
The Darling
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Narrated by:
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Mary Beth Hurt
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By:
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Russell Banks
About this listen
Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, The Darling is a political/historical thriller, reminiscent of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, that explodes the genre, raising serious philosophical questions about terrorism, political violence, and the clash of races and cultures.
©2004 Russell Banks (P)2004 BBC Audiobooks America, Inc. & HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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The Enigma of Human Life
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In 1971, a property speculator named Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine. Reflecting on his childhood in the early 20th century, Harley recounts that after his father’s sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida’s swamplands—mere miles away from what would become Disney World—to join a community of Shakers.
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Dry account of a shaker love story
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The Sweet Hereafter
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Story
In The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident. Using four different narrators, Banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of life's most agonizing questions: When the worst thing happens, who do you blame?
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Read the book, see the movie
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When we first meet him, Chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. Rejected by his parents, out of school and in trouble with the police, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, and takes the name "Bone."
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Out of the mouths of teenagers
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Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart. But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the listener feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time.
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Captivating read
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Continental Drift
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Give up and die
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Affliction
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- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 15 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. A well-digger and policeman in a bleak New Hampshire town, he is a former high-school star gone to beer fat, a loner with a mean streak. It is a mark of Russell Banks' artistry and understanding that Wade comes to loom in one's mind as a blue-collar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition. Told by his articulate, equally scarred younger brother, Wade's story becomes as spellbinding and inexorable as a fuse burning its way to the dynamite.
-
-
The Enigma of Human Life
- By Carlo Pate on 12-07-20
By: Russell Banks
-
The Magic Kingdom
- A Novel
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell, MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1971, a property speculator named Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine. Reflecting on his childhood in the early 20th century, Harley recounts that after his father’s sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida’s swamplands—mere miles away from what would become Disney World—to join a community of Shakers.
-
-
Dry account of a shaker love story
- By Sylvia Pinegar on 01-02-23
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The Sweet Hereafter
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Dawn Harvey, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Dominic Hoffman, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
In The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident. Using four different narrators, Banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of life's most agonizing questions: When the worst thing happens, who do you blame?
-
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Read the book, see the movie
- By RueRue on 11-24-20
By: Russell Banks
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Rule of the Bone
- A Novel
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When we first meet him, Chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. Rejected by his parents, out of school and in trouble with the police, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, and takes the name "Bone."
-
-
Out of the mouths of teenagers
- By Lori K. on 01-07-17
By: Russell Banks
-
Cloudsplitter
- A Novel
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 29 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart. But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the listener feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time.
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Captivating read
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Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
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Before Purchasing
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Dreams from My Father
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Story
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Powerful
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Anna Karenina
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Performance
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Story
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Need to Disclose and Highlight Name of Translator
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Editorial reviews
Critic reviews
- Audie Award Winner, Fiction (Unabridged), 2005
"A rich and complex look at the searing connections between the personal and the political, this is one of Banks's most powerful novels yet." (Publishers Weekly)
"Banks brings the full weight of his storytelling genius and psychological perceptiveness to a novel as compulsively readable as it is eviscerating in its dramatization of cultural divides, political mayhem, psychotic violence, and profound alienation." (Booklist)
In narrow terms, this is the story of a one-time member of the SDS Weather Underground, who ends up escaping from the US to Africa, marries into the Liberian autocracy, lives through the bloody civil war of the late-1980s & 1990s. It is reminiscent of Graham Greene (e.g., the Comedians), but more powerful & more intimate. Hanna is not an alienated foreign observer of the same ilk as most of Greene's protagonists. It is reminiscent of Naipaul, but told from an American's perspective rather than a british-third-world perspective.
This is extremely well narrated and very difficult to put down. Recommended highly.
wonderfully read, wonderfully written
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Living underground
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Not for the faint of heart
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LOVED IT
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amazing story
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Brilliant!
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Excellent but too painful to finish
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Do be warned though, this is a long listen, and out of all the many hours, there is what seemed like zero joy in the life of the protagonist, as well as none in lives of the any of the other characters. It is in fact, a grim and depressing story.
Good, but dark.
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Complex and compelling
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Compelling, but monotonous
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