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The End of the End of the Earth
- Essays
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
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Publisher's summary
This program has been updated with a new epilogue written and read by the author.
A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections
The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like “a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.” For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world.
Franzen’s great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both. Where the new media tend to confirm one’s prejudices, he writes, literature “invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.” Whatever his subject, Franzen’s essays are always skeptical of received opinion, steeped in irony, and frank about his own failings. He’s frank about birds, too (they kill “everything imaginable”), but his reporting and reflections on them—on seabirds in New Zealand, warblers in East Africa, penguins in Antarctica—are both a moving celebration of their beauty and resilience and a call to action to save what we love.
Calm, poignant, carefully argued, full of wit, The End of the End of the Earth provides a welcome breath of hope and reason.
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- By Brandi on 03-13-19
By: Paige Williams
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The Quiet World
- Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960
- By: Douglas Brinkley
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 23 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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A riveting history of America's most beautiful natural resources, The Quiet World documents the heroic fight waged by the U.S. federal government from 1879 to 1960 to save wild Alaska - ;Mount McKinley, the Tongass and Chugach national forests, Gates of the Arctic, Glacier Bay, Lake Clark, and the Coastal Plain of the Beaufort Sea, among other treasured landscapes - from the extraction industries.
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Where are Native Alaskans?
- By Peggy on 11-13-14
By: Douglas Brinkley
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Essays of E. B. White
- By: E. B. White
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Legendary author and essayist E. B. White writes, "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." Covering a large number of subjects, this classic collection features 31 of White's most memorable essays.
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E.B. White writes honestly, fearlessly and clearly
- By Bonny on 09-03-17
By: E. B. White
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Poached
- Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking
- By: Rachel Love Nuwer
- Narrated by: Christina Delaine
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Our insatiable demand for animals - for jewelry, pets, medicine, meat, trophies, and fur - is driving a worldwide poaching epidemic, threatening the continued existence of countless species. Rachel Nuwer, an award-winning science journalist with a background in ecology, takes listeners on a narrative journey to the front lines of the trade: to killing fields in Africa, traditional medicine black markets in China, and wild meat restaurants in Vietnam. Through exhaustive first-hand reporting that took her to 10 countries, Nuwer explores the forces currently driving the demand.
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Fascinating
- By Annie on 11-30-18
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The Great Wall of China and the Salton Sea
- Monuments, Missteps, and the Audacity of Ambition
- By: Russell Rathbun
- Narrated by: Larry Herron
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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We've been building and making things ever since we stumbled out of paradise. Some of those things are incredible continuations of God's creation, while others are nothing but ambitious catastrophes. We continue making, says Russell Rathbun, but we've lost ourselves in the process.
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Excellent narrator
- By Tammy on 03-17-18
By: Russell Rathbun
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Lost Among the Birds
- Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year
- By: Neil Hayward
- Narrated by: Sam Devereaux
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Early in 2013 Neil Hayward was at a crossroads. He didn't want to open a bakery or whatever else executives do when they quit a lucrative but unfulfilling job. He didn't want to think about his failed relationship with 'the one' or his potential for ruining a new relationship with 'the next one'. And he almost certainly didn't want to think about turning 40. And so instead he went birding. Birding was a lifelong passion. It was only among the birds that Neil found a calm that had eluded him in the confusing world of humans.
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Know a Birder? This will help you Understand.
- By Carole T. on 08-27-17
By: Neil Hayward
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Monster of God
- By: David Quammen
- Narrated by: Brian Holsopple
- Length: 16 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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For millennia, lions, tigers, and their man-eating kin have kept our dark, scary forests dark and scary, and their predatory majesty has been the stuff of folklore. But by the year 2150 big predators may only exist on the other side of glass barriers and chain-link fences. Their gradual disappearance is changing the very nature of our existence. We no longer occupy an intermediate position on the food chain; instead we survey it invulnerably from above - so far above that we are in danger of forgetting that we even belong to an ecosystem.
