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Empty Mansions
- The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
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Publisher's summary
When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly 60 years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the 19th century with a 21st-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for 20 years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money?
Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark’s cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her. Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a family of extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself away from the outside world.
Empty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her intimate circle. We meet her extravagant father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister, her French boyfriend, her nurse who received more than $30 million in gifts, and the relatives fighting to inherit Huguette’s copper fortune. Empty Mansions is an enthralling story of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the Gilded Age who lived life on her own terms.
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The dark-eyed woman in the long, black gown was first seen in the 1970s, standing near a fireplace. She was sad and translucent, present and absent at once. Strange things began to happen in the Santa Fe hotel where she was seen. Gas fireplaces turned off and on without anyone touching a switch. Glasses flew off shelves. And in one second-floor suite with a canopy bed and arched windows looking out to the mountains, guests reported alarming events.
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A true American tale
- By Cleo Colorado on 05-29-15
By: Hannah Nordhaus
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The City of Falling Angels
- By: John Berendt
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil returns to give us an intimate look at the "magic, mystery, and decadence" of the city of Venice and its inhabitants.
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Do Yourself a Favor and Skip This Book!
- By AUDIBLE on 10-08-05
By: John Berendt
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Lady Bird
- A Biography of Mrs. Johnson
- By: Jan Jarboe Russell
- Narrated by: Andrea Gallo
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A revealing biography of Lady Bird Johnson with startling new insights into her marriage to Lyndon Baines Johnson and her unexpectedly strong impact on his presidency. Long obscured by her husband's shadow, Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson emerges in this first comprehensive biography as a figure of surprising influence and the centering force for LBJ, a man who suffered from extreme mood swings and desperately needed someone to help control his darker impulses.
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Do not waste an audible credit
- By Sandra B. on 10-15-23
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The Sugar King of Havana
- The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon
- By: John Paul Rathbone
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Fifty years after the Cuban revolution, the legendary wealth of the sugar magnate Julio Lobo remains emblematic of a certain way of life that came to an abrupt end when Fidel Castro marched into Havana. Known in his day as the King of Sugar, Lobo was for decades the most powerful force in the world sugar market, controlling vast swaths of the island's sugar interests.
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VERY INFORMATIVE
- By Terry on 03-26-12
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The World According to Fannie Davis
- My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers
- By: Bridgett M. Davis
- Narrated by: Bridgett M. Davis
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A daughter's moving homage to an extraordinary parent, The World According to Fannie Davis is also the suspenseful, unforgettable story about the lengths to which a mother will go to "make a way out of no way" to provide a prosperous life for her family - and how those sacrifices resonate over time. This original, timely, and deeply relatable portrait of one American family is essential listening.
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Fantastic
- By BK on 02-15-19
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Emily Post
- Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners
- By: Laura Claridge
- Narrated by: Christine Williams
- Length: 18 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From the excesses of the late 19th-century Gilded Age, through the horrors of World War I, to the transformations of the Roaring 20s that gave birth to her magisterial Etiquette, Emily Post unfailingly took the measure of her era. A Baltimore blue blood with a populist heart, she helped the masses live the American dream with her hugely popular book, which has been continuously in print for over 85 years.
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Typical for Emily Post
- By Stephanie on 01-07-19
By: Laura Claridge
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The Riviera Set
- Glitz, Glamour, and the Hidden World of High Society
- By: Mary S. Lovell
- Narrated by: Jill Rolls
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Riviera Set reveals the story of the group of people who lived, partied, bed-hopped, and politicked at the Château de l'Horizon near Cannes, over the course of 40 years from the time when Coco Chanel made southern French tans fashionable in the twenties to the death of the playboy Prince Aly Khan in 1960. At the heart of dynamic group was the amazing Maxine Elliott, the daughter of a fisherman from Connecticut, who built the beautiful art deco Château.
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Riviera Set
- By Lois Kelly on 05-04-18
By: Mary S. Lovell
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America's Queen
- The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
- By: Sarah Bradford
- Narrated by: Sandra Burr
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Story
Using remarkable new sources, Sarah Bradford has written a timely celebration of a life that was more private than commonly supposed. Revealing new testimony from many of the couple's friends shows the complexities of this apparently very public relationship and of her controversial marriage to Aristotle Onassis. Here is the private Jackie - neglected wife, vigilant mother, and working widow - whose contradictory and fascinating nature is illuminated by all that Bradford has discovered.
