
Tinkers
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Narrated by:
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Christian Rummel
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By:
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Paul Harding
About this listen
Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2010
An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure.A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost seven decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring.
Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.
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Story
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War", then, at age 50, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle.
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A book for dreaming over
- By Penelope Wisner on 04-18-05
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Ironweed
- By: William Kennedy
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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Story
Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers' strike; he ran away again after accidentally – and fatally – dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and the present.
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Darkly Lovely
- By Michael on 07-22-17
By: William Kennedy
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Interpreter of Maladies
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Matilda Novak
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the crosscurrents set in motion when immigrants, expatriates, and their children arrive, quite literally, at a cultural divide. The nine stories in this stunning debut collection unerringly chart the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations.
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skip it
- By Sheri on 06-30-09
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
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The Known World
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: Kevin Free
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.
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A meandering audiobook...
- By Daniel on 09-03-04
By: Edward P. Jones
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The Optimist's Daughter
- By: Eudora Welty
- Narrated by: Eudora Welty
- Length: 3 hrs and 59 mins
- Abridged
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This story of a young woman's confrontation with death and her past is a poetic study of human relations.
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Beautiful writing
- By Teresa on 07-15-13
By: Eudora Welty
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Cathedral
- By: Raymond Carver
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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This is Raymond Carver's third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. The 12 stories in Cathedral mark a turning point in Carver's work.
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Disaffected performance
- By Tom Broderick on 07-22-17
By: Raymond Carver
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A Summons to Memphis
- By: Peter Taylor
- Narrated by: Boyd Gaines
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in 1917, Tennessee author Peter Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize for this exceptional work of literature. The well-to-do Carver family moves to Memphis from Nashville, where they become embroiled in a domestic dispute over the widower patriarch's decision to remarry.
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Not at all interesting
- By Nichole on 06-01-09
By: Peter Taylor
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March
- By: Geraldine Brooks
- Narrated by: Richard Easton
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story "filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man" (Sue Monk Kidd). With "pitch-perfect writing" (USA Today), Brooks follows March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs.
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Great book, greatly narrated
- By Paula on 07-30-06
By: Geraldine Brooks
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The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
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Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
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Pay as You Go
- A Fable
- By: Eskor David Johnson
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 15 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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New to town and delusionally confident, Slide imagined himself living in a glossy building with doormen and sweeping views of the skyline. Instead he's landed in a creaking, stuffy apartment with two roommates: a loping giant who hardly leaves his room, and a weight-obsessed neurotic who keeps no fewer than forty-seven lamps throughout the house, blazing at all hours. Unwilling to accept this fate, Slide—a barber with an opaque past—embarks on a quest for the perfect apartment, pinballing through the sprawling, madcap city of Polis and its endless procession of neighborhoods.
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Great story and narrator
- By N. E. H. on 02-01-24
Decent, but...
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I was also somewhat annoyed by the narrator's voice and delivery. Not my kind of book.
"Poetical language" is pretentious.
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I suspect that I should love this book.
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Ugh - simple plot beautifully written
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Annoying narrator and confusing plot
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Interesting but dry
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I'm not sure where to rank it. Not at the top, but certainly not near the bottom. It's a different kind of novel.
Who was your favorite character and why?
I liked Howard the best. The sections with Howard driving the cart and his mule, Prince Albert, pulling it were the most interesting.
What does Christian Rummel bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Rummel does a great job of reading. I really have no complaints. The narration is on par with the story.
If you could take any character from Tinkers out to dinner, who would it be and why?
Prince Albert, the mule, because that would surely be something to see.
Any additional comments?
This novel is for those who like description and enjoy the beauty of language. Don't get me wrong, there's a story here, and the author does a good job of telling it. It's not a long recording, and it's worth the time.
better than I expected
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Hated It!
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I gave it 2 stars simply because the technical aspects of this production are good.
Annoying and pretentious
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Beautifully written
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