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Many Hands Make Light Work
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: Cheryl Stritzel McCarthy
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
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Publisher's summary
Many Hands Make Light Work is the rollicking true story of a family of nine children growing up in the college town of Ames, Iowa, in the ’60s and ’70s. Inspiring, full of surprises, and laugh-out-loud funny, this utterly unique family champions diversity and inclusion long before such concepts become cultural flash points.
Cheryl and her siblings are the offspring of an eccentric professor father and unflappable mother. Mindful of their ever-expanding family’s need for cash, her parents begin acquiring tumbledown houses in the campus town to renovate and rent.
Dad, who changes out of his suit and tie into a carpenter’s battered white overalls, like Clark Kent into Superman, is supremely confident his offspring can do anything, whether he’s there or not.
Mom, an organizational genius disguised as a housewife, manages nine children so deftly that she finds the time - and heart - to take in student boarders, who stir their own offbeat personalities into this unconventional household.
The kids, meanwhile, pour concrete, paint houses, and, at odd moments, break into song, because instead of complaining, they sing as they work, like a von Trapp family in painters caps.
Free-wheeling and contagiously cheerful, Many Hands Make Light Work is a winsome memoir of a heartland childhood unlike any other.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 78
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 71
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Story4 out of 5 stars 72
This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next 14 years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years - a book in the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A famous writer describes her life growing up in foster care
- By Nancy C. on 12-21-18
By: Paula McLain
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In Polite Company
- A Novel
- By: Gervais Hagerty
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Gideon
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 68
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 66
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Story4 out of 5 stars 66
Tourists think they see the real Charleston, but Simons Smythe knows there’s more to her hometown than sweet tea and Southern hospitality. Behind the walled gardens, inside the fabled historic homes, live Charleston’s elite. Simons was born into this powerful aristocracy that has quietly ruled the city for centuries.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Disappointing
- By Sarah A on 08-31-21
By: Gervais Hagerty
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Nothing with Strings
- NPR's Beloved Holiday Stories
- By: Bailey White
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 58
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 43
The mundane and the miraculous stand side by side in these sketches and stories of Southern small-time life by the author of Quite a Year for Plums.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A real jewel.
- By Mary on 12-31-08
By: Bailey White
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Coop
- A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting
- By: Michael Perry
- Narrated by: Michael Perry
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 226
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 209
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 208
Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with 37 acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood - his city-bred parents took in more than 100 foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm - for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Meh
- By dpenney on 12-22-16
By: Michael Perry
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Freckled
- A Memoir of Growing Up Wild in Hawaii
- By: T. W. Neal
- Narrated by: Sara Malia Hatfield
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 267
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 240
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 238
We live in a place everyone calls paradise. Sure, Kauai’s beautiful, with empty beaches, drip-castle mountains, and perfect surf...but we’ve been "camping" for six months, eating boiled chicken feed for breakfast, and wearing camouflage clothes so no one sees us trespassing in our jungle hideout. The cockroaches leave rainbow colors all over everything from eating the crayons we left outside the tent, and now a tractor is coming to scrape our camp into the river. Standing in front of the tent in my nightgown, I know my own truth: I just want to be normal.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Zero to Hero
- By Allen B. Galiza on 08-13-19
By: T. W. Neal
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She Got Up Off the Couch
- By: Haven Kimmel
- Narrated by: Haven Kimmel
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 274
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 186
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 187
When we last saw Zippy, she was oblivious to the storm that was brewing in her home. Her mother, Delonda, had literally just gotten up off the couch and ridden her rickety bicycle down the road. Her dad was off somewhere, gambling or "working." And Zippy was lost in her own fabulous world of exploring the fringes of Moorland, Indiana.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great fun !!
- By Kim on 04-20-11
By: Haven Kimmel
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The Lightest Object in the Universe
- A Novel
- By: Kimi Eisele
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 77
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 68
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Story4 out of 5 stars 69
What if the end times allowed people to see and build the world anew? This is the landscape that Kimi Eisele creates in her surprising and original debut novel. Evoking the spirit of such monumental love stories as Cold Mountain and the creative vision of novels like Station Eleven, The Lightest Object in the Universe tells the story of what happens after the global economy collapses and the electrical grid goes down.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Don't waste your time.......
- By Chester Johnson on 07-18-19
By: Kimi Eisele
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Lone Stars
- By: Justin Deabler
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 25
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 24
Lone Stars follows the arc of four generations of a Texan family in a changing America. Julian Warner, a father at last, wrestles with a question his husband posed: what will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they're gone? Finding the answers takes Julian back in time to Eisenhower's immigration border raids, an epistolary love affair during the Vietnam War, crumbling marriages, queer migrations to Cambridge and New York, up to the disorienting polarization of Obama's second term.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Read for bookclub but fell in Love
- By Ericka Lawson on 09-11-22
By: Justin Deabler
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The Paper Palace
- A Novel
- By: Miranda Cowley Heller
- Narrated by: Nan McNamara
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 7,951
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 6,932
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Story4 out of 5 stars 6,921
It is a perfect July morning, and Elle, a 50-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at “The Paper Palace” - the family summer place she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different: Last night, Elle and her oldest friend, Jonas, crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside. Now, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love.
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3 out of 5 stars
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The story has too much child abuse discription
- By DTurek on 07-14-21
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Growing Things and Other Stories
- By: Paul Tremblay
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden, Graham Halstead, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 330
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 284
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Story4 out of 5 stars 282
A chilling collection of psychological suspense and literary horror from the multiple award-winning author of the national best seller The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts. A masterful anthology featuring 19 pieces of short fiction, Growing Things and Other Stories is an exciting glimpse into Paul Tremblay’s fantastically fertile imagination.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Paul Tremblay is totally nuts.
- By Gary & Jay on 07-07-19
By: Paul Tremblay
What listeners say about Many Hands Make Light Work
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 05-14-20
Perfect Pandemic-Escape Read About A Uniquely Bonded Family
Step back into childhood and place yourself into this busy family of nine creative children with parents who kept them bonded and grounded through old fashioned values, shared work and love.
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