The Empathy Exams
Essays
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Narrated by:
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Coleen Marlo
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By:
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Leslie Jamison
About this listen
From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014
Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain - real and imagined, her own and others' - Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory - from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration - in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.
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A hilarious and heartbreaking memoir-in-remedies by a self-described "professional soul-searcher" that details a journey of self-discovery through more than 160 tonics, seminars, regimens, and transformative therapies. With a voice that is at once intimate and hilarious, Megan captures the openness and honesty necessary for people to take a new path in life. Listeners will open the audiobook with curiosity about all the different healing therapies that Megan tries, but leave with a new understanding of themselves.
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Mr. Toad's Wild Ride has some serious competition!
- By Elisa R. Goodman on 02-15-19
By: Megan Griswold
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The Association of Small Bombs
- By: Karan Mahajan
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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When brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana, two Delhi schoolboys, pick up their family's television at a repair shop with their friend, Mansoor Ahmed, one day in 1996, disaster strikes without warning. A bomb - one of the many "small" bombs that go off seemingly unheralded across the world - detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the Khurana boys, to the devastation of their parents. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb.
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A tragedy of manners
- By jdukuray on 07-22-16
By: Karan Mahajan
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Carthage
- A Novel
- By: Joyce Carol Oates
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen, David Colacci
- Length: 19 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Zeno Mayfield's daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks. But when the community of Carthage joins a father's frantic search for the girl, they discover the unlikeliest of suspects…a decorated Iraq War veteran with close ties to the Mayfield family. As grisly evidence mounts against the troubled war hero, the family must wrestle with the possibility of having lost a daughter forever. Carthage plunges us deep into the psyche of a wounded young corporal haunted by unspeakable acts of wartime aggression.
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A Major Disappointment!!
- By Anne on 01-23-14
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Fire in the Belly
- The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz
- By: Cynthia Carr
- Narrated by: Cynthia Barrett
- Length: 25 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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David Wojnarowicz was an abused child, a teen runaway who barely finished high school, but he emerged as one of the most important voices of his generation. His circle of East Village artists moved into the national spotlight just as the AIDS plague began its devastating advance, and as right-wing culture warriors reared their heads. Fire in the Belly is the untold story of a polarizing figure at a pivotal moment in American culture - and one of the most highly acclaimed biographies of the year.
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Why did they let this person read?
- By Wendell Ricketts on 12-11-18
By: Cynthia Carr
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Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?
- Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform
- By: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
- Narrated by: Mark Bachman
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it's an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into “straight-acting dudes hangin’ out”, what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?
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Forget the Status Quo South Beach B.S.
- By Susie on 03-14-13
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I'm the One That I Want
- By: Margaret Cho
- Narrated by: Margaret Cho
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Abridged
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I'm the One That I Want, based on her show of the same name, is filled with dead-on insights about the experience of being a woman with attitude, of flowing with the highs and lows of life, and of creating one's own identity and acceptance. It is every bit as hilarious, shocking, and irreverent as she is.
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Hilarious and deeply engrossing
- By Ling on 04-10-03
By: Margaret Cho
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Love and Other Ways of Dying
- Essays
- By: Michael Paterniti
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 17 wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection. In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples (and faces mortality) with a real-life giant; in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge.
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Incredibly intimate voice for humanity
- By Ed Hodges on 01-02-16
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Where the Past Begins
- A Writer's Memoir
- By: Amy Tan
- Narrated by: Amy Tan
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.
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Narration Issues
- By Sara on 12-14-17
By: Amy Tan
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Maya's Notebook
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Maria Cabezas
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Neglected by her parents, 19-year-old Maya Nidal has grown up in Berkeley with her grandparents. Her grandmother Nini is a force of nature, a woman whose formidable strength helped her build a new life after emigrating from Chile in 1973. Popo, Maya's grandfather, is a gentle man whose solid, comforting presence helps calm the turbulence of Maya's adolescence. When Popo dies of cancer, Maya goes completely off the rails, turning to drugs, alcohol, and petty crime in a downward spiral that eventually bottoms out in Las Vegas.
