The Ride of Our Lives
Roadside Lessons of an American Family
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Narrated by:
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Marc Cashman
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By:
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Mike Leonard
About this listen
Mike Leonard is a lucky man. It’s not everyone who gets parents like Jack and Marge. At 87, Jack is a pathological optimist with an inexhaustible gift of gab. Marge, Jack’s bride of 60 years, though cut from the same rough bolt of Irish immigrant cloth, is his polar opposite - pessimistic and proud of it. What was their son, Mike, thinking when he took a sabbatical from his job with NBC News so he could pile these two world-class originals along with three of his grown kids and a daughter-in-law into a pair of rented RVs and hit the road for a month?
Mike was thinking that he wanted to give his parents the ultimate family reunion. And so, one February morning, three generations of Leonards set out on their journey under the dazzling Arizona sky. Thirty minutes later, one of the humongous recreational vehicles has an unplanned meeting with a concrete island at a convenience store. Thus begins the adventure of a lifetime - and an absolute gem of a book.
In the course of their humorous, often poignant cross-country tour, from the desert Southwest to the New England coastline, the Leonards reminisce about their loves, their losses, and their rich and heartwarming (and sometimes heartbreaking) lives, while encountering a veritable Greek chorus of roadside characters along the way. The home stretch finds the clan racing back to Chicago, hoping to catch the arrival of the next generation, Jack and Marge’s first great-grandchild. Through it all, Mike pieces together a century of family lore and lunacy - and discovers surprising sides to his parents that allow him to see them in a whole new light.
Mike Leonard has captivated millions of television viewers with his wry and witty feature stories for NBC’s Today. Now he brings that same engaging charm and keen insight to the foibles and passions of his own blessedly unique family. By turns uproariously funny and deeply moving, The Ride of Our Lives delivers a lifetime of laughs, lessons, and priceless memories.
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Critic reviews
“Mike Leonard is a national treasure and his touching, hilarious, instructive account of a loving road trip with his parents and children should be required reading in every family. I’m sending it to all my children so they can share the laughs and the tears.” (Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation)
“Mike Leonard has generously invited the rest of us along for a ride aboard his land yacht, the S.S. Fiasco. And what a ride it is. Profound and profoundly funny, Leonard takes us on a journey deep into the heart of his family. He has been blessed with characters who are as bizarre, maddening, unpredictable and hilarious as any dreamt up by Hollywood - and they are his real-life parents! The Ride of Our Lives reads like intimate dispatches from your funniest friend, and is as touching and whimsical as a series of home movies unspooling from an American childhood.” (Amy Dickinson, syndicated advice columnist, "Ask Amy")
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A debut novel about one girl's discovery of family secrets, first love, the limits of forgiveness, and finding one's way in the world, written with wisdom and sympathy by the best-selling memoirist, actor, and director. When 15-year-old Lucy Willows discovers that her father has a child from a brief affair, an eight-year-old boy named Thomas who lives in her own suburban New Jersey town, she begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her family and her life.
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none
- By Rick on 04-06-17
By: Andrew McCarthy
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No Biking in the House Without a Helmet
- By: Melissa Fay Greene
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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When the two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene confided to friends that she and her husband planned to adopt a four-year-old boy from Bulgaria to add to their four children at home, the news threatened to place her, she writes, "among the greats: the Kennedys, the McCaughey septuplets, the von Trapp family singers, and perhaps even Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, gave birth to 69 children in eighteenth-century Russia."
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Great story of family changes
- By Peter on 02-14-12
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Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter
- By: Melissa Francis
- Narrated by: Cris Dukehart
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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When Melissa Francis was eight years old, she won the role of lifetime: playing Cassandra Cooper Ingalls, the little girl who was adopted with her brother (played by young Jason Bateman) by the Ingalls family on the world’s most famous prime-time soap opera, Little House on the Prairie. But behind the scenes, her success was fueled by the pride, pressure, and sometimes grinding cruelty of her stage mother.
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Awesome book - really enjoyed it.
- By Jane C. Bailey on 11-16-12
By: Melissa Francis
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Too Close to the Falls
- A Memoir
- By: Catherine Gildiner
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the childhood of Catherine McClure Gildiner. It is the middle of the 1950s in Lewiston, New York, a small and sleepy American town very near Niagara Falls. No one is divorced. Mothers wear high heels to the beauty salon and children pop Pez candy and swing from vines over a local gorge. But at the tender age of four, it becomes clear to her Cathy's parents that their rambunctious daughter is no ordinary child and they soon put her "to work" at her father's pharmacy.