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American Royalty
- By Kindle Customer on 06-10-16
By: Sarah Bradford
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The Husband Hunters
- American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy
- By: Anne de Courcy
- Narrated by: Clare Corbett
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Towards the end of the 19th century and for the first few years of the 20th, a strange invasion took place in Britain. The citadel of power, privilege, and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself for so long was breached. The incomers were a group of young women who, 50 years earlier, would have been looked on as the alien denizens of another world - the New World, to be precise. From 1874 - the year that Jennie Jerome, the first known "Dollar Princess", married Randolph Churchill - to 1905, dozens of young American heiresses married into the British peerage....
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Bondfide Valuable History Lesson
- By A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. on 09-21-18
By: Anne de Courcy
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The Orpheus Clock
- The Search for My Family's Art Treasures Stolen by the Nazis
- By: Simon Goodman
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Gutmanns, as they were known, rose from a small Bohemian hamlet to become one of Germany's most powerful banking families. They also amassed a magnificent, world-class art collection that included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, Guardi, and many, many others. But the Nazi regime snatched from them everything they had worked to build: their remarkable art, their immense wealth, their prominent social standing, and their very lives.
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A Masterpiece of 21st Century History
- By Daniel Grünfeld on 09-18-19
By: Simon Goodman
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If the Devil Had a Wife
- By: Frank Mills
- Narrated by: A.T. Chandler
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Once upon a time. Happily ever after. Such are the classic promises of fairy tales. Yet in Texas we find a twist to the familiar storyline. In If the Devil Had a Wife, there is still the battle of Good vs. Evil, a beautiful maiden, a wealthy suitor, a kingdom of riches and the wicked witch, but any similarity with Cinderella and Snow White ends there. With the help of her life partner and an attorney (always necessary in these modern times), Nelda Stark executes a devious plan that elevates fraud and theft to a new high.
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What a Tale!!
- By Texas Native on 09-28-16
By: Frank Mills
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Prince Charles
- The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life
- By: Sally Bedell Smith
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor, Sally Bedell Smith
- Length: 18 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From the New York Times best-selling author of Elizabeth the Queen comes the first major biography of Prince Charles in more than 20 years - perfect for fans of The Crown. Sally Bedell Smith returns once again to the British royal family to give us a new look at Prince Charles, the oldest heir to the throne in more than 300 years.
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Diana dissed at every chance
- By Ray Y on 09-12-17
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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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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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When Singer sewing machine tycoon Edward Clark built a luxury apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the late 1800s, it was derisively dubbed “the Dakota” for being as far from the center of the downtown action as its namesake territory on the nation’s western frontier. Despite its remote location, the quirky German Renaissance-style castle, with its intricate façade, peculiar interior design, and gargoyle guardians peering down on Central Park, was an immediate hit, particularly among the city’s well-heeled intellectuals and artists.
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Written 40 years ago
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Born to a pioneering family in Upstate New York in the late 1800s, Allene Tew was beautiful, impetuous, and frustrated by the confines of her small hometown. At eighteen, she met Tod Hostetter at a local dance, having no idea that the mercurial charmer she would impulsively wed was heir to one of the wealthiest families in America. But when he died twelve years later, Allene packed her bags for New York City. Never once did she look back.
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Fortune's Children
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Written by descendant Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, Fortune's Children traces the dramatic and amazingly colorful history of this great American family, from the rise of industrialist and philanthropist Cornelius Vanderbilt to the fall of his progeny - wild spendthrifts whose profligacy bankrupted a vast inheritance.
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The Rise and Fall of the Gilded Age
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Diamonds and Deadlines
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Among the fabled tycoons of the Gilded Age—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt—is a forgotten figure: Mrs. Frank Leslie. For twenty years she ran the country’s largest publishing company, Frank Leslie Publishing, which chronicled postbellum America in dozens of weeklies and monthlies. A pioneer in an all-male industry, she made a fortune and became a national celebrity and tastemaker in the process. Diamonds and Deadlines reveals the unknown, sensational life of the brilliant and brazen “empress of journalism”.
