted
- Inside the Robert Chambers-Jennifer Levin Murder
- By: Linda Wolfe
- Narrated by: Pete Cross
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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On an August night in 1986, Jennifer Levin left a Manhattan bar with Robert Chambers. The next morning, her strangled, battered body was found in Central Park. Linda Wolfe goes beyond the headlines and media hype to recreate a story of a teenager whose immigrant mother was determined to make a better life for her son, a petty thief and drug user who'd been expelled from the best schools. Wasted powerfully depicts the freewheeling 1980s society that spawned a generation steeped in violence and the fatal impulses that drove Robert Chambers to kill.
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A very thorough reporting for the time
- By Amazon Customer on 12-28-16
By: Linda Wolfe
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Bettyville
- By: George Hodgman
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself - an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook - in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can't bring himself to force her from the home both treasure - the place where his father's voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict...
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Title Should Be Georgeville-It's All About George
- By Sara on 10-08-15
By: George Hodgman
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Twentynine Palms
- A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave
- By: Deanne Stillman
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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August 2, 1991, Twentynine Palms, California: a troubled Marine who has recently returned from the Gulf War savagely murders two young girls. One was about to turn 16, the other 21. Exquisitely and inexorably, Deanne Stillman uses this tragedy as a prism through which she examines a rootless culture of fatherless families, shattered dreams, and relentless violence. She also traces the family histories of each murder victim back for generations, in one case to the Donner Party and the other to a shack in the Philippines.
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Ugh...
- By Ashley on 11-03-20
By: Deanne Stillman
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Great book, but not terrific listening
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Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.
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A meandering audiobook...
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A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality: the black Chinese restaurant.
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Appreciated it, but didn't like it
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All Aunt Hagar's Children
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Returning to the city that inspired his first prize-winning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens.
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I JUST DON'T KNOW ABOUT THIS!
- By Mimi Routh on 07-05-15
By: Edward P. Jones
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Runaway
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Three stories concern the same woman - in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls' school into a wild love affair; in the second, she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her vanished child turns up caught in the grip of a religious cult. In these and other stories Alice Munro's understanding of the people about whom she writes makes their lives as real as our own.
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Poor Audio Quality
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Evicted
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In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.
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The Copenhagen Trilogy
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Called "a masterpiece" by The Guardian, this courageous and honest trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing, explores themes of family, sex, motherhood, abortion, addiction, and being an artist. This program contains all three volumes of her memoirs.
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Masterpiece
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2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist
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The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
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"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
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Secondhand Time
- The Last of the Soviets
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When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre", describing her work as "a history of emotions - a history of the soul". Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.
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The Heart, Soul & Iron Fist Of Russia
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Citizen
- An American Lyric
- By: Claudia Rankine
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 1 hr and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Claudia Rankine's bold new audiobook recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV - everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive.
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Important Work But Audio Is Missing a Lot
- By David P on 08-30-17
By: Claudia Rankine
What listeners say about Random Family
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- LARGECRASH
- 04-05-18
outstanding
love it
narrator was perfect
it felt like I was there my favorite is Ms Scutari
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1 person found this helpful
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- Liz
- 12-25-18
Powerful
Wow. This one packs a punch.
It has taken me the better part of a year to read / listen to this book. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is an incredible journalist and has told this story— of George, Jessica, Cesar, and Coco —so well. Their struggles are real and exhausting and painful, but such an important story to tell. This is some incisive and insightful journalism.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Krystal Alexander
- 08-16-20
Loved this
This book was so amazing. I wish I could see how everyone turned out. I probably listened to the whole thing in 3 days.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-02-19
Speechless
This book has been one the most amazing audibles I have come across. I haven’t been trying to find it for years and finally was able to get ahold of it through audible. Coco was my absolute favorite character. She reminded me of so many women in my life. Truly a beautiful told story of the hardships that many people who live on poverty and how the influence of your surrounds and family can shape your life.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Monica F. Fajardo
- 04-11-18
Must read
This is a powerful story of the vicious cycle of poverty in the Bronx. Growing up here and not too far from where the story begins, makes the characters and their circumstances familiar, relatable, and heartbreaking. A must read, no matter your zip code.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Carrie Grisham
- 05-15-19
Wow.
So well-written and eye-opening. You feel as though you are there, experiencing everything with the random family members. I never wanted to stop listening and don't quite know what to do now that I've finished it. I wish all of the book subjects the best and truly appreciate them sharing their lives with us.
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- Merlin
- 07-19-23
Please, please READ THIS BOOK
I read, loved and was heartbroken by this book when it was as first published. Listening on Audible was outstanding experience and added more to my understanding as this cycle has most certainly continued in families across America. I wish the author would write a follow up book on these brave women.
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- Rose
- 03-15-24
Everything is perfect
I read this book 16 years ago when I was a senior in high school and am glad I listened to it as an adult. The narrator carries the story well and it is an important book to read - there is a sympathy and empathy that often isn’t afforded to the groups of people depicted. The author did a great job and I have thought of these people for years and hope they are as okay as they could be now.
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- Taquanah Glenn
- 03-24-19
Loved It
A good read.A book to learn from.Boy George was a great man who went to to the street life who found himself with a life term in prison.He will always be the star amongst the moons.Boy Georve,Jessica,Coco,and Cesar,their stories touch my heart.I wish them all well.
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-26-24
how different it hits years later
wow this books really feels so different than when I was in college. so much of this story is the story of people I grew up with and though not perfect it is still wonderful that they have received a voice outside of the Bronx. though sometimes voyeuristic, this is such a deep dive into a family and their struggles connected to poverty. wished that the audio was read with a more authentic voice but then it would not really reflect the writer. overall a great revisit for me, but of course it's personal for me
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