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First-Person America
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Publisher's summary
In the late 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project set out to create a first-person portrait of America by sending young writers around the country to interview people from diverse ethnic groups, occupations, and backgrounds. When the Writers Project closed its doors, some 10,000 of these oral histories were left gathering dust in a remote storeroom at the Library of Congress. In First Person America, Ann Banks has collected dozens of these oral histories, including a North Carolina patent-medicine pitchman, a retired Oregon prospector, a Bahamian midwife from Florida, a Key West smuggler, a Pullman Porter, and Chicago jazz musicians. There are men and women who remember meeting Billy the Kid, survived the Chicago Fire, and fled the Czar to America. They hawked lucky charms and patent medicine. They knew Bix Beiderbecke personally and tried to copy his style in Chicago jazz clubs. They peddled cake flavoring, auctioned tobacco, and fished and smuggled rum, and sometimes aliens, from Cuba to Key West. They worked in coal and granite and cotton and iron. The women quilted and pressed laundry and took in boarders and delivered babies. And when their men ran out on them they swallowed their pride and threw rent parties. Lloyd Green, a Pullman Porter in Harlem, lamented his move north to the big city, telling Federal Writer Ralph Ellison, "I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me." First Person America is narrated by Tony Kahn, a public radio veteran writer, host, and producer.
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Story
This is a novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960s. Miss Jane Pittman has "endured," has seen almost everything and foretold the rest.
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At great listen
- By Susan on 11-11-08
By: Ernest J. Gaines
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Appointment in Samarra
- Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition
- By: John O'Hara, Charles McGrath - introduction
- Narrated by: Christian Camargo
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, social circuit is electrified with parties and dances. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English. But in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent toward self-destruction.
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Quite good, but not a classic
- By Michael on 04-25-15
By: John O'Hara, and others
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Leaving Cheyenne
- By: Larry McMurtry
- Narrated by: John Randolph Jones
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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As the world enters a new century, three teenagers forge a future for themselves on the wild Texas grasslands: Gideon Fry, torn between going his way and following his father's footsteps; Johnny McCloud, whose restless spirit finds its solace traversing an open range; and Molly Taylor, the woman they both love. Rugged, bold and volatile, the three of them come of age in this tender and intimate novel of the heart.
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Beautiful and sincere novel
- By Paul on 05-22-09
By: Larry McMurtry
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Ava's Man
- By: Rick Bragg
- Narrated by: Rick Bragg
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Abridged
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With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression
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Deeply moving
- By Kate on 08-12-03
By: Rick Bragg
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The 42nd Parallel
- By: John Dos Passos
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 13 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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This first entry in John Dos Passos's celebrated U.S.A. trilogy paints a grand picture of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century.
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Powerful document of an all-too-familiar past
- By Ryan on 06-01-13
By: John Dos Passos
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All God's Dangers
- The Life of Nate Shaw
- By: Theodore Rosengarten
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 23 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Nate Shaw's father was born into slavery. Nate was born into a bondage that was only a little gentler. At the age of nine, he was picking cotton and plowing behind a mule. At the age of 47, he faced down a crowd of White deputies who had come to confiscate a neighbor's livestock. His defiance cost him 12 years in prison.This triumphant autobiography, All God's Dangers, assembled from the 84-year-old Shaw's oral reminiscences, is the plainspoken story of an "over average" man who witnessed momentous changes in the lives of Southern people, Black and White....
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Incomprehensible narration
- By BruceDC on 09-09-19
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Chasing Me to My Grave
- An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South
- By: Winfred Rembert, Erin I. Kelly, Bryan Stevenson - foreword
- Narrated by: Dion Graham, Karen Chilton
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the civil rights movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, later survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent the next seven years on chain gangs. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of 51 and with Patsy’s encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison.
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Remarkable Memoir, Both Beautiful and Brutal
- By Peter Haas on 10-21-21
By: Winfred Rembert, and others
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Bullwhip Days
- The Slaves Remember: An Oral History
- By: James Mellon
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards, Brad Sanders
- Length: 15 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration commissioned an oral history of the remaining former slaves. Bullwhip Days is a remarkable compendium of selections from these extraordinary interviews, providing an unflinching portrait of the world of government-sanctioned slavery of Africans in America. Here are 29 full narrations, as well as nine sections of excerpts related to particular aspects of slave life, from religion to plantation life to the Reconstruction era.
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Excellent
- By Norficia Overton on 10-23-17
By: James Mellon
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Tobacco Road
- By: Erskine Caldwell
- Narrated by: Mark Hammer
- Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Earthy, raunchy and high spirited, this story of larkabout Jeeter Lester’s struggle to keep his farm is one of the most poignant and humorous in Depression-era literature and an American classic.
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Wonderful
- By KEE on 11-28-11
By: Erskine Caldwell
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Nigger
- An Autobiography
- By: Dick Gregory, Dr. Christian Gregory - introduction, Robert Lipsyte
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi, Dr. Christian Gregory
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Fifty-five years ago, in 1964, an incredibly honest and revealing memoir by one of the America's best-loved comedians and activists, Dick Gregory, was published. With a shocking title and breathtaking writing, Dick Gregory defined a genre and changed the way race was discussed in America.
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PLEASE don't pass this book up!
- By D on 05-06-20
By: Dick Gregory, and others