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Wonderful biography of forgotten gilded age publishing icon
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By: Betsy Prioleau
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Such Good Friends
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On a Thursday morning in May 1961, a well-mannered twenty-one-year-old named Marlene enters the Fifth Avenue apartment of Lee Radziwill to interview for the position of housekeeper and cook. The stylish wife of London-based Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, Princess Lee is intelligent and creative, with ambitions beyond simply jet-setting. But to the public, she is always First Lady Jackie Kennedy's little sister. As Marlene becomes a trusted presence in the Radziwill household, she observes the dazzling array of famous figures who flit in and out of Lee’s intimate circle
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Too Much Servant, Not Enough Truman and Lee
- By Gail Meyer on 03-09-24
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Astor
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From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire, was then amplified by holdings in Manhattan real estate. Over the ensuing generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New York society and inserted themselves into political and cultural life, but also suffered the most famous loss on the Titanic.
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A family first made, then destroyed by wealth.
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Bunny Mellon
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A new biography of Bunny Mellon, the style icon and American aristocrat who designed the White House Rose Garden for her friend JFK and served as a living witness to 20th century American history, operating in the high-level arenas of politics, diplomacy, art, and fashion.
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Well written bio.
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The Plaza
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The Plaza is the account of one vaunted New York City address that has become synonymous with wealth and scandal, opportunity and tragedy. With glamour on the surface and strife behind the scenes, it is the story of how one hotel became a mirror reflecting New York's place at the center of the country's cultural narrative for over a century.
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Don't need your politics, Julie
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By: Julie Satow
What listeners say about Empty Mansions
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- MBK
- 06-27-20
Unbelievable ~ Yet The Details Are Factual
From beginning to end...it's an interesting look into the lives of a wealthy family...particularly a Father and his daughter left on her own to carry on. It's also insightful as to how those around her unprofessionaly profited by chance of interacting in her later years.
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- B Hart
- 07-21-15
Ver interesting
Overall this was a good listen and very interesting about how Clark stared with nothing and built an empire. It was too long with too many unnecessary details. I enjoyed most of it. The narrator was very good.
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- Strongest Army of 3
- 03-31-19
Enjoyed every minute of it!
After listening to this book I couldn't wait to learn more of Huguette Clark. What a fascinating woman! I so enjoyed the conversations with her and Paul. Just loved loved loved it. Thank you for sharing your family story. I do have to say without spoiling it...Shame on a couple of Huguette's care givers the last years of her life. Shame on some of her relatives too. So judgmental and greedy to such a kind woman; it's unfortunate for the relatives they never knew Mrs. Clark. God Bless Chris, whom was sent from Heaven; and was to be a true trusted confidant and friend. I just loved, loved, loved this book. Thank you again.
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- A
- 07-31-15
A most peculiar story of one of America's wealthiest families.
While the story of the empty mansions brought me to Ms Clark's story, the narrative of her life was a mixture of wonder, sadness, happiness and mystery.
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- Jason
- 05-22-19
GREAT FOR HISTORIANS
Good story, best for history buffs (I'm not). If you like stories of recluse, this might be for you.
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- George
- 08-16-21
Wrong narrator.
Narrator isn’t right for this book. She’s too emotive. It’s distracting. She’s better off with fiction.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-02-20
Loved the book and learning about Hugette Clark
I rarely write reviews, although I love to read them. This was a very interesting book and a nugget in history that I knew nothing about. Her world was a million miles away from mine, but what a truly fascinating life she led! The audio book was spectacular.
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- Redhead
- 06-15-22
Interesting story
This was an interesting story. It was full of details of Huguette Clark’s life. Although, her life seemed “sad”, Mrs.Clark lived the way she wanted to live. Oh, the history she observed in her almost 105 years of life! She is one of those people you’d like to sit down with and share some conversations. Good book to listen to while driving.
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- VP
- 03-27-20
I am sure the story is great but
The voices were soo deep and hard for me to follow!! So I didn’t listen to the story..
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- Dawn Wallace
- 08-05-19
Loved it
I really liked this book! I also love non fiction..I definitely recommend it and I liked the narrator a lot.
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