A People's History of Chicago
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A People's History of Chicago
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Narrated by:
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Kevin Coval
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Jamila Woods
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By:
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Kevin Coval
About this listen
Known variously as "the Windy City" "the City of Big Shoulders," or "Chi-Raq", Chicago is one of the most widely celebrated, routinely demonized, and thoroughly contested cities in the world.
Chicago is the city of Gwendolyn Brooks and Chief Keef, Al Capone and Richard Wright, Lucy Parsons and Nelson Algren, Harold Washington and Studs Terkel. It is the city of Fred Hampton, House Music, and the Haymarket Martyrs. Writing in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Kevin Coval’s A People’s History of Chicago celebrates the history of this great American city from the perspective of those on the margins, whose stories often go untold. These 77 poems (for the city’s 77 neighborhoods) honor the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city’s workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social landscape.
Kevin Coval is the poet/author/editor of seven books, including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and the play, This Is Modern Art, co-written with Idris Goodwin. Founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival and the Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, Coval teaches hip-hop aesthetics at the University of Illinois - Chicago. The Chicago Tribune has named him "the voice of the new Chicago" and the Boston Globe calls him "the city’s unofficial poet laureate."
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- By Heather M. Vitz on 03-15-15
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Acid West
- Essays
- By: Joshua Wheeler
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 25
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 23
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 23
Early on July 16, 1945, Joshua Wheeler's great grandfather awoke to a flash, and then a long rumble: the world's first atomic blast filled the horizon north of his ranch in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Out on the range, the cattle had been bleached white by the fallout. Acid West, Wheeler's stunning debut collection of essays, is full of these mutated cows: vestiges of the Old West that have been transformed, suddenly and irrevocably, by innovation. Traversing the New Mexico landscape, Wheeler excavates and reexamines these oddities.
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5 out of 5 stars
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In The Year of our Lord 2018
- By Ruffkutt on 05-05-18
By: Joshua Wheeler
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Bad Indians
- A Tribal Memoir
- By: Deborah A. Miranda
- Narrated by: Deborah Miranda
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 51
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Story5 out of 5 stars 43
This beautiful and devastating book - part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir - should be required for anyone seeking to learn about California Indian history, past and present. Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone Costanoan Esselen family as well as the experience of California Indians as a whole through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. The result is a work of literary art that is wise, angry, and playful all at once, a compilation that will break your heart and teach you to see the world anew.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Bad recording
- By Aspyn Maes on 09-18-21
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Black Dog of Fate
- A Memoir
- By: Peter Balakian
- Narrated by: Peter Balakian
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 76
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 66
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 65
The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia. He was immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced: the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book!
- By Lm on 06-27-13
By: Peter Balakian
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Detroit
- An American Autopsy
- By: Charlie LeDuff
- Narrated by: Eric Martin
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,329
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,178
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,171
In the heart of America, a metropolis is quietly destroying itself. Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age - mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs - Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation that only a native son can possess, journalist Charlie LeDuff sets out to uncover what has brought low this once-vibrant city, his city.
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3 out of 5 stars
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WOW
- By Avid Reader and Listener on 07-09-13
By: Charlie LeDuff
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Brothers of the Gun
- A Memoir of the Syrian War
- By: Marwan Hisham, Molly Crabapple
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 29
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 26
In 2011, Marwan Hisham and his two friends - fellow working-class college students Nael and Tareq - joined the first protests of the Arab Spring in Syria, in response to a recent massacre. Arm in arm they marched, poured Coca-Cola into one another’s eyes to blunt the effects of tear gas, ran from the security forces, and cursed the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad. It was ecstasy. A long-bottled revolution was finally erupting, and freedom from a brutal dictator seemed, at last, imminent.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Perfect with Peter Ganim
- By Anonymous User on 06-14-24
By: Marwan Hisham, and others
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St. Marks Is Dead
- The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street
- By: Ada Calhoun
- Narrated by: Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 37
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 37
St. Marks Place in New York City has spawned countless artistic and political movements. Here Frank O'Hara caroused, Emma Goldman plotted, and the Velvet Underground wailed. But every generation of miscreant denizens believes that their era, and no other, marked the street's apex.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wonderful history of a wonderful place.
