Clear Springs
A Family Story
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Clear Springs
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Narrated by:
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Janet Metzger
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By:
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Bobbie Ann Mason
About this listen
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
From acclaimed author Bobbie Ann Mason, her Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir chronicling three generations of her Kentucky lineage, spanning a century in the life of an American family.
"Mason gets to the heart of a whole generation.... She can write the hard truth about home, love, loss.... Immensely satisfying." (New York Times Book Review)
People love and remember the novels of Bobbie Ann Mason because they ring so true. This dazzling memoir has the same power. In it, Mason tells the story of her own family - a multilayered saga of three generations, their aspirations, their conflicts, and the ties that bound them to one another.
Spanning decades, Clear Springs gracefully weaves together the stories of Mason's grandparents, parents, and her own generation. The narrative moves from the sober industriousness of a Kentucky farm to the hippie lifestyle of the countercultural 1960s; from a New York fan magazine to the shock-therapy ward of a mental institution; from a county poorhouse to the set of a Hollywood movie.In the process of recounting her own odyssey - the story of an isolated girl who dreamed of distant places - Mason depicts the changes that have come to family, to women, and to heartland America in the 20th century. Ultimately, Clear Springs is a heartfelt portrait of an extended family, and a profound affirmation of the importance of family love.
©2013 Bobbie Ann Mason (P)2020 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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- By: Tom Savage
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 96
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 82
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 82
Thomas Savage, a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN/Faulkner Award nominee, has long been a critically acclaimed author. The New Yorker calls him "a writer of the first order". This starkly elegant story details the lives of Emma Russell Sweringen and her family in the early 1900s. Emma’s daughter Beth secretly gave up a baby girl for adoption many years ago. Now, Beth’s secret life is being unraveled as her daughter comes looking for her long-lost family.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent in all respects
- By Marlene J. Gustafson on 05-11-19
By: Tom Savage
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Dalva
- A Novel
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrated by: Chris Henry Coffey, Stacey Glemboski
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 67
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 58
From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born, and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at 45 she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians.
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5 out of 5 stars
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As a woman, I can finally appreciate Jim Harrison with this book.
- By kathryn gray on 09-11-24
By: Jim Harrison
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One of Ours
- By: Willa Cather
- Narrated by: Louis B. Jack
- Length: 14 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 85
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 75
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 75
This is One of Ours, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Willa Cather, America’s greatest writer of the prairie heartland. It is set in rural Nebraska in the early 20th century prior to the first World War that enveloped Europe and eventually the United States. The story focuses on the young Claude Wheeler, a well-to-do farmer’s son who secretly longs for something to take him away from the hum-drum agrarian life he has inherited. As he prepares to take over his family’s farm business, war intrudes.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Opened my heart
- By georgette bartell on 06-28-19
By: Willa Cather
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Pale Horse, Pale Rider
- Three Short Novels
- By: Katherine Anne Porter
- Narrated by: Chelsea Stephens
- Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 56
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Story4 out of 5 stars 55
The classic 1939 collection of three novellas by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author and journalist, including the famous title story set during the influenza epidemic of 1918.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Some of the most brilliant prose ever written
- By Anonymous User on 03-21-23
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Main Street (Annotated): 100th Anniversary Edition
- By: Sinclair Lewis
- Narrated by: Kitty Hendrix
- Length: 19 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 63
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 63
A biting satire that countered the American myth of wholesome small-town life with a depiction of narrow-minded provincialism, it was to some degree based on Lewis's own experience of growing on Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Set in mid-1910s, it depicts the struggles of Carol Kennicott, a city girl, as she tries to adapt to small town life, having left her librarian job and St. Paul, Minnesota to marry Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie. Dismayed by the town’s drabness and the conforming, petty inhabitants, Carol optimistically sets out to improve the town.
