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The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
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Publisher's summary
The earliest known prison memoir by an African American writer - recently discovered and authenticated by a team of Yale scholars - sheds light on the longstanding connection between race and incarceration in America.
In 2009, scholars at Yale University came across a startling manuscript: the memoir of Austin Reed, a free Black man born in the 1820s who spent most of his early life ricocheting between forced labor in prison and forced labor as an indentured servant. Lost for more than 150 years, the handwritten document is the first known prison memoir written by an African American. Corroborated by prison records and other documentary sources, Reed's text gives a gripping first-person account of an antebellum Northern life lived outside slavery that nonetheless bore, in its day-to-day details, unsettling resemblances to that very institution.
Now, for the first time, we can hear Austin Reed's story as he meant to tell it. He was born to a middle-class Black family in the boomtown of Rochester, New York, but when his father died, his mother struggled to make ends meet. Still a child, Austin was placed as an indentured servant to a family of White farmers near Rochester. He was caught attempting to set fire to a building and sentenced to 10 years at Manhattan's brutal House of Refuge, an early juvenile reformatory that would soon become known for beatings and forced labor.
Seven years later, Reed found himself at New York's infamous Auburn State Prison. It was there that he finished writing this memoir, which explores America's first reformatory and first industrial prison from an inmate's point of view, recalling the great cruelties and kindnesses he experienced in those places and excavating patterns of racial segregation, exploitation, and bondage that extended beyond the boundaries of the slaveholding South into free New York.
Formatted for optimal listenability and including fascinating historical documents (including a series of poignant letters written by Reed near the end of his life), The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict is a work of uncommon beauty that tells a story of 19th-century racism, violence, labor, and captivity in a proud, defiant voice. Reed's memoir illuminates his own life and times - as well as ours today.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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Story
A big, brilliant, spooky collection of classic and contemporary ghost stories that will make you hesitate before turning off that light.
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A very mixed review
- By Michael Mayer on 08-05-15
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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- By: Harriet Jacobs
- Narrated by: Audio Élan
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, written under the pseudonym Linda Brent, details her experiences as a slave in North Carolina, her escape to freedom in the north, and her ensuing struggles to free her children. The narrative was partly serialized in the New York Tribune, but was discontinued because Jacobs’ depictions of the sexual abuse of female slaves were considered too shocking. It was published in book form in 1861.
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Another impossible narration
- By JPALJ on 06-11-18
By: Harriet Jacobs
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Les Miserables
- By: Victor Hugo
- Narrated by: David Case
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Abridged
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Les Misérables emphasizes the three major predicaments of the 19th century, each symbolized by a major character: Jean Valjean represents the degradation of man in the proletariat, Fantine represents the subjection of women through hunger, and Cosette represents the atrophy of the child by darkness.
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TOO Abridged, Read Only if You Won't Read More
- By Syd Young on 02-03-14
By: Victor Hugo
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- By: Frederick Douglass
- Narrated by: Walter Covell
- Length: 3 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Frederick Douglass was an American abolitionist, women's suffragist, editor, orator, author, statesman and reformer. He was called both "The Sage of Anacostia" and "The Lion of Anacostia" and is one of the most prominent figures in African-American history and United States history.
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Great Book!
- By Mama C on 03-05-11
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Resurrection
- By: Leo Tolstoy
- Narrated by: Alastair Cameron
- Length: 16 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In Tolstoy's final novel, a privileged nobleman by the name of Dmitri Nekhlyudov seeks to make amends for a bad deed he committed in the past. In the process, he discovers that he has been living in a world far removed from the reality of the average person.
By: Leo Tolstoy
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The Brothers Karamazov [Naxos AudioBooks Edition]
- By: Constance Garnett - translator, Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Narrated by: Constantine Gregory
- Length: 37 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a titanic figure among the world's great authors, and The Brothers Karamazov is often hailed as his finest novel. A masterpiece on many levels, it transcends the boundaries of a gripping murder mystery to become a moving account of the battle between love and hate, faith and despair, compassion and cruelty, good and evil.
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A Spiritual and Philosophical Tour-de-Force
- By Rich on 02-27-16
By: Constance Garnett - translator, and others
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The Fixer
- A Novel
- By: Bernard Malamud
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev and, after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder.
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Technical Problems Need To Ne Resolved
- By REX LANYI on 12-24-20
By: Bernard Malamud
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Plain Tales from the Hills
- By: Rudyard Kipling
- Narrated by: Martin Jarvis
- Length: 4 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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An intimate, evocative, often funny, and always vital portrait of India at the peak of the British Raj. Written at the age of 22, they immediately show Kipling's natural and prodigious talent. Timeless, they can be listened to forever.
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Gentle irony
- By Simon Bowler on 01-25-06
By: Rudyard Kipling
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Resurrection
- By: Leo Tolstoy
- Narrated by: Neville Jason
- Length: 20 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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When Prince Dmitri Nekhludov is called for jury duty on a murder case, he little knows how the experience will change his life. Faced with the accused, a prostitute, he recognizes Katusha, the young girl he seduced and abandoned many years before, and realizes his responsibility for the life of degradation she has been forced to lead. His determination to make amends leads him into the darkest reaches of the Tsarist prison system, and to the beginning of his spiritual regeneration.
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Same Mood, The Same Power, Resurrected
- By Darwin8u on 11-01-15
By: Leo Tolstoy
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The Mark of the Beast
- By: Rudyard Kipling
- Narrated by: B.J. Harrison
- Length: 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When a carousing Englishman disgraces the consecrated effigy of Hanuman, a leprous "Silver Man" marks him with a hideous curse. The ensuing night brings new terrors to the house of the doomed man.
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Must listen again
- By uffdasuzanne on 10-06-17
By: Rudyard Kipling
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The House of the Dead
- By: Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Completed six years after Dostoyevsky's own term as a convict, The House of the Dead is a semi-autobiographical account of life in a Siberian prison camp, and the physical and mental effects it has on those who are sentenced to inhabit it. Alexandr Petrovitch Goryanchikov, a gentleman of the noble class, has been condemned to 10 years of hard labor for murdering his wife.
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most accessible dostoevsky book.
- By Calemos on 01-04-22