Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
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Narrated by:
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Allyson Johnson
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By:
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Saidiya Hartman
About this listen
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.
In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.
Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives re-creates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them - domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty - and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology.
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Baldwin's personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics. Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America's self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist.
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A Critical Masterpiece.
- By Ramon McGee on 05-10-18
By: James Baldwin
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Empire of Sin
- By: Gary Krist
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Empire of Sin re-creates the remarkable story of New Orleans' 30-years war against itself, pitting the city's elite "better half" against its powerful and long-entrenched underworld of vice, perversity, and crime. This early-20th-century battle centers on one man: Tom Anderson, the undisputed czar of the city's Storyville vice district, who fights desperately to keep his empire intact as it faces onslaughts from all sides.
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very interesting
- By Claireoline on 02-20-15
By: Gary Krist
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My Thoughts Be Bloody
- The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth
- By: Nora Titone, Doris Kearns Goodwin - introduction/notes
- Narrated by: John B. Lloyd
- Length: 19 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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My Thoughts Be Bloody, a sweeping family saga, revives an extraordinary figure whose name has been missing, until now, from the story of President Lincoln's death. Edwin Booth, John Wilkes's older brother by four years, was in his day the biggest star of the American stage. Without an account of Edwin Booth, author Nora Titone argues, the real story of Lincoln's assassin has never been told.
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Wonderful!
- By Tad Davis on 11-30-10
By: Nora Titone, and others
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The Lady in Gold
- The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, 'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer'
- By: Anne-Marie O'Connor
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The Lady in Gold, considered an unforgettable masterpiece, one of the 20th century's most recognizable paintings, made headlines all over the world when Ronald Lauder bought it for $135 million a century after Klimt, the most famous Austrian painter of his time, completed the society portrait. Anne-Marie O'Connor, writer for the Washington Post, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, tells the galvanizing story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a dazzling Viennese Jewish society figure.
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Get a better narrator.
- By David A Weatherbie on 04-13-15
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Lady Killers
- Deadly Women Throughout History
- By: Tori Telfer
- Narrated by: Jaime Lamchick
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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When you think of serial killers throughout history, the names that come to mind are ones like Jack the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy. But what about Tillie Klimek, Moulay Hassan, Kate Bender? The narrative we’re comfortable with is the one where women are the victims of violent crime, not the perpetrators. In fact, serial killers are thought to be so universally, overwhelmingly male that in 1998, FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood infamously declared in a homicide conference, “There are no female serial killers.”
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An ode to arsenic
- By 🔥 Phx17 🔥 on 03-04-24
By: Tori Telfer
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Becoming Faulkner
- The Art and Life of William Faulker
- By: Philip Weinstein
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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William Faulkner was the greatest American novelist of the 20th century, yet he lived a life marked by a pervasive sense of failure. Throughout his career, he remained haunted by his inability to master a series of personal and professional challenges: his less-than-heroic military career; the loss of his brother in an airplane crash; a disappointing stint as a Hollywood screenwriter; and a destructive bout with alcoholism.
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Miss.'s BCS-Bundren.Compson.Snopes/Sutpen/Sartoris
- By W Perry Hall on 05-01-14
By: Philip Weinstein
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American Rose
- A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee
- By: Karen Abbott
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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With the critically acclaimed Sin in the Second City, best-selling author Karen Abbott “pioneered sizzle history” (USA Today). Now she returns with the gripping and expansive story of America’s coming-of-age - told through the extraordinary life of Gypsy Rose Lee and the world she survived and conquered. America in the Roaring Twenties. Vaudeville was king. Talking pictures were only a distant flicker. Speakeasies beckoned beyond dimly lit doorways; money flowed fast and free.
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Well done biography of a complicated Icon
- By Moire on 01-27-11
By: Karen Abbott
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Tinseltown
- Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood
- By: William J. Mann
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 15 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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By 1920, the movies had suddenly become America's new favorite pastime and one of the nation's largest industries. Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence; yet Hollywood's glittering ascendancy was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies - including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, a legendary crime that has remained unsolved until now.
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Everybody's a dreamer...
- By Steven on 01-08-15
By: William J. Mann
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The Moor's Last Sigh
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 20 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile.
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The performance is enchanting.
- By Kelly on 05-04-18
By: Salman Rushdie
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The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
- By: James Weldon Johnson
- Narrated by: Richard Allen
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Originally published anonymously in 1912, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man revealed as never before the color line dividing America, and the price it exacted on those souls who could traverse the two worlds. The book presents the fictional account of "an ex-colored man" - an African-American who could pass for white - as he attempts to choose which side of the line will better suit his life, and his psyche.
