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The Lives of Chang and Eng
- Siam’s Twins in Nineteenth-Century America
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
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Publisher's summary
Connected at the chest by a band of flesh, Chang and Eng Bunker toured the United States and the world from the 1820s to the 1870s, placing themselves and their extraordinary bodies on exhibit as "freaks of nature" and "Oriental curiosities". More famously known as the Siamese twins, they eventually settled in rural North Carolina, married two white sisters, became slave owners, and fathered 21 children between them. Though the brothers constantly professed their normality, they occupied a strange space in 19th-century America. They spoke English, attended church, became American citizens, and backed the Confederacy during the Civil War. Yet in life and death, the brothers were seen by most Americans as "monstrosities", an affront they were unable to escape.
Joseph Andrew Orser chronicles the twins' history, their sometimes raucous journey through antebellum America, their domestic lives in North Carolina, and what their fame revealed about the changing racial and cultural landscape of the United States. More than a biography of the twins, the result is a study of 19th-century American culture and society through the prism of Chang and Eng that reveals how Americans projected onto the twins their own hopes and fears.
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Ramachandra Guha takes us from Gandhi's birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, his two years as a student in London, and his two decades as a lawyer and community organizer in South Africa. Guha has uncovered myriad previously untapped documents, including private papers of Gandhi's contemporaries. Using this wealth of material in an exuberant, brilliantly nuanced and detailed narrative, Guha describes the social, political, and personal worlds inside of which Gandhi began the journey that would earn him the honorific Mahatma: "Great Soul".
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Somewhat repetitive and lacking
- By freehope on 03-10-21
By: Ramachandra Guha
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Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 24 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us - an ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings. In best-selling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. In Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson shows how Franklin defines both his own time and ours. The most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself.
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Good book, not crazy about the narrator
- By Cathi on 07-20-13
By: Walter Isaacson
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Twilight at Monticello
- The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson
- By: Alan Pell Crawford
- Narrated by: James Boles
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Much has been written about Thomas Jefferson, with good reason: His life was a great American drama, one of the greatest, played out in compelling acts. He was the architect of our democracy, a visionary chief executive who expanded this nation's physical boundaries to unimagined lengths.
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After Leaving Office
- By Roy on 09-23-10
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Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement
- By: Sally McMillen
- Narrated by: Barbara Goodson
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In the quiet town of Seneca Falls, New York, over the course of two days in July 1848, a small group of women and men, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, held a convention that would launch the woman's rights movement and change the course of history. The implications of that remarkable convention would be felt around the world - and indeed are still being felt today.
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A Good Listen
- By Kindle Customer on 09-28-18
By: Sally McMillen
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Spectacle
- The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga
- By: Pamela Newkirk
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1904 Ota Benga, a young Congolese "pygmy" - a person of petite stature - arrived from central Africa and was featured in an anthropology exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair. Two years later the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging the slight 103-pound, 4-foot 11-inch tall man with an orangutan. The attraction became an international sensation, drawing thousands of New Yorkers and commanding headlines across the nation and in Europe.
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hard pass
- By savvy shopper on 02-26-19
By: Pamela Newkirk
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Jefferson's Daughters
- Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America
- By: Catherine Kerrison
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 17 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Jefferson had three daughters: Martha and Maria by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and Harriet by his slave Sally Hemings. Although the three women shared a father, the similarities end there. Martha and Maria received a fine convent school education while they lived with their father during his diplomatic posting in Paris. Once they returned home, however, the sisters found their options limited by the laws and customs of early America. Harriet Hemings followed a different path. She escaped slavery — apparently with the assistance of Jefferson himself.
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Don't waste money on this book.
- By Amazon Customer on 02-17-18
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The Strange Career of William Ellis
- The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire
- By: Karl Jacoby
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican, the proud owner of a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, a busy Wall Street office, and scores of mines and haciendas in Mexico. But for all his obvious riches and his elegant appearance, Eliseo was also the possessor of a devastating secret: He was not, in fact, from Mexico at all. Rather, he had begun life as a slave named William Ellis, born on a cotton plantation in Texas during the waning years of King Cotton.
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Fascinating Tale of Racial Passing
- By Steven Schuster on 06-10-16
By: Karl Jacoby
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New England Bound
- Slavery and Colonization in Early America
- By: Wendy Warren
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In a work that fundamentally recasts the history of colonial America, Wendy Warren shows how the institution of slavery was inexorably linked with the first century of English colonization of New England. While most histories of slavery in early America confine themselves to the Southern colonies and the Caribbean, New England Bound forcefully widens the historical aperture to include the entirety of English North America.
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Don't waste your time or money
- By Dis Carded on 09-03-17
By: Wendy Warren
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One Nation, Under Gods
- A New American History
- By: Peter Manseau
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 17 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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At the heart of the nation's spiritual history are audacious and often violent scenes. But the Puritans and the shining city on the hill give us just one way to understand the United States. Rather than recite American history from a Christian vantage point, Peter Manseau proves that what really happened is worth a close, fresh look.
