Goodbye to Clocks Ticking
How We Live While Dying
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Goodbye to Clocks Ticking
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Narrated by:
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Matthew Spaur
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By:
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Joseph Monninger
About this listen
An uplifting journey of truly seeing and appreciating what makes life worth living in the year following a terminal diagnosis
For fans of Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking
Goodbye to Clocks Ticking is an unforgettable book that tells the story of a singular year of challenges, insights, and peculiar gifts. It is also a sort of postcard from a place many of will one day visit.
After thirty-two years of teaching, Joe Monninger, an avid outdoorsman in robust health, was looking forward to a long retirement with the love of his life in a cabin beside a New England estuary. Three days after his last class, however, he’s diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, even though he has not smoked for more than 30 years. It was May, and he might be dead by early fall.
Soon Joe learned, however, that he was a genetic match for treatment with a drug that could not cure his cancer, but could prolong his life. With this temporary reprieve, he sets out to live life to the fullest and to write about the year of grace that follows, from his cancer treatments to his innermost thoughts.
Goodbye to Clocks Ticking is a work of wisdom and insight. Joe Monninger’s aubade to the world that he knew and loved offers a page-turning, suspenseful story to relish and to celebrate, to share and to discuss, to ponder and to learn from.
"Full of heart and discovery." – Booklist, on Joseph Monninger's writing
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Uniquely wonderful book
- By Lucie on 09-07-10
By: Gail Caldwell
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Little Matches
- A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark
- By: Maryanne O'Hara
- Narrated by: Maryanne O'Hara
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Story5 out of 5 stars 34
When their only child was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) at the age of two, Maryanne O'Hara and her husband were told that Caitlin could live a long life or be dead in a matter of months. Thirty-one years later, Caitlin lost her battle with this devastating disease following an excruciating two-year wait on the transplant list and a last-minute race to locate a pair of healthy lungs. The sudden spiral of events left Maryanne in an existential crisis, searching to find an answer to the eternal question: Why we are here?
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5 out of 5 stars
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I don't know who needs to read it...
- By H. Hill on 04-18-23
By: Maryanne O'Hara
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Heartwood
- The Art of Living with the End in Mind
- By: Barbara Becker
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Story5 out of 5 stars 41
When her earliest childhood friend is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Becker sets off on a quest to immerse herself in what it means to be mortal. Can we live our lives more fully knowing some day we will die? With a keen eye toward that which makes life worth living, interfaith minister, mom, and perpetual seeker Barbara Becker recounts stories where life and death intersect in unexpected ways.
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4 out of 5 stars
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The author’s compassion
- By Amazon Customer on 04-16-24
By: Barbara Becker
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Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them)
- A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
- By: Sallie Tisdale
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 193
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 166
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 165
You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I thought I had more time...
- By Alyssa on 09-09-19
By: Sallie Tisdale
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Marrow
- A Love Story
- By: Elizabeth Lesser
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Lesser, Sally Field
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 231
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 212
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 212
A mesmerizing and courageous memoir: the story of two sisters uncovering the depth of their love through the life-and-death experience of a bone marrow transplant. Throughout her life Elizabeth Lesser has sought understanding about what it means to be true to yourself and, at the same time, truly connected to the ones you love. But when her sister, Maggie, needs a bone marrow transplant to save her life, and Lesser learns that she is the perfect match, she faces a far more immediate and complex question about what it really means to love.
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5 out of 5 stars
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“ Love came first “
- By marie on 03-26-18
By: Elizabeth Lesser
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Nothing Was the Same
- A Memoir
- By: Kay Redfield Jamison
- Narrated by: Renée Raudman
- Length: 5 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 42
Perhaps no one but Kay Redfield Jamison---who combines the acute perceptions of a psychologist with writerly elegance and passion---could bring such a delicate touch to the subject of losing a spouse to cancer. In spare and at times strikingly lyrical prose, Jamison looks back at her relationship with her husband, Richard Wyatt, a renowned scientist who battled severe dyslexia to become one of the foremost experts on schizophrenia.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Liked the story better than the narrator
- By Pamela Harvey on 07-22-11
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Let's Take the Long Way Home
- A Memoir of Friendship
- By: Gail Caldwell
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 4 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 224
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 144
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Story4 out of 5 stars 145
In Let's Take the Long Way Home, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gail Caldwell offers a powerful and moving memoir about her coming-of-age in mid-life and her extraordinary friendship with Caroline Knapp, the author of Drinking: A Love Story. Though they are more different than alike, these two fiercely private, independent women quickly relax into a friendship more profound than either of them expected. They grow increasingly inseparable until, in 2003, Caroline is diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Uniquely wonderful book
- By Lucie on 09-07-10
By: Gail Caldwell
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White Hot Light
- Twenty-Five Years in Emergency Medicine
- By: Frank Huyler
- Narrated by: Gary Bennett
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 44
In the late 1990s, a young physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, published a stunning memoir of his experiences in the highly charged world of the ER. Presented in a series of powerful, poetic vignettes, The Blood of Strangers became an instant classic. Now, over two decades later, Dr. Frank Huyler delivers another dispatch from the trenches—this time from the perspective of middle age. In portraits visceral, haunting, sometimes surreal, Huyler reveals the gritty reality of medicine practiced on the razor’s edge between life and death.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Even Better than The Blood of Strangers
- By Elizabeth Darcy on 10-14-20
By: Frank Huyler
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One Blade of Grass
- Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir
- By: Henry Shukman
- Narrated by: Henry Shukman
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 156
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 138
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 137
This is the story of how a meditation practice gave Henry Shukman a context for integrating a sudden spiritual awakening into his life and how his depression and anxiety were gradually healed through this practice. In sharing how he grew into a Zen teacher, Shukman demystifies Zen training, casting its profound insights in simple, lucid language. Along the way, One Blade of Grass guides listeners on a journey of their own, into the hidden treasures that contemplative practice can reveal to any of us.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Boring
- By Elvis on 09-10-20
By: Henry Shukman
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Finding Chika
- A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family
- By: Mitch Albom
- Narrated by: Mitch Albom
- Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 2,048
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 1,778
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Story5 out of 5 stars 1,770
Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince. With no children of their own, the 40-plus children who live, play, and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine. But at age five, Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says "no one in Haiti can help you with."