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5 out of 5 stars
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What Are Your Assumptions About Yourself & Others
- By Benny Fife on 02-06-20
By: Sinclair Lewis
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The Past Is Never
- A Novel
- By: Tiffany Quay Tyson
- Narrated by: Devon Sorvari
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 64
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Story4 out of 5 stars 59
Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot, and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water - until the day six-year-old Pansy vanishes...not drowned, not lost, simply gone. When their father disappears as well, Bert and Willet leave their childhoods behind to try and hold their broken family together.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Intriguing Southern gothic tale
- By Robert Jason on 03-11-20
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That Old Ace in the Hole
- By: Annie Proulx
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 180
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 160
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 158
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man trying to make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, when he takes a job with Global Pork Rind - his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Doesn't work as a novel
- By Sarah C on 05-30-12
By: Annie Proulx
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America Is in the Heart
- By: Carlos Bulosan, Elaine Castillo - foreword, E. San Juan Jr. - introduction, and others
- Narrated by: Ramon de Ocampo
- Length: 13 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 55
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 41
Poet, essayist, novelist, fiction writer, and labor organizer, Carlos Bulosan (1911-1956) wrote one of the most influential working class literary classics about the US pre-World War II, a period and setting similar to that of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row. Bulosan's semi-autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart begins with the narrator's rural childhood in the Philippines and the struggles of land-poor peasant families affected by US imperialism after the Spanish-American War of the late 1890s.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Pointless, wandering narrative poorly performed
- By B. Bartok on 08-15-20
By: Carlos Bulosan, and others
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Last Witnesses
- An Oral History of the Children of World War II
- By: Svetlana Alexievich, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky
- Narrated by: Julia Emelin, Allen Lewis Rickman
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 98
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 90
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Story5 out of 5 stars 90
Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, Last Witnesses is Alexievich’s collection of the memories of those who were children during World War II. They had sometimes been soldiers as well as witnesses, and their generation grew up with the trauma of the war deeply embedded - a trauma that would change the course of the Russian nation. Collectively, this symphony of children’s stories, filled with the everyday details of life in combat, reveals an altogether unprecedented view of the war.
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5 out of 5 stars
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And how many years to forget?
- By Darwin8u on 09-16-21
By: Svetlana Alexievich, and others
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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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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 656
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 454
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Story5 out of 5 stars 451
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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5 out of 5 stars
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Deeply moving
- By Kate on 08-12-03
By: Rick Bragg
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Tomboyland
- Essays
- By: Melissa Faliveno, Joey Soloway - introduction
- Narrated by: Melissa Faliveno
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 54
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 54
Flyover country, the middle of nowhere, the space between the coasts. The American Midwest is a place beyond definition, whose very boundaries are a question. It's a place of rolling prairies and towering pines, where guns in bars and trucks on blocks are as much a part of the landscape as rivers and lakes and farms. Where girls are girls and boys are boys, where women are mothers and wives, where one is taught to work hard and live between the lines.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Embrace the Quirk
- By Lorraine S. on 07-26-22
By: Melissa Faliveno, and others
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Maggie-Now
- A Novel
- By: Betty Smith
- Narrated by: Nicola Barber
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 53
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 53
In Brooklyn's unforgiving urban jungle, Maggie Moore is torn between answering her own needs and catering to the desirous men who dominate her life. Confronted by her quarrelsome Irish immigrant father, the feckless lover who may become her husband, and others, Maggie must learn to navigate a cycle of loss, separation, and hope as she forges her own path toward happiness.
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5 out of 5 stars
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no unabridged
- By sally on 08-03-21
By: Betty Smith
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Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty
- An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother
- By: Kate Hennessy
- Narrated by: Randye Kaye
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 75
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 67
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 67
Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was a prominent Catholic, writer, social activist, and cofounder of a movement dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor. Her life has been revealed through her own writings as well as the work of historians, theologians, and academics. What has been missing until now is a more personal account from the point of view of someone who knew her well.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Great content.HORRIBLE Narration. Cannot listen.
- By Christian on 04-21-17
By: Kate Hennessy
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Jane of Lantern Hill
- By: L.M. Montgomery
- Narrated by: Lauren Saunders
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 215
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 191
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 190
For as long as she can remember, Jane Stuart and her mother have lived with her controlling grandmother in a dreary mansion in Toronto. Jane always believed her father was dead, so she was shocked to receive an invitation to stay with him for the summer on Prince Edward Island. But from their very first meeting, Jane fell in love with her charming father and his whimsical cottage. During her stay with him, she even found herself daring to dream that there could be such a house back in Toronto.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Adore the book. The recording needs to be EDITED!
- By Island Girl on 06-17-20
By: L.M. Montgomery
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The Moonflower Vine
- A Novel
- By: Jetta Carleton
- Narrated by: Natalie Ross
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 106
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 94
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Story4 out of 5 stars 94
On a farm in western Missouri, during the first half of the twentieth century, Matthew and Callie Soames create a life for themselves and raise four headstrong daughters. Jessica will break their hearts. Leonie will fall in love with the wrong man. Mary Jo will escape to New York. And wild child Mathy’s fate will be the family’s greatest tragedy. Over the decades they will love, deceive, comfort, forgive - and, ultimately, they will come to cherish all the more fiercely the bonds of love that hold the family together.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I didn't want it to end!!!
- By Amanda H. on 01-20-21
By: Jetta Carleton
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- By: Maya Angelou
- Narrated by: Maya Angelou
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 9,490
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 8,353
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 8,320
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age - and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. But years later, she learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Emotional & Powerful
- By Miss Toni on 06-30-13
By: Maya Angelou