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The O'Briens
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
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Publisher's summary
Peter Behrens' eagerly awaited second novel is The O’Briens. In the character of Joe O’Brien - ambitious railroad magnate and industrialist, fiercely loyal family man, brooding troubled soul - he gives us one of the most compelling and complex characters to come along in years. A brilliant follow-up to The Law of Dreams, and yet standing masterfully on its own, The O’Briens is a tragic, romantic, and ultimately hopeful epic of great heart, imagination and narrative force.
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I sure tried.
- By A.C. CALLOWAY on 01-28-24
By: Joy Williams
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (Unabridged Selections)
- By: Edited by David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris, Mary-Louise Parker, Cherry Jones
- Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.
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Great stories but only 5 of 17 are included
- By Terri Kirk on 07-13-12
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The Bell Jar
- By: Sylvia Plath
- Narrated by: Maggie Gyllenhaal
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful but slowly going under - maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
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A must-read for every woman
- By Julie W. Capell on 05-06-16
By: Sylvia Plath
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Pearl in a Cage
- By: Joy Dettman
- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 20 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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On a balmy midsummer's evening in 1923, a young woman - foreign, dishevelled and heavily pregnant - is found unconscious just off the railway tracks in the tiny logging community of Woody Creek. The town midwife, Gertrude Foote, is roused from her bed when the woman is brought to her door. Try as she might, Gertrude is unable to save her, but the baby lives.
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Pearl in a Cage
- By Verita on 06-16-17
By: Joy Dettman
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The Magic of Ordinary Days
- A Novel
- By: Ann Howard Creel
- Narrated by: Justine Eyre
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Olivia Dunne, a studious minister's daughter who dreams of being an archaeologist, never thought that the drama of World War II would affect her quiet life in Denver. An exhilarating flirtation reshapes her life, though, and she finds herself banished to a rural Colorado outpost, married to a man she hardly knows. Overwhelmed by loneliness, Olivia tentatively tries to establish a new life, finding much-needed friendship and solace in two Japanese American sisters who are living at a nearby internment camp.
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I purchased this audio book not 15 minutes ago...
- By Kim on 09-15-16
By: Ann Howard Creel
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Varina
- A Novel
- By: Charles Frazier
- Narrated by: Molly Parker
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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With her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects a life of security as a landowner. He instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history - culpable regardless of her intentions. The Confederacy falling, her marriage in tatters, and the country divided, Varina and her children escape Richmond and travel south on their own, now fugitives.
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Read it rather than listen
- By Anonymous on 08-31-18
By: Charles Frazier
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The Lighthouse Road
- A Novel
- By: Peter Geye
- Narrated by: Tara Ochs
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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The story moves back and forth in time from the arrival of Thea from her isolated village in arctic Norway in search of a new life in the near wilderness of a small town and logging camp on the shore of Lake Superior to the travails of her orphaned son, Odd, some twenty years later. When Thea’s aunt and uncle do not meet her boat as planned, she’s initially left abandoned with no money or prospects and without speaking the language.
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Narrator wrecks storyline
- By customer on 12-01-17
By: Peter Geye
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
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Forgiveness
- A Gift from My Grandparents
- By: Mark Sakamoto
- Narrated by: Geoff Sugiyama
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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When the Second World War broke out, Ralph MacLean chose to escape his troubled life on the Magdalen Islands in eastern Canada and volunteer to serve his country overseas. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Mitsue Sakamoto saw her family and her stable community torn apart after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
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Admirable progenitors
- By M. D. Baines on 04-24-18
By: Mark Sakamoto
What listeners say about The O'Briens
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Bonnie Brody
- 05-05-12
A Family Saga of Three Generations
The O'Briens is a family saga that extends from 1887 through 1960 covering three generations of the O'Brien family. As the novel starts, Joe O'Brien is a second generation Irishman living in rural Canada with his mother and drunken stepfather. Joe has served as a parental child since his earliest years, taking care of his siblings due to his mother's fragile state of health and his desire to keep his brothers and sisters protected from his stepfather. At one point, when he finds out that his stepfather has been acting inappropriately with his sisters, he nearly kills him.
Joe is the patriarch of the family throughout this novel. "He knew how to hold himself within himself. A fellow needed a good hard shell to survive." Joe has this shell along with the desire to better himself. He wants power, money and a well-bred wife. His first chore is to see that his siblings are taken care of. He sees that one of his brothers is enrolled at Fordham to become a priest, his two sisters enter a convent to prepare for the nunnery, and his other brother travels west.