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Great book, shame about the performance
- By Shirzy on 05-23-18
By: David Quammen
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The Hour of Land
- A Personal Topography of America's National Parks
- By: Terry Tempest Williams
- Narrated by: Terry Williams
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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For years, America's national parks have provided public breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why close to 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now, to honor the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, what they mean to us, and what we mean to them.
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It could have been good.
- By udzuzu on 04-14-18
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The Wonder of Birds
- What They Tell Us About Ourselves, the World, and a Better Future
- By: Jim Robbins
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Birds, Jim Robbins posits, are our most vital connection to nature. They compel us to look to the skies, both literally and metaphorically, draw us out into nature to seek their beauty, and let us experience vicariously what it is like to be weightless. Birds have helped us in so many of our human endeavors: learning to fly, providing clothing and food, and helping us better understand the human brain and body.
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Stories about birds with something for everyone
- By D on 07-24-17
By: Jim Robbins
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Maphead
- Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks
- By: Ken Jennings
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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It comes as no surprise that, as a kid, Jeopardy! legend Ken Jennings slept with a bulky Hammond world atlas by his pillow every night. Maphead recounts his lifelong love affair with geography and explores why maps have always been so fascinating to him and to fellow enthusiasts everywhere.
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A Romp through Maps
- By Lynn on 01-27-12
By: Ken Jennings
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Galapagos
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Galapagos takes the listener back one million years to AD 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, totally different human race. Kurt Vonnegut, America's master satirist, looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry - and all that is worth saving.
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The survival of the human race is a total bore!
- By Darwin8u on 12-13-16
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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The Thing with Feathers
- The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human
- By: Noah Strycker
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Birds are highly intelligent animals, yet their intelligence is dramatically different from our own and has been little understood. As we learn more about the secrets of bird life, we are unlocking fascinating insights into memory, relationships, game theory, and the nature of intelligence itself. The Thing with Feathers explores the astonishing homing abilities of pigeons, the good deeds of fairy-wrens, the influential flocking abilities of starlings, the deft artistry of bowerbirds, the extraordinary memories of nutcrackers, and other mysteries.
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Interesting book, terrible reader
- By MGM123 on 03-16-18
By: Noah Strycker
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Good narration, like some essays more than others
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Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
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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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What listeners say about The End of the End of the Earth
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Traut
- 12-04-22
Engaging Collection of Essays
I highly recommend this collection. My family and I love birds and support environmental efforts to protect them. I am by no means knowledgeable about them, but still managed to find great enjoyment and learned a great deal here. I also found the essays dealing with non-bird topics entertaining as well.
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- Sara T.
- 12-23-18
not that exciting unless you like birds
I was a huge fan of the corrections so I was looking forward to this. although some parts were engaging a lot of it just didn't grab me. Also about half of it is about bird-watching which I was hoping I might get into But ultimately did not find that interesting. The narration was great though.
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- Barbara S. Smith
- 12-21-19
Many excellent essays.
As a birder and environmentalist I had a particular interest in this book. The essay on the birds of the middle east was worth the price of the book but there were several more essays that were interesting and moving. There were 1 or 2 I could have skipped.
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3 people found this helpful
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- howshermun
- 12-05-18
brilliant! Every essay is a journey onto itself…
The writing and THINKING is superb and brilliantly wrought as one would expect from Jonathan Franzen. Robert Petkoff’s delivery, however, conforms to the prevailing standards of hyper-clarity… A plodding pace, scrupulously articulating every syllable and every ending consonant. Although he is very skilled I find it a bit labored and, on a long drive, exhausting on the ear… I much prefer the more relaxed, conversational - and therefore MUCH CLEARER – delivery of Dennis Boutsikaris (The Human Stain) or Richard Poe (East of Eden). (Not to be hard on Robert Petkoff… He may well have been following the directions of his producer who assumes that, since Jonathan Franzen frequently writes in long, compound, complex sentences, the delivery must be slowed down and exaggerated in the interest of clarity. Actually, (to my ears) the opposite is true: Our brains are NATURALLY TUNED to apprehend the cadences of normal conversation... not to the arduous enunciations of HYPER – CLARITY.
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2 people found this helpful