Summary of Jessica Bruder's Nomadland
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Narrated by:
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Aaron Friedrichsen
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By:
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Slingshot Books
About this listen
No time to read/listen to the original book? Get the main key insights from Summary of Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland in 23 minutes or less.
A few key insights from chapter one:
1. Linda Mary is a grandmother who now lives in a trailer she named the Squeeze Inn, attached to a Jeep. In 2015, she was heading to Hanna Flat, a campground in California where she would be working during the summer, as she had done the previous year.
2. Even though she was 64, she did not have enough savings to be able to retire comfortably, so she had to keep working. She was enthusiastic about the fact that Hanna Flat would be giving her a raise over the previous year, an additional 20 cents per hour.
3. Many Americans, like Linda, work full-time on the road. These nomads are attempting to avoid an economic paradox: the collision of rising rents and stagnant wages - a force that cannot be stopped, running into an immovable object.
4. Wages and cost of housing have diverged so substantially that the dream of a middle-class life has become difficult, if not impossible, for a growing number of Americans.
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Story
In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.
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Can't understand the low ratings!
- By Janet Pittman Henley on 05-27-13
By: George Packer
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Overground Railroad
- The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America
- By: Candacy Taylor
- Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The first book to explore the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for Black motorists.
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Narrator destroyed this for me! read it instead
- By purpleprose on 10-16-22
By: Candacy Taylor
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Happy City
- Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
- By: Charles Montgomery
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks, and tower dwelling improvements on the car dependence of sprawl?
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Great book-terrible narrator
- By Amazon Customer on 02-04-19
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Meet the Frugalwoods
- Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living
- By: Elizabeth Willard Thames
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Gideon
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2014, Elizabeth and Nate Thames were conventional 9-5 young urban professionals. But the couple had a dream to become modern-day homesteaders in rural Vermont. Determined to retire as early as possible in order to start living each day - as opposed to wishing time away working for the weekends - they enacted a plan to save an enormous amount of money: well over 70 percent of their joint take-home pay. Dubbing themselves the Frugalwoods, Elizabeth began documenting their unconventional frugality and the resulting wholesale lifestyle transformation on their eponymous blog.
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Self-congratulatory, pollyanna garbage
- By Cecelia on 08-06-18
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Disintegration
- The Splintering of Black America
- By: Eugene Robinson
- Narrated by: Alan Bomar Jones
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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The African American population in the United States has always been seen as a single entity: a "Black America" with unified interests and needs. In his groundbreaking book Disintegration, longtime Washington Post journalist Eugene Robinson argues that, through decades of desegregation, affirmative action, and immigration, the concept of Black America has shattered.
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Written for Popular Consumption
- By Catherine S. Read on 06-03-11
By: Eugene Robinson
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Young China
- How the Restless Generation Will Change Their Country and the World
- By: Zak Dychtwald
- Narrated by: Zak Dychtwald
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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A close-up look at the Chinese generation born after 1990, exploring through personal encounters how young Chinese feel about everything from money and sex to their government, the West, and China’s shifting role in the world - not to mention their love affair with food, karaoke, and travel. Set primarily in the Eastern 2nd tier city of Suzhou and the budding Western metropolis of Chengdu, the book charts the touchstone issues this young generation faces.
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Erudite, enthralling, and engaging!
- By Anonymous User on 03-22-19
By: Zak Dychtwald
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Strange Stones
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: George Backman
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Full of unforgettable figures and an unrelenting spirit of adventure, Strange Stones is a far-ranging, thought-provoking collection of Peter Hessler’s best reportage - a dazzling display of the powerful storytelling, shrewd cultural insight, and warm sense of humor that are the trademarks of his work. Over the last decade, as a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three books, Peter Hessler has lived in Asia and the United States, writing as both native and knowledgeable outsider in these two very different regions.
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funny, entertaining
- By Katherine on 08-02-13
By: Peter Hessler
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Thrive
- Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way
- By: Dan Buettner
- Narrated by: Michael McConnohie
- Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In the first book to identify demographically proven happiness hotspots worldwide, researcher and explorer Dan Buettner documents the happiest people on earth and reveals how we can create our own happy zones. Detailing extraordinary new discoveries and meticulous research on four continents, Buettner observes happiness in unlikely places and gleans surprising insight into what generates contentment and what it means to thrive.
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Around the world with circular reasoning
- By Andy on 05-17-11
By: Dan Buettner
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Country Driving
- A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 16 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver's license. For the next seven years, he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved roads were transforming China.
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Pass the white rice please
- By Nick on 02-18-10
By: Peter Hessler
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Methland
- The Death and Life of an American Small Town
- By: Nick Reding
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world, and nowhere is that more true than in the small towns of the American heartland. Methland tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other small towns across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people.
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Beautifully written, but insubstantial
- By Flavius Krakdaddius on 02-10-10
By: Nick Reding
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New York, New York, New York
- Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
- By: Thomas Dyja
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy, Thomas Dyja - introduction
- Length: 17 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Dangerous, filthy, and falling apart, garbage piled on its streets and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble; New York’s terrifying, if liberating, state of nature in 1978 also made it the capital of American culture. Over the next thirty-plus years, though, it became a different place - kinder and meaner, richer and poorer, more like America and less like what it had always been.
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OMG...right on 👍👍👍👍👍
- By howie wine on 04-04-21
By: Thomas Dyja
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Sign My Name to Freedom
- A Memoir of a Pioneering Life
- By: Betty Reid-Soskin
- Narrated by: Betty Reid-Soskin
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In Betty Reid Soskin’s 96 years of living, she has been a witness to a grand sweep of American history. When she was born in 1921, the lynching of African-Americans was a national epidemic, blackface minstrel shows were the most popular American form of entertainment, white women had only just won the right to vote, and most African-Americans in the Deep South could not vote at all. From her great-grandmother, who had been enslaved until her mid-20s, Betty heard stories of slavery and the times of terror and struggle for Black folk that followed.
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How she stressed Creole, but I guess it was a badge if honor not being regular black.
- By Satisfied customer on 05-21-24