The Unsettlers
In Search of the Good Life in Today's America
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Narrated by:
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Mark Sundeen
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By:
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Mark Sundeen
About this listen
The radical search for the simple life in today's America.
On a frigid April night, a classically trained opera singer, five months pregnant, and her husband, a former marine biologist, disembark an Amtrak train in La Plata, Missouri, assemble two bikes, and pedal off into the night, bound for a homestead they've purchased sight unseen. Meanwhile, a horticulturist, heir to the Great Migration that brought masses of African Americans to Detroit, and her husband, a product of the white flight from it, have turned to urban farming to revitalize the blighted city they both love. And near Missoula, Montana, a couple who have been at the forefront of organic farming for decades navigate what it means to live and raise a family ethically.
A work of immersive journalism steeped in a distinctively American social history and sparked by a personal quest, The Unsettlers traces the search for the simple life through the stories of these new pioneers and what inspired each of them to look for - or create - a better existence. Captivating and clear-eyed, it dares us to imagine what a sustainable, ethical, authentic future might actually look like.
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In this impressive anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine Black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. We Are Each Other’s Harvest elevates the voices and stories of Black farmers and people of color, celebrating their perseverance and resilience, while spotlighting the challenges they continue to face. Luminous and eye-opening, this eclectic collection helps people and communities of color today reimagine what it means to be dedicated to the soil.
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Various Voices
- By Peggy Sweeney on 11-06-21
By: Natalie Baszile
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The King of California
- J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire
- By: Mark Arax, Rick Wartzman
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 19 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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J. G. Boswell was the biggest farmer in America. He built a secret empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labor unions, and every journalist who ever tried to lift the veil on the ultimate "factory in the fields". The King of California is the previously untold account of how a Georgia slave-owning family migrated to California in the early 1920s, drained one of America 's biggest lakes in an act of incredible hubris and carved out the richest cotton empire in the world.
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Interesting story of California Ag history
- By Jean on 08-11-14
By: Mark Arax, and others
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Methland
- The Death and Life of an American Small Town
- By: Nick Reding
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world, and nowhere is that more true than in the small towns of the American heartland. Methland tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other small towns across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people.
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Beautifully written, but insubstantial
- By Flavius Krakdaddius on 02-10-10
By: Nick Reding
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Strangers in Their Own Land
- Anger and Mourning on the American Right
- By: Arlie Russell Hochschild
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In Strangers in Their Own Land, the renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country - a stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she famously champions, Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground and quickly warms to the people she meets.
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Performance undercuts thesis
- By married, one tall dog, one smelly dog on 01-02-17
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Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
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Country Driving
- A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 16 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver's license. For the next seven years, he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved roads were transforming China.
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Pass the white rice please
- By Nick on 02-18-10
By: Peter Hessler
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In Manchuria
- A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China
- By: Michael Meyer
- Narrated by: George Backman
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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For three years Meyer rented a home in the rice-farming community of Wasteland, hometown of his wife's family, and their personal saga mirrors the tremendous change most of rural China is undergoing in the form of a privately held rice company that has built new roads, introduced organic farming, and constructed high-rise apartments into which farmers can move in exchange for their land rights.
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If you liked the Wonder Years...?
- By Judas Mallory on 05-19-15
By: Michael Meyer
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Enough
- Why the World's Poorest Starve in An Age of Plenty
- By: Roger Thurow, Scott Kilman
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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For more than 30 years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the Green Revolution succeeded in South America and Asia, it never got to Africa. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every yearmost of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse.
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It's Time For Us To Be More Compassionate
- By James on 07-18-10
By: Roger Thurow, and others
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Street of Eternal Happiness
- Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road
- By: Rob Schmitz
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Modern Shanghai: a global city in the midst of a renaissance, where dreamers arrive each day to partake in a mad torrent of capital, ideas, and opportunity. Marketplace's Rob Schmitz is one of them. He immerses himself in his neighborhood, forging deep relationships with ordinary people who see in the city's sleek skyline a brighter future, and a chance to rewrite their destinies.
