Grieving
Dispatches from a Wounded Country
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Grieving
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Narrated by:
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Marisa Blake
About this listen
This hybrid collection of short crónicas, journalism, and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border draws together literary theory and historical analysis to outline how neoliberalism, corruption, and drug trafficking - culminating in the misnamed “war on drugs” - has shaped Mexico.
Working from and against this political context, Cristina Rivera Garza posits that collective grief is an act of resistance against state violence and that writing is a powerful mode of seeking social justice and embodying resilience. As she states, “As we write, as we work with language - the humblest and most powerful force available to us - we activate the potential of words, phrases, sentences. Writing as we grieve, grieving as we write: a practice able to create refuge from the open. Writing with others. Grieving like someone who takes refuge from the open. Grieving, which is always a radically different mode of writing.”
©2011 Cristina Rivera Garza (P)2021 Dreamscape Media, LLCListeners also enjoyed...
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great read - horrible performance
- By Denise Johnson on 03-26-15
By: Rebecca Solnit
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1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
- A Memoir
- By: Ai Weiwei, Allan H. Barr - translator
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 182
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 152
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 151
Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This book changed my life
- By Johnny Nopolis on 08-16-22
By: Ai Weiwei, and others
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Those Who Forget
- By: Geraldine Schwarz
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 26
During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer - those who followed the current. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her grandfather took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Not what it purports to be
- By DPM on 10-10-20
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Notes on a Foreign Country
- An American Abroad in a Post-American World
- By: Suzy Hansen
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 203
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 176
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 173
In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A MUST-READ for all Truth-Seeking American wh
- By Parveen Mehdi-Newton on 12-08-17
By: Suzy Hansen
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The Myth of the American Dream
- Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety and Power
- By: D.L. Mayfield
- Narrated by: Nan McNamara
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 44
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 36
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 37
Affluence, autonomy, safety, and power. These are the central values of the American dream. But are they actually compatible with Jesus' command to love our neighbor as ourselves? In essays grouped around these four values, D. L. Mayfield asks us to pay attention to the ways they shape our own choices, and the ways those choices affect our neighbors. Where did these values come from? How have they failed those on the edges of our society? And how can we disentangle ourselves from our culture's headlong pursuit of these values and live faithful lives of service to God and our neighbors?
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5 out of 5 stars
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Sooooo good. Powerful
- By D. Frazier on 08-19-21
By: D.L. Mayfield
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The Fire This Time
- A New Generation Speaks About Race
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Michael Early, Kevin R. Free, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 245
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 208
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 206
National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Delusion shattering
- By Matthew A. Burnett on 06-12-20
By: Jesmyn Ward
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The Art of Inventing Hope
- Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel
- By: Howard Reich
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 80
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 70
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Story5 out of 5 stars 70
The Art of Inventing Hope offers an unprecedented, in-depth conversation between the world's most revered Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, and a son of survivors, Howard Reich. During the last four years of Wiesel's life, he met frequently with Reich in New York, Chicago, and Florida - and spoke often on the phone - to discuss the subject that linked them: both Wiesel and Reich's father, Robert Reich, were liberated from Buchenwald death camp on April 11, 1945. What started as an interview assignment from the Chicago Tribune evolved into a friendship and partnership.
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5 out of 5 stars
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a view into post holocaust survivors recovery
- By Lance Strosser on 02-17-21
By: Howard Reich
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Looking for Lorraine
- The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 166
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 140
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Story5 out of 5 stars 141
Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Radiant
- By Rose Brookins on 03-20-19
By: Imani Perry
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The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 212
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 185
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 186
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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Learning from the Germans
- Race and the Memory of Evil
- By: Susan Neiman
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 20 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 139
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 127
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 124
In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights-era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This is an important book.
- By Amazon Customer on 05-29-20
By: Susan Neiman
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Survivor Cafe
- The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory
- By: Elizabeth Rosner
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Rosner
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 37
Beyond preserving the firsthand testimonies of participants and witnesses, individuals and societies must continually take responsibility for learning the painful lessons of the past in order to offer hope for the future. Survivor Café offers a clear-eyed sense of the enormity of our 21st-century human inheritance - not only among direct descendants of the Holocaust, but also in the shape of our collective responsibility to learn from tragedy.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A book every generation should read
- By J. Faught on 09-29-17
By: Elizabeth Rosner
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Notes of a Native Son
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,318
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,134
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,130
Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of Black life and Black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Masterful Essayist
- By Andre on 09-30-16
By: James Baldwin
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,167
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,887
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,894
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
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4 out of 5 stars
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Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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We Have Overcome
- An Immigrant's Letter to the American People
- By: Jason D. Hill
- Narrated by: Jared Wright
- Length: 4 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 35
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 33
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Story5 out of 5 stars 33
The dominant narrative, repeated in the media and from the angry mouths of politicians and activists, is the exact opposite of the reality. They paint a portrait of an America rife with racial and ethnic division, where minorities are mired in a poverty worse than slavery, and white people stand at the top of an unfairly stacked pyramid of privilege. Jason D. Hill corrects the narrative in this powerfully eloquent book. Dr. Hill came to America at the age of twenty from Jamaica and, rather than being faced with intractable racial bigotry, Hill found a land of bountiful opportunity.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A message of hope for all Americans
- By No Regrets on 06-25-20
By: Jason D. Hill
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We Don't Know Ourselves
- A Personal History of Modern Ireland
- By: Fintan O'Toole
- Narrated by: Aidan Kelly
- Length: 22 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 480
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 404
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Story5 out of 5 stars 400
In We Don't Know Ourselves, Fintan O'Toole weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society - perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Relentlessly Negative
- By John on 06-02-22
By: Fintan O'Toole
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Life Beyond Measure
- Letters to My Great-Granddaughter
- By: Sidney Poitier
- Narrated by: Sidney Poitier
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 108
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 78
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 78
Sidney Poitier is one of the most revered actors in the history of Hollywood. He has overcome enormous obstacles in extraordinary times and is a role model for many Americans because of his convictions, bravery, and grace. Poitier reflects on his amazing life in Life Beyond Measure, offering inspirational advice and personal stories in the form of extended letters to his great-granddaughter.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Mix of family history and life advice.
- By Adam Shields on 10-31-19
By: Sidney Poitier