The Book Collectors
A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories that Carried Them Through a War
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The Book Collectors
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Narrated by:
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Nikki Massoud
About this listen
"An urgent and compelling account of great bravery and passion." (Susan Orlean)
Award-winning journalist Delphine Minoui recounts the true story of a band of young rebels, a besieged Syrian town, and an underground library built from the rubble of war.
Reading is an act of resistance.
Daraya is a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian Civil War began. Long a site of peaceful resistance to the Assad regimes, Daraya fell under siege in 2012. For four years, no one entered or left, and aid was blocked. Every single day, bombs fell on this place - a place of homes and families, schools and children, now emptied and broken into bits.
And then a group searching for survivors stumbled upon a cache of books in the rubble. In a week, they had 6,000 volumes; in a month, 15,000. A sanctuary was born: a library where people could escape the blockade, a paper fortress to protect their humanity.
The library offered a marvelous range of books - from Arabic poetry to American self-help, Shakespearean plays to stories of war in other times and places. The visitors shared photos and tales of their lives before the war, planned how to build a democracy, and tended the roots of their community despite shell-shocked soil. In the midst of the siege, the journalist Delphine Minoui tracked down one of the library’s founders, 23-year-old Ahmad. Over text messages, WhatsApp, and Facebook, Minoui came to know the young men who gathered in the library, exchanged ideas, learned English, and imagined how to shape the future, even as bombs kept falling from above. By telling their stories, Minoui makes a far-off, complicated war immediate and reveals these young men to be everyday heroes as inspiring as the books they read.
The Book Collectors is a testament to their bravery and a celebration of the power of words.
©2020 Delphine Minoui (P)2020 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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In 2011, Marwan Hisham and his two friends - fellow working-class college students Nael and Tareq - joined the first protests of the Arab Spring in Syria, in response to a recent massacre. Arm in arm they marched, poured Coca-Cola into one another’s eyes to blunt the effects of tear gas, ran from the security forces, and cursed the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad. It was ecstasy. A long-bottled revolution was finally erupting, and freedom from a brutal dictator seemed, at last, imminent.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Perfect with Peter Ganim
- By Anonymous User on 06-14-24
By: Marwan Hisham, and others
-
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
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 182
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 152
-
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
-
Night Draws Near
- Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War
- By: Anthony Shadid
- Narrated by: Anthony Shadid
- Length: 6 hrs and 6 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 76
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 26
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 27
Determined to offer an unfiltered version of events, the Washington Post's Anthony Shadid was neither embedded with soldiers nor briefed by politicians. Because he is fluent in Arabic, Shadid, an Arab-American born and raised in Oklahoma, was able to actually disappear into the divided, dangerous worlds of Iraq. Day by day, as American dreams clashed with Arab notions of justice, he pieced together the human story of ordinary Iraqis weathering the terrible dislocations and tragedies of war.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Too little, too late
- By Kindle Customer on 03-23-09
By: Anthony Shadid
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The People's Republic of Amnesia
- Tiananmen Revisited
- By: Louisa Lim
- Narrated by: Louisa Lim
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 74
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 67
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 67
In The People's Republic of Amnesia, NPR correspondent Louisa Lim charts how the events of June 4 changed China, and how China changed the events of June 4 by rewriting its own history. Lim reveals new details about those fateful days, including how one of the country's most senior politicians lost a family member to an army bullet, as well as the inside story of the young soldiers sent to clear Tiananmen Square.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
great book and recording
- By Robert Peters on 06-14-16
By: Louisa Lim
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Known and Strange Things
- Essays
- By: Teju Cole
- Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 48
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 42
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices. Minute after minute, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Book that Teaches and Shares
- By Carolyn J. on 10-08-17
By: Teju Cole
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War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
- By: Chris Hedges
- Narrated by: Chris Hedges
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 379
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 296
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 294
Drawing on his own experience and on the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr, Hedges shows how war seduces not just those on the front lines but entire societies, corrupting politics, destroying culture, and perverting the most basic human desires. Mixing hard-nosed realism with profound moral and philosophical insight, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is a work of terrible power and redemptive clarity whose truths have never been more necessary.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Powerful, perceptive, personal
- By Cx30 on 08-08-07
By: Chris Hedges
-
Create Dangerously
- The Immigrant Artist at Work
- By: Edwidge Danticat
- Narrated by: Kristin Kalbli
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 46
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 40
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 39
In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile. Inspired by Albert Camus and adapted from her own lectures for Princeton University’s Toni Morrison Lecture Series, here Danticat tells stories of artists who create despite (or because of) the horrors that drove them from their homelands. Combining memoir and essay, these moving and eloquent pieces examine what it means to be an artist from a country in crisis.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A very important book.
