Charles Dickens
A Life from Beginning to End
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Charles Dickens
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Narrated by:
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Mike Nelson
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By:
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Hourly History
About this listen
From working in a shoe-blacking factory as a 12-year-old to help his family while his father was in debtor’s prison, Charles Dickens rose to become one of the best-known novelists of all time. Lines like Oliver Twist’s “Please sir, may I have some more” or the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” are part of the popular vocabulary, and many of Dickens’ works have been translated into movies or TV series. Yet the story of his rise from relative obscurity to immense fame and popularity is not a simple one. Always energetic and unceasingly active, writing until the day before his death, Dickens proves to be a character as interesting as many of those he created.
Inside you will hear about:
- Providing for his family as a child
- Beginnings as an author
- Increasing fame
- The republic of my imagination
- Rumors and infidelity
- Return to America and last years
- And much more!
In this book, you’ll meet the author who not only wrote famous novels like Great Expectations and David Copperfield, but whose work also helped to develop and popularize the genre of the novel.
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Story4 out of 5 stars 73
Generations of children have fallen in love with the pioneer saga of the Ingalls family, of Pa and Ma, Laura and her sisters, and their loyal dog. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books have taught millions of Americans about frontier life, giving inspiration to many and in the process becoming icons of our national identity. Yet few realize that this best-selling series wandered far from the actual history of the Ingalls family and from what Laura herself understood to be central truths about pioneer life.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Very Interested!!
- By ME00625 on 01-16-17
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Jackie Kennedy: A Captivating Guide to the Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Duke Holm
- Length: 1 hr and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 31
Without a doubt, the name Jacqueline Kennedy draws multiple thoughts to mind. She is, perhaps, most well-known for her service as the first lady of the United States when her husband, John F. Kennedy, took office as the president, and for her role in restoring the White House. While she made major impacts on the White House, Jackie was much more than her title of first lady.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Loved this book. Love the Kennedys
- By Leroy on 09-29-17
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When Paris Sizzled
- The 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and Their Friends
- By: Mary McAuliffe
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 97
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 88
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 89
When Paris Sizzled vividly portrays the City of Light during the fabulous 1920s, les Annees folles, when Parisians emerged from the horrors of war to find that a new world greeted them - one that reverberated with the hard metallic clang of the assembly line, the roar of automobiles, and the beat of jazz. Mary McAuliffe traces a decade that saw seismic change on almost every front, from art and architecture to music, literature, fashion, entertainment, transportation, and, most notably, behavior.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Informative, but no sizzle
- By OzEnigma on 06-01-17
By: Mary McAuliffe
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Ida M. Tarbell
- The Woman Who Challenged Big Business - and Won!
- By: Emily Arnold McCully
- Narrated by: Emily Arnold McCully
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 47
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4 out of 5 stars 41
Born in 1857 and raised in oil country, Ida M. Tarbell was one of the first investigative journalists and probably the most influential in her time. Her series of articles on the Standard Oil Trust, a complicated business empire run by John D. Rockefeller, revealed to readers the underhanded, even illegal practices that had led to Rockefeller's success.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent!
- By AKA1 on 03-16-19
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J. D. Salinger: A Life
- By: Kenneth Slawenski
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 19 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 33
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 32
One of the most popular and mysterious figures in American literary history, J. D. Salinger eluded fans and journalists for most of his life. Now comes a new biography that Peter Ackroyd in the Times of London calls "energetic and magnificently researched" - a book from which "a true picture of Salinger emerges". Filled with new information and revelations garnered from countless interviews, letters, and public records, J. D. Salinger: A Life presents an extraordinary life that spanned nearly the entire 20th century.
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
- By: Gerald Martin
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 22 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 75
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 58
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 62
In his novels and short stories, Gabriel García Márquez has transformed the particulars of his own life and the lives of his fellow Colombians into wondrous fiction. While telling the story of the sloppily dressed, skinny young man who rose from obscurity as a provincial journalist to international fame as the progenitor of a new literature, Gerald Martin also considers the tensions in García Márquez's life between celebrity and the personal quest for literary quality, between politics and writing, and between the seductions of power, solitude, and love.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great content, somewhat disappointing narrator.
- By Paola Herrington on 01-08-13
By: Gerald Martin
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Taking on the Trust
- The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller
- By: Steve Weinberg
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 70
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 52
Long before the rise of mega-corporations like Wal-Mart and Microsoft, Standard Oil controlled the oil industry with a monopolistic force unprecedented in American business history. Undaunted by the ruthless power of its owner, John D. Rockefeller, a fearless and ambitious reporter named Ida Minerva Tarbell confronted the company known simply as "The Trust".