- By Liza B. on 11-07-15
By: Ada Calhoun
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Season of the Witch
- Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love
- By: David Talbot
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 16 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,141
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 988
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 986
Season of the Witch is the first book to fully capture the dark magic of San Francisco in this breathtaking period, when the city radically changed itself - and then revolutionized the world. The cool gray city of love was the epicenter of the 1960s cultural revolution. But by the early 1970s, San Francisco’s ecstatic experiment came crashing down from its starry heights. The city was rocked by savage murder sprees, mysterious terror campaigns, political assassinations, street riots, and finally a terrifying sexual epidemic.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Gripping, important history - well told
- By The Companion on 05-21-12
By: David Talbot
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Something Fierce
- Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter
- By: Carmen Aguirre
- Narrated by: Carmen Aguirre
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 33
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 28
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 27
Carmen Aguirre was six-year-old when she and her family fled to Canada following General Augusto Pinochet’s violent 1973 coup in Chile. She was only eleven-years-old when her mother and stepfather joined the resistance movement and returned to South America, taking Carmen and her sister went with them. As their mother and stepfather set up a safe house for resistance members in La Paz, Bolivia, the girls' own double lives began. At 18, Carmen became a militant herself, plunging further into a world of terror, paranoia and euphoria.
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4 out of 5 stars
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revolutionary read
- By David Brown on 04-05-18
By: Carmen Aguirre
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The Fear
- By: Peter Godwin
- Narrated by: Peter Godwin
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 73
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 66
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 67
Born in what’s now called Zimbabwe, journalist Peter Godwin returns to his homeland in 2008 after three decades of Robert Mugabe’s brutal economic and human destruction. Hoping to “dance on Mugabe’s political grave” in the wake of the tyrant’s defeat at the polls, Godwin instead risks his life to secretly chronicle Mugabe’s ruthless backlash of torture and terror locals call “The Fear.”
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5 out of 5 stars
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Read at your own Risk!
- By Jim on 05-05-15
By: Peter Godwin
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Falconer
- By: John Cheever
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 113
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 78
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 80
A convict named Farragut struggles to remain a man while inside a nightmarish prison. Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Unsettling and beautiful
- By Darwin8u on 01-21-13
By: John Cheever
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Nine Lives
- Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans
- By: Dan Baum
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 134
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 116
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 116
Nines Lives is a multivoiced biography of a dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city, told through the lives of nine unforgettable characters and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed New Orleans in the 1960s, and Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. Dan Baum brings this kaleidoscopic portrait to life, showing us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Do not miss if you're interested in New Orleans
- By Kelly on 03-22-18
By: Dan Baum
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Love, Africa
- A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival
- By: Jeffrey Gettleman
- Narrated by: Charlie Thurston
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 195
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 171
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 173
A seasoned war correspondent, Jeffrey Gettleman has covered every major conflict over the past 20 years, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Congo. For the past decade, he has served as the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, fulfilling his teenage dream of living in Africa. Love, Africa is the story of how he got there - and of his difficult, winding path toward becoming a good reporter and a better man.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Loved this book!!!
- By Benjamin on 05-26-17
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1919
- By: Eve L. Ewing
- Narrated by: Eve L. Ewing
- Length: 1 hr and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 42
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Story5 out of 5 stars 42
The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation's Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event - which lasted eight days and resulted in 38 deaths and almost 500 injuries - through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.
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5 out of 5 stars
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visceral felt and poetically read
- By BF J.V. on 01-30-24
By: Eve L. Ewing
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The Fire This Time
- A New Generation Speaks About Race
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Michael Early, Kevin R. Free, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 246
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 208
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 206
National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Delusion shattering
- By Matthew A. Burnett on 06-12-20
By: Jesmyn Ward
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When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
- A Memoir of Africa
- By: Peter Godwin
- Narrated by: Peter Godwin
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 89
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 80
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Story5 out of 5 stars 78
After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downward into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in their allegiance to the failed state that has been their adopted home for 50 years.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Worth the listen.
- By SEE on 09-06-21
By: Peter Godwin
What listeners say about A People's History of Chicago
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Katie Rosewicz
- 10-04-22
Better in Print
love this book and the performance. However, this is one book that is better in print.
I do like the structure of 1 poem= 1 chapter though because I can share them with others and the performance is much better than me reading it out loud
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