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Freedom
- A Novel
- Narrated by: David LeDoux
- Length: 24 hrs and 9 mins
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Publisher's summary
From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a darkly comedic novel about family.
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outré rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,” an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?
In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's intensely realized characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.
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Annoyed by Hidden Theme
- By parsnip on 08-12-13
By: Mike Greenberg
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The Admissions
- A Novel
- By: Meg Mitchell Moore
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The Hawthorne family has it all. Great jobs, a beautiful house in one of the most affluent areas of Northern California, and three charming kids whose sunny futures are all but assured. And then comes their eldest daughter's senior year of high school....
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Anything for success
- By JillHen on 09-13-15
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Nearly Normal
- Surviving the Wilderness, My Family and Myself
- By: Cea Sunrise Person
- Narrated by: Cea Sunrise Person
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In her best-selling memoir North of Normal, Cea wrote with grace about her unconventional childhood - her early years living in a tipi in Alberta with her pot-smoking, free-loving counterculture family. But her struggles do not end when she leaves her family at the age of 13 to become a model. Honest and daring, Nearly Normal reveals the many ways that Cea's unconventional childhood continues to reverberate through the years.
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This one is just not for me
- By Pamela Plimpton on 03-15-19
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32 Candles
- A Novel
- By: Ernessa T. Carter
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Davie—an ugly duckling growing up in small-town Mississippi—is positive her life couldn’t be any worse. She has the meanest mother in the South, possibly the world, and on top of that, she’s pretty sure she’s ugly. Just when she’s resigned herself to her fate, she sees a movie that will change her life— Sixteen Candles. But in her case, life doesn’t imitate art.
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2 High Fives - for Monkey Night
- By Nevada on 10-03-12
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Small Admissions
- A Novel
- By: Amy Poeppel
- Narrated by: Carly Robins
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Despite her innate ambition and summa cum laude smarts, Kate Pearson has turned into a major slacker. After being dumped by her handsome French "almost fiancé", she abandons her grad school plans and spends her days lolling on the couch, leaving her apartment only when a dog-walking gig demands it. Her friends don't know what to do other than pass tissues and hope for a comeback while her practical sister, Angela, pushes every remedy she can think of, from trapeze class to therapy to job interviews.
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For fans of "Where'd You Go, Bernadette ?"
- By RueRue on 01-16-17
By: Amy Poeppel
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I'm the One That I Want
- By: Margaret Cho
- Narrated by: Margaret Cho
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Abridged
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I'm the One That I Want, based on her show of the same name, is filled with dead-on insights about the experience of being a woman with attitude, of flowing with the highs and lows of life, and of creating one's own identity and acceptance. It is every bit as hilarious, shocking, and irreverent as she is.
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Hilarious and deeply engrossing
- By Ling on 04-10-03
By: Margaret Cho
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The Pursuit of Happyness (Abridged)
- By: Chris Gardner
- Narrated by: Andre Blake
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Abridged
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At the age of 20, Chris Gardner arrived in San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. However, he surprised everyone and himself by setting his sights on the competitive world of high finance. Yet no sooner had he landed an entry-level position at a prestigious firm, Gardner found himself caught in a web of incredibly challenging circumstances that left him part of the city's working homeless with his toddler son.
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Very Good Story!
- By Lito Da Critic on 06-02-06
By: Chris Gardner
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The Southern Education of a Jersey Girl
- Adventures in Life and Love in the Heart of Dixie
- By: Jaime Primak Sullivan
- Narrated by: Jaime Primak Sullivan
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Jaime Primak Sullivan, a Jersey-bred, tough-as-nails PR maven - and unlikely transplant in an upscale suburb of Birmingham, Alabama - has spent her entire life crossing the line: whether she's pushing the boundaries of what proper Southern ladies consider to be "polite behavior" or literally traversing the Mason-Dixon line in the name of love. She isn't afraid to say what everyone is thinking when it comes to love, sex, friendship, and many other topics that are all too often sugar-coated in polite Southern company.