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5 out of 5 stars
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BUY READ AND RECOMMEND THIS BOOK
- By The Birds. on 11-05-19
By: Mitch Albom
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A Seaside Practice
- Tales of a Scottish Country Doctor
- By: Dr Tom Smith
- Narrated by: Dr Tom Smith
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 412
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 307
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 310
Heartwarming and gloriously eccentric, Dr Tom's stories capture the beauty of the Lowlands, the joys and sorrows of its inhabitants and the richly rewarding experiences of life as a Scottish country doctor.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Engaging Memoir
- By Jean on 10-16-17
By: Dr Tom Smith
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Knocking on Heaven's Door
- The Path to a Better Way of Death
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 157
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 142
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 138
Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non - life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker.
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2 out of 5 stars
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A better way to narrate a book about death?
- By MAUREEN on 10-21-13
By: Katy Butler
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He Came in with It
- A Portrait of Motherhood and Madness
- By: Miriam Feldman
- Narrated by: Ann Richardson
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 57
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 56
In an idyllic Los Angeles neighborhood, where generations enjoy deep roots in old homes, the O’Rourke family fits right in. Miriam and Craig are both artists and their four children carry on the legacy. When their teenage son, Nick, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, a tumultuous decade ensues in which the family careens off the conventional course. Like the 10 Biblical plagues, they are hit by one catastrophe after another: violence, evictions, arrests, a suicide attempt, a near-drowning - even cancer and a brain tumor - play against the backdrop of a wild teenage bacchanal.
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5 out of 5 stars
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So Beautifully Written
- By Michael on 08-01-22
By: Miriam Feldman
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Messenger
- The Legacy of Mattie J. T. Stepanek and Heartsongs
- By: Jeni Stepanek
- Narrated by: Jeni Stepanek
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 21
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Story5 out of 5 stars 19
Oprah Winfrey has called him an inspiration, Maya Angelou saw him as a kindred spirit and fellow poet, and Jimmy Carter described Mattie Stepanek as the "most remarkable person I have ever known". When Jerry Lewis received his lifetime achievement award at the Oscars, footage of Mattie played behind him. Five years after his death from a rare neuromuscular disease, Mattie is still being celebrated for his indomitable spirit and message of hope.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Loved Jeni telling Mattie’s story
- By Hello Mrs. on 12-29-22
By: Jeni Stepanek
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As I Knew Him
- My Dad, Rod Serling
- By: Anne Serling
- Narrated by: Anne Serling
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 126
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 113
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 113
To Anne Serling, the imposing figure the public saw hosting The Twilight Zone each week, intoning cautionary observations about fate, chance, and humanity, was not the father she knew. Her fun-loving dad would play on the floor with the dogs, had nicknames for everyone in the family, and was apt to put a lampshade on his head and break out in song. He was her best friend, her playmate, and her confidant. After his unexpected death at 50, Anne, just 20, was left stunned.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Beautiful Tribute to a Wonderful Man
- By Becky on 04-12-20
By: Anne Serling
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Chicken Soup for the Soul - Find Your Happiness
- 101 Inspirational Stories about Finding Your Purpose, Passion, and Joy
- By: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen
- Narrated by: Cynthia Barrett
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4 out of 5 stars 42
What makes you happy? Others share how they found their passion, purpose, and joy in life in these 101 personal and exciting stories that are sure to inspire and encourage listeners to find their own happiness. Chicken Soup for the Soul: Find Your Happiness will encourage listeners to pursue their dreams, find their passion and seek joy in their life with its 101 personal and inspiring stories. This book continues Chicken Soup for the Soul’s focus on inspiration and hope, reminding us that we all can find our own happiness.
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2 out of 5 stars
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I got even more depressed
- By Tom on 09-08-14
By: Jack Canfield, and others
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Chicken Soup for the Soul: Think Positive
- 101 Inspirational Stories about Counting Your Blessings and Having a Positive Attitude
- By: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Amy Newmark, and others
- Narrated by: Tanya Eby, Jim Bond
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 176
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 146
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Story4 out of 5 stars 149
101 True Stories about how Positive Thinking can change your life! Everyone needs a little attitude adjustment once in a while, and these amazing true life stories reveal how real people used positive thinking to improve their lives and overcome challenges. You’ll read stories about how you can make every day a special day, incorporate gratitude and joy into your daily life, count your blessings and change your outlook, use a few well-chosen words to reorient your life, manage cancer and other health challenges through a positive attitude, simplify and have a more meaningful life and more!
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3 out of 5 stars
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Good overall.
- By Sergey Makeev on 02-21-24
By: Jack Canfield, and others
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When Breath Becomes Air
- By: Paul Kalanithi, Abraham Verghese - foreword
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra, Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 29,269
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 25,697
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 25,631
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Phenomenal book!
- By A. Potter on 01-16-16
By: Paul Kalanithi, and others
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The Sum of Our Days
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Blair Brown, Isabel Allende
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 55
Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory - and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.
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5 out of 5 stars
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She does not disappoint
- By ChiChi's Rule on 06-01-22
By: Isabel Allende