Joe has grown up on the railroads and he knows how the system works. He wants to become a railroad magnate and by the time he's in his early twenties, he has succeeded. He now only needs a wife. "A house was just a house. He had a railroad, mountains. He was making something of himself." "Alone was no good". He meets Iseult, a young woman of independent means and quite spirited. They begin a passionate and lifelong ambivalent relationship, marrying a few months after meeting. Iseult is searching for herself but also also wants family and children.
Gradually, Joe's business increases to the point that he becomes very rich. His prime interest is his business. "All that mattered to him was getting the work completed and on schedule. It didn't matter who survived or who didn't." He runs into some problems with unions but he prevails. Iseult, in her existential angst, thinks of Joe, her husband as the man who once "promised life, connection, children, meaning. But really, people were alone. Even in marriage - perhaps most of all in marriage - they were alone.
Joe and Iseult have four children, three daughters and a son. One of the daughters dies after living only two days. The O'Briens have homes in Canada, Santa Barbara, and Maine. Joe owns land up and down the west coast. As the book propels towards World War II, the children grow up and the war plays a large part in the novel.
One of the problems with this novel, and it is a good novel, is that it is just too short at 386 pages to cover so much time and inform the reader about all of the family members. The reader becomes very familiar with Joe, Iseult, Joe's borther Grattan, and the first generation to some extent. However, the grandchildren are just glossed over.
One of the most poignant parts of the novel are Joe's alcohol binges that nearly bring the marriage to an end. Every so often, Joe leaves his home and goes to New York City where he takes a room at some luxury hotel. There he stays and drinks for days until Iseult is called and asked to pick Joe up. At one point, Iseult leaves Joe and takes the children to Santa Barbara where she and Joe remain separated for nearly a year. Joe continues to binge but it is never discussed between them again.
Another very significant aspect of this novel is the acknowledgement of post-traumatic stress disorder although it is never given a name. Grattan returns from World War I a changed man, virtually crazy and wild. He has been in the trenches but he does not speak of what he has experienced. A similar situation occurs with Joe and Iseult's son Mike after he returns injured from World War II. He has lost his health, his love and his grounding in the world.
Iseult's ambivalence about Joe occurs throughout their marriage. She states that Joe "had occupied her life like a foreign army. But was that really true? Wasn't it just as true that they has created a life together?" Joe, on the other hand, has implacable faith in himself to the point of narcissism. He takes it for granted that his life with Iseult is a necessity and that he needs her to make a home. "Selfish, Frankie thought. Hard-hearted. Her mother needed him, but he as usual was thinking of no one but himself."
The saga is quite interesting but at times I felt like I was just skimming the surface. The depths were too deep and too many to touch in this too short a book. Perhaps if it were 800 pages, the characters could have been more fleshed out. Another possibility would have been to limit the novel to just two generations and leave the third one out. Personally, I would have liked this to have been two books.
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- @dawgwriter
- 01-12-13
Great story, bad reader
I am still reading this book but I am so sorry I got it as an audio book as I don't like the reader. He does not enunciate "she," it sounds like "he" and it's very confusing when you think one character is being discussed only to hear "he" instead of "she" and you can't turn back the pages to see if you missed something. I will be sure to remember this reader, Paul Hecht, to make sure I don't get another book he has read.
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- mary
- 04-23-12
enjoyable
If you could sum up The O'Briens in three words, what would they be?
Enjoyable historical fiction
Would you be willing to try another one of Paul Hecht???s performances?
I found his habit of dropping "s's" irritating and confusing - especially with the word"she".
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- Sandra
- 03-06-16
a good night's sleep with a family you will love being part of
I loved this story about a family's struggle to succeed in a new world , all too human, with love prevailing thru heartbreak. Mostly, I went to bed with it every night set on a timer and never failed to have a good night's sleep.
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- GPFord
- 08-08-12
Not much to this one
What would have made The O'Briens better?
There just wasn't much to the story. My wife liked it okay but wasn't wowed by it. I, on the other hand, kept waiting for something interesting to happen or some character in the book to make me like them. Maybe had the author focused more on fewer characters he might have been able to create more interest.
Would you ever listen to anything by Peter Behrens again?
I'm not at all sure. I am hesitant to say that I would never listen to a book by a particular author after just one try. But if The O'Briens is typical of Berhens books, then I would not be very likely to listen to another one.
You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?
It could have been good. The sweep of time covered, the interesting locales, the memorable events portrayed all were redeeming qualities. The problem is that Behrens did so little with them.
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