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Awesome book
- By Gwendolyn on 09-23-16
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Because I Come from a Crazy Family
- The Making of a Psychiatrist
- By: Edward M. Hallowell
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
When Edward M. Hallowell was 11, a voice out of nowhere told him he should become a psychiatrist. A mental health professional of the time would have called this psychosis. But young Edward (Ned) took it in stride, despite not quite knowing what "psychiatrist" meant. With a psychotic father, an alcoholic mother, an abusive stepfather, and two so-called learning disabilities of his own, Ned was accustomed to unpredictable behaviour from those around him and to a mind he felt he couldn't always control.
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Love and connection permeates through this book!
- By Steve Steinmetz on 06-29-18
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If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother
- By: Julia Sweeney
- Narrated by: Julia Sweeney
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Since her time on Saturday Night Live, where she created the infamous androgynous character "Pat", Julia Sweeney has gone on to establish herself as a witty, captivating performer of one-woman shows, like God Said Ha!, In the Family Way, and Letting Go of God. She gave a TED talk sharing how she explained the birds and the bees to her eight-year-old daughter, Mulan, which ignited an incredible response. Now, when it comes to talking about motherhood, people want to hear what Julia has to say.
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I Love Julia Sweeney
- By Lisa on 04-05-13
By: Julia Sweeney
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The Todd Glass Situation
- A Bunch of Lies about My Personal Life and a Bunch of True Stories about My 30-Year Career in Standup Comedy
- By: Todd Glass, Jonathan Grotenstein
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn't have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And once you added gay into the mix, life became more difficult. So Todd Glass decided to hide the gay part, no matter how comic, tragic, or comically tragic the results. Now, Todd has written an open, honest, and hilarious memoir in an effort to help everyone - young and old, gay and straight - breathe a little more freely.
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Worth It
- By Heather on 11-17-14
By: Todd Glass, and others
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In Love with a Younger Man
- By: Cheryl Robinson
- Narrated by: Nikki Amsterdam
- Length: 11 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Olena Day’s first love died tragically, and her college boyfriend left her for nother woman. Now a successful, independent 43-year-old,she begins a passionate relationship with Matthew, a man 18 years her junior. Can a relationship finally end happily-ever-after for Olena—or will it be torn apart once again?
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A Sequel Will Be Coming From This...
- By Leejorae on 03-15-10
By: Cheryl Robinson
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"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
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The first story is the best
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The End of the End of the Earth
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The way essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like “a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.” For the past 25 years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world. Franzen’s great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both.
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Many excellent essays.
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St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. A classic of contemporary fiction, The Twenty-Seventh City shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American dream unraveling into terror and dark comedy.
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A messy, ambitious, prognostic American novel
- By Darwin8u on 09-01-14
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century - a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.
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A memorable book; flawless narration
- By Charles Elmore on 01-06-04
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Purity
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Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
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Not a case of Franzenfreude
- By Mel on 09-13-15
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Corrections
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- Length: 21 hrs and 53 mins
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The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
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"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
- By Georgia Burns on 10-08-13
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The first story is the best
- By Susan S. on 01-20-14
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The End of the End of the Earth
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The way essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like “a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.” For the past 25 years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world. Franzen’s great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both.
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Many excellent essays.
- By Barbara S. Smith on 12-21-19
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Twenty-Seventh City
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Meetu Chilana
- Length: 20 hrs and 48 mins
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Overall
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St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. A classic of contemporary fiction, The Twenty-Seventh City shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American dream unraveling into terror and dark comedy.
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A messy, ambitious, prognostic American novel
- By Darwin8u on 09-01-14
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Corrections
- By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century - a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.