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Brilliant and funny and touching.
- By Kindle Customer on 11-07-19
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Double Take
- By: Kevin Michael Connolly
- Narrated by: Kevin Michael Connolly
- Length: 4 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Double take: a rapid or surprised second look, either literal or figurative, at a person or situation whose significance has not been completely grasped at first. Kevin Michael Connolly is a 23-year-old man who has seen the world in a way most of us never will. Whether swarmed by Japanese tourists at Epcot Center as a child or holding court at the X Games on his mono-ski, Kevin Connolly has been an object of curiosity since the day he was born without legs.
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Love this story so much
- By R. MCRACKAN on 07-04-18
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I'll Be There
- By: Holly Goldberg Sloan
- Narrated by: Laura Jennings
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Emily Bell believes in destiny. To her, being forced to sing a solo in the church choir - despite her average voice - is fate: because it's while she's singing that she first sees Sam. At first sight they are connected. Sam Border wishes he could escape, but there's nowhere for him to run. He and his little brother, Riddle, have spent their entire lives constantly uprooted by their unstable father. As Sam and Riddle are welcomed into the Bells' lives, they witness the warmth and protection of a family for the first time.
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Needs to be a film!
- By TreasureHunter on 06-25-16
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Fragile Beasts
- A Novel
- By: Tawni O'Dell
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer, Laural Merlington
- Length: 15 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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When their hard-drinking but loving father dies in a car accident, teenage brothers Kyle and Klint Hayes face a bleak prospect: leaving their Pennsylvania hometown for an uncertain life in Arizona with the mother who ran out on them years ago. But in a strange twist of fate, their town's matriarch, an eccentric, wealthy old woman whose family once owned the county coal mines, hears the boys' story and takes them in.
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Tawni O'Dell Fan
- By bette on 09-20-10
By: Tawni O'Dell
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The Cost of These Dreams
- Sports Stories and Other Serious Business
- By: Wright Thompson
- Narrated by: Wright Thompson
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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There is only one Wright Thompson. He is, as they say, famous if you know who he is: his work includes the most-read articles in the history of ESPN (and it's not even close) and has been anthologized in the Best American Sports Writing series ten times, and he counts John Grisham and Richard Ford among his ardent admirers. But to say his pieces are about sports, while true as far as it goes, is like saying Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove is a book about a cattle drive.
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Just great
- By ACK on 06-02-19
By: Wright Thompson
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An American Caddie in St. Andrews
- Growing Up, Girls, and Looping on the Old Course
- By: Oliver Horovitz
- Narrated by: Oliver Horovitz
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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In the middle of Oliver Horovitz's high school graduation ceremony, his cell phone rang: It was Harvard. He'd been accepted, but he couldn't start for another year. A caddie since he was 12 and a golfer sporting a 1.8 handicap, Ollie decided to spend his gap year in St. Andrews, Scotland - a town with the UK's highest number of pubs per capita, and home to the Old Course, golf's most famous 18 holes - where he enrolls in the St. Andrews Links Trust caddie trainee program.
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Fabulous read
- By David on 06-02-16
By: Oliver Horovitz
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Finding Fish
- A Memoir
- By: Antwone Q. Fisher
- Narrated by: Thomas Penny
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Baby Boy Fisher was raised in institutions from the moment of his birth in prison to a single mother. He ultimately came to live with a foster family, where he endured near-constant verbal and physical abuse. In his midteens he escaped and enlisted in the navy, where he became a man of the world, raised by the family he created for himself. Finding Fish shows how, out of this unlikely mix of deprivation and hope, an artist was born.
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This book will not disappoint you.
- By Joseph on 10-16-16
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Bettyville
- By: George Hodgman
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself - an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook - in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can't bring himself to force her from the home both treasure - the place where his father's voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict...
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Title Should Be Georgeville-It's All About George
- By Sara on 10-08-15
By: George Hodgman
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The One-in-a-Million Boy
- By: Monica Wood
- Narrated by: Chris Ciulla
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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For years, guitarist Quinn Porter has been on the road, chasing gig after gig, largely absent to his twice-ex-wife Belle and their odd, Guinness records-obsessed son. When the boy dies suddenly, Quinn seeks forgiveness for his paternal shortcomings by completing the requirements for one of his son's unfinished Boy Scout badges. For seven Saturdays Quinn does yard work for Ona Vitkus, the spry 104-year-old Lithuanian immigrant the boy had visited weekly.