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New favorite
- By Jess on 03-19-15
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White like Her
- By: Gail Lukasik PhD, Kenyatta D. Berry - foreword
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother's decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother's fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother's racial lineage, tracing her family back to 18th-century colonial Louisiana. In coming to terms with her decision to publicly out her mother, Gail changed how she looks at race and heritage.
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Disappointed
- By Yoli on 06-06-18
By: Gail Lukasik PhD, and others
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What listeners say about Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Angela Fobbs
- 02-12-21
what a wonderful book
I loved the writing style and the stories. I would highly recommend it to everyone.
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- K.M.S.
- 04-09-22
On black women: love drained and emptied her
This book uses characters to paint the lives of trauma endured by black women during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. I appreciated every moment of it. More than anything, it helps one to understand the relationship between incidents of one's past and the formation of one's identity. Hartman writes about black women and their random convictions and their vulnerability to the lascivious hands of society. She also discusses free love versus the obligations of marriage. She unpacks the reality of new forms of slavery post emancipation. Black women having to support black men because they couldn't get jobs. Black women couldn't roam the streets alone without being at risk of rape or reformatory where they would reside for three years. She states, "the police snatched you ip and had an excuse later." Servitude was the only life that was acceptable for them to society. Having a life outside of work for the black woman was "disorderly." People shunned black women because they were black and poor. They weren't equal to white women, and no matter how hard they worked to support their families, they would never be equal to men. House tenement laws. The only thing she could dream of is being a "dancer, domestic, or whore." She also speaks about the ways in which black and white females crossed sexual boundaries in buffet flats and the home of Madame C. J. Walker's daughter.
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- L.A.
- 12-27-19
Utterly beautiful!
Saidiya Hartman has produced a gift of deep love. Her careful attention to the lives of Black women, who society has cast as unimportant, deviant, menial, and forgettable, is both a masterful, poignant mourning and celebration of persistent freedom dreams. This soulful book offers both intimate portraits and a fuller history of the social landscape of the early twentieth-century than typically disclosed. Wayward Lives is a lush elaboration of Hartman's many meditations on what is possible to uncover when the archive is scant and violent. As a writer and student, I am thankful for this book which is a masterclass. As a Black woman, I am thankful for Hartman's commitment to seeing us, caring for us, loving us, and imagining an otherwise.
Wayward Lives challenges everyone to take up the work of waywardness, committing to freedom.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Marcia Baynes
- 06-07-19
Unique and brilliant.
Uniquely brilliant in methodology. Must be read with your eyes and ears. Honors the lives and women who by their legacy taught us how to not just survive but thrive in an environment designed to destroy them.
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- Kr
- 11-13-23
Everything
A beautiful book. Written about beautiful lives in tragic times. Written beautifully. Everything I’ve hoped for in a book about Black womankind.
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- Pradnya
- 02-07-20
Crucial but glorious read
It is important to educate yourself about these Black women and their stories. This history of Black women needs to be told and heard. Beautifully written!
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- David B.
- 10-16-20
A Great Book
Well-written, well-narrated. this book really made me think about inequality in our society today, and in particular about how I can't believe Jeff Bezos made so much money while Amazon workers contracted COVID-19 due to unsafe workplace policies with minimal hazard pay and were fired (and in some cases smeared and ruined) for organizing for dignified working conditions.
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- Pearl L.
- 01-31-23
Humanizing the archives
Dr. Hartman’s imagination breathes life into the archives on black women and non-men of the post-civil war, pre-civil rights era. Dr. Hartman highlights the different ways people take their freedom, while not shying away from the reality of Jim Crow America. The book juxtaposes how white eyes have analyzed these lives (often paternalistic, dehumanizing, fetishizing, or flattening) with her own analysis couched in imaginings inspired by archival evidence. A must read.
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- Ifayemisi
- 12-29-22
Beautifully raw
There are so few books that speak to the ordinary experiences of the post-enslaved Black woman. This book does a masterful job of capturing a variety of experiences without distilling their complexities.
It is so raw but the writing is so well done that it mitigates the anxiety, sadness, and anger of realizing that nothing has changed and that all that we are blamed for was engineered!
I saw and heard myself and others like me in this work.
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- T.N.
- 09-11-19
Necessary
This is one of the most important books you will read this year. The audio version is excellent.
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3 people found this helpful