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A memorable book; flawless narration
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The Corrections
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This dramatisation of Jonathan Franzen's acclaimed, epic, award-winning novel revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-20th century to 'one last Christmas' together near the turn of the millennium. A family saga, that sits against the backdrop of this century's changing face of America, the novel was published 10 days before 9/11 but is widely considered an observation of what happened to the American psyche after 9/11.
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Don't use your valuable audible credit on this!!
- By Linda M. Gulyn on 09-30-21
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Strong Motion
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Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
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Compelling Story, Ridiculous Narrator
- By DianeReads on 02-28-16
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Discomfort Zone
- A Personal History
- By: Jonathan Franzen
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- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his development from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person", through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions.
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Good narration, like some essays more than others
- By Doggy Bird on 05-30-08
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Underworld
- By: Don DeLillo
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- Length: 31 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
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CYBEX burned into my eyes
- By Ruth Ann Orlansky on 07-01-12
By: Don DeLillo
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Jewel
- By: Bret Lott
- Narrated by: Celia Weston
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- Abridged
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Performance
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When Brenda Kay is born in 1943, Jewel gives thanks for a healthy baby, last-born and most welcome. Jewel is the story of how quickly a life can change; how, like lightning, an unforeseen event can set us on a course without reason or compass. In this story of a woman's devotion to the child who is both her burden and God's singular way of smiling on her, Bret Lott has created a mother-daughter relationship of matchless intensity and beauty, and one of the finest, most indomitable heroines in contemporary American fiction.
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Unnesesary & overuse of the phrase 'Nigga Women'
- By Ashley N. Wilkins on 04-18-18
By: Bret Lott
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The Fortress of Solitude
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 18 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."
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A smorgasbord of language
- By Jonathan on 10-21-03
By: Jonathan Lethem
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Telegraph Avenue
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- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: Clarke Peters
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- Unabridged
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As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there - longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed, between them, more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart - half tavern, half temple - stands Brokeland Records.
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26,784 sq in (and 4.5 miles) surrounded by REALITY
- By Darwin8u on 09-11-12
By: Michael Chabon
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Middlesex
- By: Jeffrey Eugenides
- Narrated by: Kristoffer Tabori
- Length: 21 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
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Anything but middle.
- By Michael on 05-04-03
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Ellen Foster
- By: Kaye Gibbons
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- Unabridged
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Story
"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy." So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kaye Gibbons's first novel, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Wise, funny, affectionate and true, Ellen Foster is, as Walker Percy called it, "The real thing. Which is to say, a lovely, sometimes heart/wrenching novel...."
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Great!!
- By Jo on 04-06-18
By: Kaye Gibbons
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Ruby
- A Novel
- By: Cynthia Bond
- Narrated by: Cynthia Bond
- Length: 11 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Ephram Jennings has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby, “the kind of pretty it hurt to look at,” has suffered beyond imagining, so as soon as she can, she flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York. Ruby quickly winds her way into the ripe center of the city - the darkened piano bars and hidden alleyways of the Village - all the while hoping for a glimpse of the red hair and green eyes of her mother.
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disturbing yet beautiful
- By Beth Anne on 07-06-14
By: Cynthia Bond
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Bridge of Sighs
- By: Richard Russo
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 26 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Louis Charles ("Lucy") Lynch has spent all his 60 years in upstate Thomaston, New York, married to the same woman, Sarah, for 40 of them, their son now a grown man. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an optimist, though he's had plenty of reasons not to be: chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive.
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Wonderful
- By Victoria Wright on 10-08-07
By: Richard Russo
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
What listeners say about Freedom
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Paul
- 02-09-11
I wanted to kill myself....
Good Lord this book was dragged out and boring as HELL. Honestly, it may as well be a left wing manifesto that is poorly written. I didn't finish the book because it was driving me crazy. I think the 2 stars Igave it is an over rate. Dont bother.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Story
- T. Hibbs
- 10-16-11
What a waste of a credit!