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Loved it
- By Justin on 10-20-16
By: Monica Wood
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The Fragile World
- A Novel
- By: Paula Treick DeBoard
- Narrated by: Jessica Almasy, Will Damron
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The Kaufmans have always considered themselves a normal, happy family. Curtis is a physics teacher at a local high school. His wife, Kathleen, restores furniture for upscale boutiques. Daniel is away at college on a prestigious music scholarship, and 12-year-old Olivia is a happy-go-lucky kid whose biggest concern is passing her next math test. And then comes the middle-of-the-night phone call that changes everything.
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Inaccurate
- By CCB on 03-10-15
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My Year with Eleanor
- A Memoir
- By: Noelle Hancock
- Narrated by: Emily Beresford
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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After losing her high-octane job as an entertainment blogger, Noelle Hancock was lost. About to turn 29, she'd spent her career writing about celebrities' lives and had forgotten how to live her own. Unemployed and full of self-doubt, she had no idea what she wanted out of life. She feared change - in fact, she feared almost everything. Once confident and ambitious, she had become crippled by anxiety, lacking the courage required even to attend a dinner party - until inspiration struck one day in the form of a quote on a chalkboard in a coffee shop.
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Right on time!
- By Leah on 02-19-18
By: Noelle Hancock
What listeners say about The Ride of Our Lives
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Patrick Graham
- 11-22-21
Great book. Laugh out loud funny.
A great adventure from the first to the last page. Terrific spirit. Enjoy the read!
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- Nancy
- 05-31-07
Hurray for Mike!
I really enjoyed listening to this book. The narrator did a fine job. The story is so heart-warming. I am usually a suspense/mystery book fan, but it was to listen to a "feel good" book for a change.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Julie
- 05-19-17
Travel with family
I highly enjoyed this book. The author is in his middle aged years soon to become a grandparent. His kids are all adults and his elderly parents are in a bit of a rough patch in their lives, so he decides to rent 2 RVs and hit the road for a final tour of some of the places his parents have always wanted to go, or go back to revisit. He brings some of his adult kids with him and they make many stops throughout the country. His parents are a real Hoot, especially his mom, who pretty much says what she thinks all the time. Filled with humor, but with a touch of melancholy, this turns into more than just a vacation.
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1 person found this helpful
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- JOSEPH B MCQUILLEN
- 03-01-19
Out standing book
One of the best books on the afterlife out there...really well written. Keep em coming Bob
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Overall
- Michael
- 04-10-08
Oh How Human We Are
Well, he certainly described his family well, expecially his parents. I hope they did not mind their descriptions.
I found the book to be fun. In fact, I have listened to it twice - something I seldom do - and found that I laughed even more the second time.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Retired
- 06-16-10
Tired of it early
Being an RV-er, I was looking for more RV and less dialog between family members; hence, my reaction to this book was moderated by my own personal desires, so I tired of it here and there and was glad to move on to something else.
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- LB in Dallas
- 06-08-07
Fun Family Outing
I bought this because we own a motorhome and I was hoping for an interesting listen while cruising the highway. The RV aspect is mere background noise to the family's interaction. The author gained additional insight into his elderly parents' lives during their trip but there was a shallowness to the book that distracted me from what should have been a very fun story.
P.S. note to the reader New Trier (treer) HS is pronounced with a long e in as is Weibolts (weebolts)department store. You didn't grow up in Chicagoland I presume.
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- Reada 29
- 08-24-17
My teenage daughter and I listened twice!
The characters in this book have become a household names. Great story, skillfully told, lovely and laughable. Perfect road trip story for our family.
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1 person found this helpful
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- TurtlesRMe
- 03-06-07
Hilarious!!!
There is good news and bad news about this book! The good news is that it was one of the most entertaining I have read (listened to) in years! The bad news is that I searched all over the internet, but ths author doesn't have any other audiobooks! It was entertaining on so many levels and I could literally picture taking a road trip with my whole extended family while listening to this story! I don't often laugh out loud, but I did several times while listening to this one!
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5 people found this helpful
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- April
- 06-03-21
What a ride!
Great story telling! You’ll laugh(mostly)cry a little and think about your own life. So worth it.
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