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Narrator ruins this book
- By R.J. Mulder on 05-13-14
By: Isabel Allende
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10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
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A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
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What listeners say about The Empathy Exams
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- David
- 04-05-16
Examining our relationship to empathy
In a world of cynicism and a deluge of stories and strangers, Leslie Jamison brilliantly weaves together literature, vulnerable personal narrative, pop culture, and other diverse sources, uniting the essays with a single invitation: to let pain and experiences of others touch us, no matter how we have been taught to dismiss them.
Jamison's analysis and intuition for human experience is rich, at times almost too thick too take in even over multiple readings, but never becomes lofty, remaining grounded in vulnerable exposes of her own life.
Perhaps the undergirding gift in the book is found in Jamison's ability to anticipate skepticism, articulate bias, and empathize with cynics and those we default judgement to, all the while avoiding resorting to jaded cynicism herself, directing us instead to a deeper invitation to be human and to be inhabited by the experiences of other humans.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Ben
- 04-22-15
Not my cup of tea...
A very real and detailed look at pain, suffering and empathy from the authors personal experience/research...some of it is very moving and thought-provoking to me, however I did not enjoy the style in which some of it was portrayed. I did listen to the end and enjoyed the narration.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Dietrik Vander Hill
- 10-04-24
She illuminates the global through the local
These are a solid group of precisely observant and considered essays. The thread of empathy explored ina variety of directions connects them all.
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- jenae batt
- 05-03-24
Was that reader Moira Rose?
If Moira Rose had a voice talent school, this reader may have been her star pupil. Her pronunciation of “damage,” which comes up often, is an example.
Overall, I liked the book, but the reader could be distracting on occasion.
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Overall
- Amrit Daswaney
- 07-10-17
A celebration of modesty.
I want to start by saying this is the first collection of essays I have listened to. I wonder if they all leave you with a similar sense that you have only heard one layer, that the book needs to be excavated again. The prose is lyrical, but also intellectual. Empathy Exams is neither self help nor philosophy. It is some perfect in between. It seeks not to provide answers, but rather to encourage reflection into feelings. When personally biased, the author seems mildly indignant at a flourishing culture of turning emotion into something that is by turns unnecessary, untrue, distracting, unpleasant and weak, and one by one examines and attacks these assumptions, culminating in a tantalizingly suggestive piece on the relationship between women and wounds. It's a fantastic read, the best expression of privileged guilt i have ever read, and a defence of the pressure to be jaded and unmoved that is not afraid to be slightly ashamed of itself.
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4 people found this helpful
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- 2or3littlebirds
- 03-18-15
provocative
If you could sum up The Empathy Exams in three words, what would they be?
Smart, philosophical, creepy
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Empathy Exams?
I am only half way through the book, but the 2nd essay is skin crawling, literally.
Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Coleen Marlo?
Anyone. She has a strange, annoying voice that sounds digitally generated. She also isn't consistent in her pronunciations. Seemed unrehearsed to me, and I found myself distracted from the narrative, wanting to turn her off.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
The first essay will remain with you.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Mindyrecycles
- 07-06-15
Narrator is awful
What didn’t you like about Coleen Marlo’s performance?
She has a bizarre accent, which could more accurately be called an affectation. She sounds kind of like Siri on a bad day. It was very distracting to the point that I don't even know whether or how much I like the actual book.
Any additional comments?
I wish I had read this one instead of listening to it.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Jennifer D. Cook
- 09-15-16
What's up with the narrator?
This is beautiful writing, but I'm hearing through a metallic sounding robot. I have two hours to go but don't think I can finish because this narrators voice is so deeply unpleasant.
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4 people found this helpful
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- eric olszewski
- 03-11-16
What a thrill... onion
This book is by no means a typical read for me, and it certainly drove the point home as I progressed through it. There were a number of very interesting essays that all seemed to have their own resolve while touching on the central idea of the novel.
I definitely learned a bit of trivia as well as witnessed a different perspective of empathy as a whole. I don't read between the lines too often, but I can't get over how force-fed the last essay was; it seemed to lend itself to a completely different theme than those other stories.
Nevertheless, it was a great book, I just wish the ending had been alluded to earlier. Especially given the fact that it is what best remains in my memory from the read.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-18-18
powerful, scary, bold, a must read.
difficult and taboo subjects written with compelling clarity and frankness. would recommmend to a mature or aware reader.
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