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The Mathematician's Shiva
- Narrated by: Angela Brazil, Stephen R. Thorne
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
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Publisher's summary
When the greatest female mathematician in history passes away, her son, Alexander "Sasha" Karnokovitch, just wants to mourn his mother in peace. But rumor has it the notoriously eccentric Polish émigré has solved one of the most difficult problems in all of mathematics and has spitefully taken the solution to her grave. As a ragtag group of mathematicians from around the world descends upon Rachela's shiva, determined to find the proof or solve it for themselves - even if it means prying up the floorboards for notes or desperately scrutinizing the mutterings of her African Grey parrot - Sasha must come to terms with his mother's outsized influence on his life.
Spanning decades and continents, from a crowded living room in Madison, Wisconsin, to the windswept beach on the Barents Sea where a young Rachela had her first mathematical breakthrough, The Mathematician's Shiva is an unexpectedly moving and uproariously funny novel that captures humanity's drive not just to survive but to achieve the impossible.
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The word "shanda" is defined as shame or disgrace in Yiddish. This book, Shanda, tells the story of three generations of complicated, intense twentieth-century Jews for whom the desire to fit in and the fear of public humiliation either drove their aspirations or crushed their spirit. In her deeply engaging, astonishingly candid memoir, author and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin exposes the fiercely-guarded lies and intricate cover-ups woven by dozens of members of her extended family.
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Beautifully Written!
- By Adele Aron Greenspun on 01-12-23
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Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
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Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
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Learning to Die in Miami
- Confessions of a Refugee Boy
- By: Carlos Eire
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Carlos Eire's story of a boyhood uprooted by the Cuban Revolution quickly lures us in, as eleven-year-old Carlos and his older brother Tony touch down in the sun-dappled Miami of 1962 - a place of daunting abundance where his old Cuban self must die to make way for a new, American self waiting to be born. In this enchanting new work, narrated in Eire's inimitable and lyrical voice, young Carlos adjusts to life in his new country.
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Excellent memoir of a forgotten time in history
- By BRB on 03-23-15
By: Carlos Eire
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Between Two Worlds
- Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam
- By: Zainab Salbi, Laurie Becklund
- Narrated by: Josephine Bailey
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Zainab Salbi was 11-years-old when her father was chosen to serve as Saddam Hussein's personal pilot, her family often forced to spend weekends with Saddam where he watched their every move. As a palace insider, Zainab offers a singular glimpse of what it is like to come of age under a dictator and provides an intimate portrait of the man she was taught to call "uncle". She watched as Saddam pitted friends, spouses, and even children against each other to compete for his approval.
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An excellent history lesson
- By Ella on 12-01-09
By: Zainab Salbi, and others
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Ordinary Light
- A Memoir
- By: Tracy K. Smith
- Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
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Simply spoken - poetic
- By CarolynneRHarris on 04-27-15
By: Tracy K. Smith
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In the Light of What We Know
- By: Zia Haider Rahman
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 21 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.
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dreadful
- By sam on 06-05-15
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After I'm Gone
- A Novel
- By: Laura Lippman
- Narrated by: Linda Emond
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Dead is dead. Missing is gone. When Felix Brewer meets nineteen-year-old Bernadette "Bambi" Gottschalk at a Valentine's Day dance in 1959, he charms her with wild promises, some of which he actually keeps. Thanks to his lucrative - if not all legal - businesses, she and their three little girls live in luxury. But on the Fourth of July in 1976, Bambi's comfortable world implodes when Felix, facing prison, vanishes. Though Bambi has no idea where her husband - or his money - might be, she suspects one woman does: his devoted young mistress, Julie.
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Cannot rate this highly enough!
- By C. Vincent on 03-05-14
By: Laura Lippman
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And After the Fire
- A Novel
- By: Lauren Belfer
- Narrated by: Xe Sands, Simon Vance
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In the ruins of Germany in 1945, at the end of World War II, American soldier Henry Sachs takes a souvenir, an old music manuscript, from a seemingly deserted mansion and mistakenly kills the girl who tries to stop him. In America in 2010, Henry's niece, Susanna Kessler, struggles to rebuild her life after she experiences a devastating act of violence on the streets of New York City. When Henry dies soon after, she uncovers the long-hidden music manuscript.
