The Conservationist
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Narrated by:
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Nadia May
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By:
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Nadine Gordimer
About this listen
Mehring, a rich, powerful and vital industrialist, has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer. But his possessions refuse to remain objects: his wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; and even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.
Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, paints a fascinating portrait of a man both reckless and calculating, a “conservationist” left only with the possibility of self-preservation, in this subtle and detailed study of the forces and relationships that seethe in South Africa today. Joint winner of the Booker Prize.
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Nanzeen's inauspicious birth in a Bangladeshi village imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents. Married off to a man old enough to be her father, Nanzeen moves to London and cares for her family. But gradually she begins to question whether fate controls her or whether she has a hand in her own destiny. She discovers both the complexity that comes with free choice and the depth of her attachment to her husband, her daughters and her new world.
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A truly wonderful book!
- By A M on 11-24-03
By: Monica Ali
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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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Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
- An African Childhood
- By: Alexandra Fuller
- Narrated by: Lisette Lecat
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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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
- By Sara on 10-12-15
By: Alexandra Fuller
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The Wayward Bus
- By: John Steinbeck, Gary Schamhorst - introduction
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In his first novel to follow the publication of his enormous success, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck's vision comes wonderfully to life in this imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus traveling California's back roads, transporting the lost and the lonely, the good and the greedy, the stupid and the scheming, the beautiful and the vicious away from their shattered dreams and, possibly, toward the promise of the future. This edition features an introduction by Gary Scharnhorst.
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Steinbeck always touches the heart, makes you feel
- By Kelly on 05-08-17
By: John Steinbeck, and others
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A Spear of Summer Grass
- By: Deanna Raybourn
- Narrated by: Nicola Barber
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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The daughter of a scandalous mother, Delilah Drummond is already notorious, even among Paris society. But her latest scandal is big enough to make even her oft-married mother blanch. Delilah is exiled to Kenya and her favorite stepfather's savanna manor house until gossip subsides. Fairlight is the crumbling, sun-bleached skeleton of a faded African dream, a world where dissolute expats are bolstered by gin and jazz records, cigarettes and safaris. As mistress of this wasted estate, Delilah falls into the decadent pleasures of society.
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Disappointed
- By Vinity on 07-13-13
By: Deanna Raybourn
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A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
- By: Flannery O'Connor
- Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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The collection that established O’Connor’s reputation as one of the American masters of the short story. The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive "The Misfit", as well as “The Displaced Person” and eight other stories.
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Meater story teller
- By Gary Hunt on 02-04-20
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
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Scribbling the Cat
- Travels with an African Soldier
- By: Alexandra Fuller
- Narrated by: Lisette Lecat
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger". Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war.
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Astonishing
- By G. Robinson on 06-27-04
By: Alexandra Fuller
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The Unreal and the Real
- Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin, Volume One: Where on Earth
- By: Ursula K. Le Guin
- Narrated by: Tandy Cronyn
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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The Unreal and the Real is a major event not to be missed. In this two-volume selection of Ursula K. Le Guin's best short stories--as selected by the National Book Award winning author herself--the reader will be delighted, provoked, amused, and faced with the sharp, satirical voice of one of the best short story writers of the present day. Where on Earth explores Le Guin's earthbound stories which range around the world, from small town Oregon to middle Europe in the middle of revolution to summer camp.
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Shame on you, Audible
- By Audrey McCombs on 07-03-20
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The Blind Assassin
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Whitney on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
What listeners say about The Conservationist
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Saman
- 07-02-17
Writing is spectacular ...
This is a book that I wanted to read and enjoy for some time now. The author was a Nobel literature winner and profuse writer of politically charged novels in apartheid South Africa. This book was also the joint winner of the 1974 Booker Prize for Fiction.
As I read this quick pacing novel, it reminded me of the writing of V.S. Naipaul. With the words so beautifully threaded, the pleasure of the sentence was paramount to its strength and beauty. The book is laced in metaphor for the plight of the black African against the dominance of the master white regime. Yet it also covers the simmering tensions of other ethnic groups such as the Indian traders in the outskirts of the farm. Some controversial (for the time) sexual content is also scattered across the pages bringing some hilarity to the story.
Ultimately, the weakness lies in the lack of a story. For me, it was just too strong intellectually where some of the intricate nuances against apartheid and its evil are hidden in a dense fog. But that was not the fault of the author but my lack of understanding.
The awful weakness of the narration was unforgivable in this Audible release.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 11-12-11
I tried three times to listen to this book.
The voice of the narrator is so irritating that my mind kept drifting off so as not to have to listen to it. I found myself sometimes an half hour further, not knowing what I had heard. Sometimes I even fell asleep. I think that the story is a good one, but in this form with this narrator it is impossible to really know.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Robert R.
- 10-29-20
NOT Unabridged
This is a very intriguing novel, but, be advised that it is not unabridged as represented. There is a section missing. Judging but the timing of the chapters (which do not reflect the actual divisions of the narrative), about 30 minutes has been lopped of "Chapter 6."
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1 person found this helpful
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- Mark
- 07-30-15
New chapter?
New chapters are not delineated in any way. Not up to audible standards generally. But glad it is available.
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4 people found this helpful
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- David Bogosian
- 02-22-18
Simply awful
The author is good at crafting language, but the story is... well... there isn't one. It jumps around, it has no thread to follow, it's confusing and ultimately deeply boring with nothing to say. The narrator does well with the various ethnicities, but is often unclear in her enunciation, with uneven dynamics that make listening even more challenging. I endured through about half the book and then gave up.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Apozema
- 07-02-15
Retains its strong relevance and message
Gordimer's prose is vivid and expressive. The story remains relevant despite changes in the country. Worth listening and remembering a great writer.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Kathryn
- 11-18-21
Great book, bad narrator
Great book with nuanced themes - blend of social realism content and modernist formal experimentation. Probably best to read the physical copy
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1 person found this helpful