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Deserving of better audio
- By Rachael on 02-19-18
By: Rob Schmitz
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Hershey
- Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams
- By: Michael D'Antonio
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In this compelling biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael D'Antonio gives us the real-life rags-to-riches story of Milton S. Hershey, a largely uneducated businessman whose idealistic sense of purpose created an immense financial empire, a town, and a legacy that lasts to this day.
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The Benchmark for Chartiable, Rich Men
- By Boyd Tschaggeny on 01-30-19
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The Idealist
- Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty
- By: Nina Munk
- Narrated by: Susan Nezami
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Jeffrey Sachs - celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential best seller The End of Poverty - disagrees. In his view, poverty is a problem that can be solved. With single-minded determination he has attempted to put into practice his theories about ending extreme poverty, to prove that the world's most destitute people can be lifted onto "the ladder of development."
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Sachs tries hard but the system is not there
- By Amazon Customer on 11-13-15
By: Nina Munk
What listeners say about The Unsettlers
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Sam DeSocio
- 02-06-17
A seriously wonderful book
I very much enjoy this work. At a few points I was confused by stories inside stories, but quickly caught on. This might be the closest thing to a overview of homesteading and counter cultural with an eye to the world context. It was also a beautiful book.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Kindle Customer
- 06-25-17
Excellent reporting and reflections!
Backstories were personal and meaningful. Would have been more interesting to use either more narrators or various intonations by one reader.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amely
- 08-31-18
LoVed it. Worth the time. Fresh perspectives
Really enjoyed the full book. Listened to it with my son. It was a refreshing perspective and really made me think about choices that many times get taken for granted.
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- Mona Haydar
- 08-16-17
Excellent. Researched. Relevant.
In depth, personal, well -researched, Sundeen's is a book for our times. He stretches back to the Founding Fathers, through slavery and the Great Depression, and into Reganomics and the death of the family farm. But he does it through three personal, compelling stories. The three couples in the book are what make it a great story.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-05-21
Honestly moving
An amazing book about amazing people. This book forced me to question my way of life so much that I’m making my boyfriend read it to make sure he wouldn’t be scared-off by the radical changes I plan to implement in my life going forward. If you want a book that’s going to make you a better person, you’ve found it.
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- Angela Farnquist
- 09-21-23
Inspiring!
Listened to this commuting the 75 miles to and from my 9-5 job. As a person who desperately wants to take the plunge and commit to the simple life, this book gave me hope. I smiled and nodded and cheered on Ethan and Sarah, Olivia and Greg, Luci and Steve, and of course, Mark and Cedar. Next stop, Wendell Berry!
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- Benjamin Ehinger
- 05-09-18
honest real book
worth every penny. one of the most inspiring books I've listened to. everyone should read it.
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1 person found this helpful
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- @THEROOTMATTERS
- 11-17-19
INTERESTING NUGGETS OF INFO WITHIN
"A" for effort towards Mark Sundeen's very own search for his place in todays America. Quirky. As well, Mark Sundeen does offer plenty of views into what some others do in process of locating and staying in place in America, where one may live "the good life".
Personally, I found The Unsettlers more than a bit unsettling. I came away with disappointment, though not with the book. The story of todays America is clearly at issue. Perhaps the problem lies within me, I got too big a bite of reality to chew...
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- Steph
- 12-04-17
5 stars for the info, ideas, people & stories
I was glad I stuck it out. the narration was not its high point. the stories and people in the book were what I loved and the ideas.. things that made me challenge my own thinking.. made me want to do better, think deeper, try harder.. I have been wanting to start a small scale urban farm plot on my 1 acre in the suburban town and I have dreamed of moving off to an intentional community somewhere so this was a book that really interested me. I don't eat meat, I try to grow what I can, question where things come from, consume less... the no car views were something that made me think WOW there is another step I could take.. but WOW how hard that would really be.. lots of good info and great stories of some very amazing people living lives that truly make a difference.. if only more people did half what these folks did
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4 people found this helpful
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- Amazontroll
- 08-19-19
poor experience
struggle to finish. only finished because I ended up using as a sleep aid. very basic parts on beginning were ok, then entire story, narration went downhill real quick. story line was also misconceiveing. not even close to what I was expecting. more like crazy cult people.
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1 person found this helpful