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Tapestry of different pieces makes for a whole
- By Gary on 03-23-15
By: Peter Manseau
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The Fever of 1721
- The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics
- By: Stephen Coss
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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During the worst smallpox epidemic in Boston history, Mather convinced Doctor Boylston to try a procedure that he believed would prevent death - by making an incision in the arm of a healthy person and implanting it with smallpox. "Inoculation" led to vaccination, one of the most profound medical discoveries in history.
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Glad that's done
- By GB on 04-21-16
By: Stephen Coss
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Jefferson
- Architect of American Liberty
- By: John B. Boles
- Narrated by: Michael Johnson
- Length: 24 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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From an eminent scholar of the American South, the first full-scale biography of Thomas Jefferson since 1970. Not since Merrill Peterson's Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation has a scholar attempted to write a comprehensive biography of the most complex Founding Father. In Jefferson, John B. Boles plumbs every facet of Thomas Jefferson's life, all while situating him amid the sweeping upheaval of his times. We meet Jefferson the politician and political thinker - as well as Jefferson the architect, scientist, bibliophile, paleontologist, musician, and gourmet.
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Makes Jefferson Human
- By MichaelBuffalo on 06-23-20
By: John B. Boles
What listeners say about The Lives of Chang and Eng
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Joy
- 02-07-15
Boring boring
This was not at all interesting. Subject matter should have been interesting but it wasn't!
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4 people found this helpful
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- S. Schwankert
- 12-28-22
Comprehensive
It’s understandable why other reviewers have written that this book is all over the place. However, “The Lives of Chang and Eng” provides a comprehensive context for the world in which they lived.
It is entirely possible that the author realized early in his undertaking that original source materials, especially from the brothers, would be scarce, and that filling a book would require an expansion of scope. There are certainly times when the book becomes repetitive. Overall this is a fine historical work.
I would avoid other books read by the same performer. His delivery led me to listen to the work at 1.2x, and his habit of allowing his sentences to hang at their end was not pleasant to the ear.
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- David
- 01-05-18
Terrible Author, Horrible Narrator
Would you try another book from Joseph Andrew Orser and/or Stephen Hoye?
The writer is all over the place with this book. It is more a disorganized stream of consciousness than a biography.
The prologue is intended as a quick overview of the book, but less than 2 minutes in the writer is going on and on and on about how they were seen as monsters and aberrations.
Chapter 1 is the youth and discovery of the twins, but is more a recap of the prologue than any real new information.
Chapter 2 is about them striking out on their own but gets more into the people who managed them and is completely out of order. In 1836 X happens and then in 1829 Y happened and then in 1837 this happened, and in 1869 this happened and in 1833 this happened. Absolutely no chronological order, and the topics discussed are not even do so via a different focus to allow the jumping around to make sense. Instead it is as if the author was just writing down facts as he could remember them. How any editor would allow this to pass amazed me.
There are entire chapters where the author says less than 5 sentences about the lives of the actual twins and instead quotes friends, business acquaintances, new papers, other books, and discusses other things going on in the US. It is honestly like he forgot he was writing a biography or rather had maybe 2 paragraphs of content and decided to fill the rest of the book with random stuff.
I think there are more sentences that refer to the twins as monstrous than sentences that contain facts about the twins.
It would be more aptly titled "A Stream of Consciousness on Discrimination due to race and disability in the 1800s" than actually name anyone.
What could Joseph Andrew Orser have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?
Have some sort of outline and stick to it. Have and provide more information about the Twins lives, get an editor. Stop making the same claim over and over (that they were seen as monsters). Provide historical, factual, live histories and not a random loosely slung together stream of thought
How did the narrator detract from the book?
His pace and tone. The inflection he used to read the book was unnatural and completely distracting. He uses the same rise and fall of his voice in every sentence and its not a normal flow. It sounded more like a machine reading than a human, or if it was a human one that never read out loud before.
What character would you cut from The Lives of Chang and Eng?
The writer and narrator
Any additional comments?
Horrible experience
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2 people found this helpful
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- Catherine
- 01-15-15
Gave it a good try but didn't like it
Tried listening to this book and gave it a good try but just found 1) the narrator was just not someone I was comfortable listening to and 2) found that yes the author did a lot of research but sensed that most of the content strayed too far off into unnecessary tangents. Overall too much stuffing not enough meat on the bones as a historical biography for my liking.
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3 people found this helpful
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- donnaernst
- 01-15-19
An Informative yet boring account
I’m sorry I didn’t research this book before I bought it but I took it on a friend’s advice that it was a good read. It might be for someone but it just wasn’t for me. I wanted more of a story and less of a documentary.
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1 person found this helpful
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- G Therapondos
- 12-11-20
Boring
Very disappointing. I thought it would be interesting to hear about the lives of conjoined twins but this book was very boring and rambled endlessly. I couldn't finish it.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-21-22
Brilliant & Insightful
This was an absolute delightful look inside of history. There are far too many things of value within this highly detailed book to name. Bravo.
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