I purchased this book because the premise sounded interesting enough, and the reviews suggested that it might be something that I would like. However, I didn't get through the first two hours of the story. The narrator was okay, although I really hated how he read women's voices. It was the book itself that was such a disappointment. I absolutely hated the characters. This is often not a problem. I can listen/read a book with characters that I don't like, provided those characters are interesting and have something compelling about them. The characters in this story, however, were the most two dimensional creations that I've encountered in a long while. Furthermore, nothing happened. Actually, in the hour and a half that I listened, things did happen. But the things that happened seemed to drive the characters in only the most superficial ways. I mean, really, your 16 year old throw a fit and moves out of the house, and you shrug your shoulders? And while the characters had their petty, private obsessions, none of them seemed authentic within the story itself. I think that's my biggest complaint about this book: it is utterly lacking in authenticity. I won't bother with any more of this author's books. And I really wish I could get back my credit.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- keith spikes
- 10-18-10
NOT FOR ME
I FOUND THIS TO BE A VERY TEDIOUS LISTEN. UNHAPPY PEOPLE TREATING EACH OTHER BADLY.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Keller44
- 12-05-10
Boring, improbable, tiresome
I stopped listening after 30 minutes, improbable and irrelevant, and very boring. Switched to Ken Follett's Fall of Giants -- what a difference in prose; what a pleasure.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Doug
- 12-03-10
awful
Dry, boring and worst of all...irrelavant. Narrator does his best but so little to work with.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Susan
- 09-23-15
In short, a largely disappointing book.
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
In my 50+ years of being an avid and voracious reader, there are only two books that I have not finished. Finishing a book was a big deal to me, even if I really disliked it, I ploughed through them in the hope that they would surprise me in the end. The two were "Last Man in Rome" and this one. The portrayal of the characters, in my opinion can be negative, or positive but should at the very least be interesting. The ones in this book were simply boring, petty and small minded. There seemed to be no passion in any of them, and the book was merely a narration of the lives of irritating people, with little or no guiding principles in their lives, going through very ordinary troubles.
What was most disappointing about Jonathan Franzen’s story?
The fact that I couldn't be bothered to finish the novel bothers me, disappoints me. I read/listen to 3-4 books a month, and eventually this one just irritated me to the point where I couldn't force it any longer. In every fictional work I've read, there is at least one character whose viewpoints, characteristics, or actions, were interesting at the least. I don't need to like them, they just need to be interesting enough to help carry the story line.
How could the performance have been better?
The story.
Could you see Freedom being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?
No
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Shelly Covell
- 04-14-12
Couldn't Finish the Book. Had to Give Up.
What disappointed you about Freedom?
What disappointed me about this book was that the story was interesting in part one. I got into the characters and tried to hang in there during part two so I could find out what happend to them.
However, in part two, the story caved as the author went back and forth between explicit sexual scenes and political, environmental rantings. I couldn't take it anymore. The characters got stuck in the background while the author used this forum to highlight his political beliefs and strange sexual descriptions. (phone sex that includes pooping in the mouth...disgusting stuff!)
Don't waste your time on this one.
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Overall
- Danny D.
- 02-23-11
Not on the bandwagon
Sorry, I don't get the Franzen thing. I find him occasionally funny, mostly a crashing bore and a self indulgent one at that.
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Overall
- JBH
- 12-27-10
Barely finished it...ugh
I don't know what all the hype was about..... I can only read about selfish characters so long. The author pretends to know how a woman thinks... but he does a poor job
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Overall
- mamasunset
- 11-26-10
My Eyes Glaze Over
Reading these reviews of Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom a Novel" certainly proves the old maxim "do not argue over matters of taste." I hesitate to post my review, as I don't really have the right to review a book I did not finish. However, as I grow older I find my time is too valuable and life too short to bother with books I hate so vehemently, and I feel I must spare some innocent Audible fan so many hours of pain and boredom. In a nutshell: I hated the characters, didn't care anything about them, and very, very strongly disliked the narrator. b e w a r e
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