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Very disappointing
- By Margalarg on 06-28-19
By: Lauren Belfer
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Mother Tongue
- A Saga of Three Generations of Balkan Women
- By: Tania Romanov
- Narrated by: Becky Parker
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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What is your mother tongue? Sometimes the simplest questions take a book to answer. Such is the case with Tania Romanov's story of exile, emigration, and immigration and how native language can be a powerful touchstone for the sense of home. The unrelenting consequences of 100 years of Balkan wars force three generations of Croatian women to flee their homelands multiple times. Eventually, Tania, a successfully integrated American immigrant from Eastern Europe, journeys back to her fractured homeland with her mother to unravel the secrets of their shared past.
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Ljiljana Popovic, born in former Yugoslavia
- By Ljiljana Popovic on 03-18-21
By: Tania Romanov
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What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
- Stories
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Gideon, Piter Marek, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In "Books and Roses", one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers' fates. In "Is Your Blood as Red as This?", an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school. "'Sorry' Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea" involves a "house of locks", where doors can be closed only with a key - with surprising unobservable developments. And in "If a Book Is Locked There's Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think", a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).
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clever
- By jared rogerson on 03-15-18
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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Things I've Been Silent About
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Naila Azad
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.
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Family portrait in the frame of history
- By Galina COS on 07-02-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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The Night Ocean
- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
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Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
What listeners say about The Mathematician's Shiva
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lee Crowe
- 07-27-15
Great read
I truly enjoyed this novel- humorous and engaging- it held my attention.
The narrator was fantastic.
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5 people found this helpful
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- mathdork
- 01-18-18
Brilliant and Original
What made the experience of listening to The Mathematician's Shiva the most enjoyable?
I don't usually write reviews, but this is the exception, I guess partly because, like the characters in this book, I am a Jewish female mathematician whose forbears came to the US from Russia. It was a great read, and to my surprise, I found myself regularly laughing out loud at the dialogue, as the narrator grapples with dichotomies: emotions vs. science vs politics vs. religion-- and how they all complicate life. This will be a rare case for me as I intend to read it again.
What about Angela Brazil and Stephen R. Thorne ’s performance did you like?
The performances were outstanding, especially Mr. Thorne's variations on a Russian accent to differentiate (see!---Math everywhere!) the various characters.
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- Loretta W
- 08-09-21
Wonderfully Colorful Novel
I discovered this book by watching a Tik Tok of the author. I was in thralled with the story telling of his parents lives. Got the book, it was funny, sad, and honest about how family’s dynamics can be. It is well worth the time.
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- Lynn Einsohn-Byram
- 01-07-19
Characters that come to life
Beautifully written interwoven past and present keeps the reader fully engaged. I couldnt put it done, I will miss the friends I have been lucky to share their lives and listen to.
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- MidwestGeek
- 03-21-17
Terrific debut. Reads as if it ought to be true.
I thoroughly enjoyed this story. I imagine that it is not for everyone, and maybe one must be an academic to appreciate just how close to the truth the satire is and to appreciate the humor in these characters. The story features Rachela Karnokovitch, a great female mathematician, and her mashugana family and colleagues, as told by her son. She is of Russian-Polish, Jewish origin. A family mostly of unbelievers, she is paradoxically observant.
Listeners who are not scientists might benefit from reading a little about the Navier-Stokes equations on wikipedia, not that one must understand the mathematics, but in order to place the problem in context. It is a basic equation for incompressible fluid flow and apparently can describe all observed behaviors, including turbulence, but the existence of solutions with the properties expected has never been demonstrated. Also, there really is a million dollar Millenium Prize awaiting the person or group who is able to characterize solutions to this equation. The reader, Stephen Thorne, does a good job with the characters, but I found Angela Brazil's portrayal of Rachela reading from her diary a bit off-putting, especially toward the end of the book. To me, she doesn't sound at all like the woman described.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Kelly El Yaagoubi
- 02-21-23
Surprisingly delightful since I don’t like math.
Had I not come across the author on Tik Tok, I never would have found his book. Such a gem of a listen and outside of my usual genres.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Lisa
- 08-17-15
Enjoyable listening despite several mispronunciations!
Having been a "Mathlete" in high school, and growing up with Yiddish-speaking grandparents and parents, the book had special appeal to me. The accents were "close", however, the pronunciation of several of the Yiddish words was inaccurate, and, as a result, somewhat distracting. Overall, I enjoyed the story and the readers very much.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Steffanie
- 07-17-20
Performance -Outstanding
The speakers added so much to my enjoyment of the story with accents to match their place of birth. Highly recommended beyond 5 stars for me.
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- Avidly Audible
- 12-04-15
This is just someone's personal rant.
Dull, unimaginative, and at times, shrieking at you, this ranks among the worst books I've ever purchased. It's going straight back to Audible.
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1 person found this helpful