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4 out of 5 stars
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Annoying Narrator
- By Nate on 04-03-15
By: Steve Weinberg
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Romantic Outlaws
- The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
- By: Charlotte Gordon
- Narrated by: Susan Lyons
- Length: 22 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 305
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 269
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 269
Charlotte Gordon's new work is a fresh look at the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, who together comprise one of the most illustrious and inspiring mother-daughter pairs in history.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Tons of info, poor format choice.
- By Gotta Tellya on 02-06-17
By: Charlotte Gordon
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Ayn Rand and the World She Made
- By: Anne C. Heller
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 19 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 339
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 203
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Story4 out of 5 stars 209
Ayn Rand is the author of two phenomenally best-selling ideological novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which have sold over 12 million copies in the United States alone. Through them, she built a right-wing cult following in the late 1950s and became the guiding light of Libertarianism and of White House economic policy in the 1960s and '70s. Her defenses of radical individualism and of selfishness as a "capitalist virtue" have permanently altered the American cultural landscape.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great history of both Rand and her era
- By Mark on 08-07-10
By: Anne C. Heller
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Zelda Fitzgerald
- The Tragic, Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess
- By: Sally Cline
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 83
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 73
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Story4 out of 5 stars 74
Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the first American flapper." Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.
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2 out of 5 stars
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The Beautiful and the Bungled
- By Silverthorne on 12-08-17
By: Sally Cline
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Butterfly in the Typewriter
- The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of a Confederacy of Dunces
- By: Cory MacLauchlin
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 59
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 48
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 48
The saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. In Butterfly in the Typewriter, Cory MacLauchlin draws on scores of new interviews with friends, family, and colleagues as well as full access to the extensive Toole archive at Tulane University, capturing his upbringing in New Orleans, his years in New York City, his frenzy of writing in Puerto Rico, his return to his beloved city, and his descent into paranoia and depression.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Worth it! Good biography. Informative.
- By French Quarter on 07-09-13
By: Cory MacLauchlin
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Rosalind Franklin
- A Life from Beginning to End (Biographies of Women in History)
- By: Hourly History
- Narrated by: Matthew J. Chandler-Smith
- Length: 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 6
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 5
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Story5 out of 5 stars 5
Rosalind Franklin was what can only be called an overlooked genius. Although she was not fully credited for the feat at the time, her work led to major breakthroughs in our understanding of DNA. In fact, she took the first X-ray photo of DNA in all of its double helix glory. By the time her former colleagues were being showered with accolades for results they made at least partially based on her findings, Franklin would not be around to see it. Sadly, it’s believed that her use of X-ray equipment gave her terminal cancer, cutting her life short at age 37.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Covers the facts
- By Freda St on 08-21-24
By: Hourly History
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Without Lying Down
- By: Cari Beauchamp
- Narrated by: Holly Palance
- Length: 20 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 23
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 20
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Story5 out of 5 stars 20
Cari Beauchamp masterfully combines biography with social and cultural history to examine the lives of Frances Marion and her many female colleagues who shaped filmmaking from the early teens through the 1940s. Frances Marion was Hollywood's highest paid screenwriter - male or female - for almost three decades, wrote almost 200 produced films and remains the only woman to win two Academy Awards for original screenwriting (The Big House and The Champ).
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Must Read
- By Robert Wallace on 03-19-19
By: Cari Beauchamp
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The Golden Age of Murder
- By: Martin Edwards
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 40
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Story4 out of 5 stars 38
A real-life detective story, investigating how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction, writing books casting new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors' darkest secrets. This is the first book about the Detection Club, the world's most famous and most mysterious social network of crime writers. Drawing on years of in-depth research, it reveals the astonishing story of how members such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers reinvented detective fiction.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Doesn't work as an audiobook
- By Pat on 08-02-15
By: Martin Edwards
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Fryderyk Chopin
- A Life and Times
- By: Dr. Alan Walker
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 23 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 86
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 75
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 76
Based on 10 years of research and a vast cache of primary sources located in archives in Warsaw, Paris, London, New York, and Washington, D.C., Alan Walker's monumental Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times is the most comprehensive biography of the great Polish composer to appear in English in more than a century. Walker's work is a corrective biography, intended to dispel the many myths and legends that continue to surround Chopin.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This book is a masterpiece
- By Carpe Diem on 02-09-19
By: Dr. Alan Walker