- By Tyler on 12-07-19
By: Edwidge Danticat
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A Rage for Order
- The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS
- By: Robert Worth
- Narrated by: Will Damron, Robert Worth
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 86
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 73
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 70
In 2011 a wave of revolution spread through the Middle East as protesters demanded an end to tyranny, corruption, and economic decay. From Egypt to Yemen, a generation of young Arabs insisted on a new ethos of common citizenship. Five years later their utopian aspirations have taken on a darker cast as old divides reemerge and deepen. In one country after another, brutal terrorists and dictators have risen to the top.
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4 out of 5 stars
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What a mess!
- By Art Guzman on 01-19-17
By: Robert Worth
-
The Long Hangover
- Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past
- By: Shaun Walker
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 66
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 54
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 52
In The Long Hangover, Shaun Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its search for a new identity, telling the story through the country's troubled relationship with its Soviet past. Walker not only explains Vladimir Putin's goals and the government's official manipulations of history, but also focuses on ordinary Russians and their motivations. He charts how Putin raised victory in World War II to the status of a national founding myth in the search for a unifying force to heal a divided country, and shows how dangerous the ramifications of this have been.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Fascinating and fair book on Putin's Russia
- By MyPublicName on 02-16-18
By: Shaun Walker
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 998
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 888
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 889
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
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The Miracle of the Kurds
- A Remarkable Story of Hope Reborn in Northern Iraq
- By: Stephen Mansfield
- Narrated by: Stephen Mansfield
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 55
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 50
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 50
Hundreds of thousands of Kurds were murdered under the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein. Some four thousand Kurdish villages were destroyed. Betrayed again and again by the nations of the world, the Kurds were as decimated as any people in history. Then came the Kurdish Miracle, that combination of ancient wisdom and modern economic genius that is now making the Kurdish homeland one of the most prosperous places on earth.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Long live the Kurds
- By Dry Bones on 03-09-19
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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
-
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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Lenin's Tomb
- The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
- By: David Remnick
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 29 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 383
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 327
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 330
In the tradition of John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this best-selling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism.
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1 out of 5 stars
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The moral complexity of a comic book
- By Tot on 02-22-19
By: David Remnick
-
The Daughter of Auschwitz
- My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope
- By: Tova Friedman, Malcolm Brabant
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 415
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 380
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 379
A powerful memoir by one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, Tova Friedman, following her childhood growing up during the Holocaust and surviving a string of near-death experiences in a Jewish ghetto, a Nazi labor camp, and Auschwitz.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Very interesting and well told
- By Tracy F. on 03-31-23
By: Tova Friedman, and others
-
"Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself"
- The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945
- By: Florian Huber
- Narrated by: Sam Peter Jackson
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 43
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 36
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 36
By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen and invasion was underway. As the Red Army advanced, horrifying stories spread about the depravity of its soldiers. For many German people, there seemed to be nothing left but disgrace and despair. For tens of thousands of them, the only option was to choose death - for themselves and for their children.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This book should be required reading for anyone that seeks to understand how ordinary people could be transformed into monsters.
- By Anonymous User on 05-08-20
By: Florian Huber
-
On All Fronts
- The Education of a Journalist
- By: Clarissa Ward
- Narrated by: Clarissa Ward
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 442
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 384
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 380
Clarissa Ward is a world-renowned conflict reporter. In this strange age of crisis where there really is no front line, she has moved from one hot zone to the next. With multiple assignments in Syria, Egypt, and Afghanistan, Ward, who speaks seven languages, has been based in Baghdad, Beirut, Beijing, and Moscow. She has seen and documented the violent remaking of the world at close range. With her deep empathy, Ward finds a way to tell the hardest stories. On All Fronts is the riveting account of Ward’s singular career and of journalism in this age of extremism.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Insights gained!
- By J. Harry on 11-10-20
By: Clarissa Ward
-
Like Dreamers
- The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation
- By: Yossi Klein Halevi
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 23 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 135
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 120
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 122
In Like Dreamers, acclaimed journalist Yossi Klein Halevi interweaves the stories of a group of 1967 paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem, tracing the history of Israel and the divergent ideologies shaping it from the Six-Day War to the present. Following the lives of seven young members from the 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade, the unit responsible for restoring Jewish sovereignty to Jerusalem, Halevi reveals how this band of brothers played pivotal roles in shaping Israel's destiny long after their historic victory.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
A Clearer Understanding of the Israel
- By deborah on 06-07-14
-
HHhH
- By: Laurent Binet
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 224
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 194
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 196
HHhH: "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich," or "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." The most dangerous man in Hitler's cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the "Butcher of Prague." He was feared by all and loathed by most. With his cold Aryan features and implacable cruelty, Heydrich seemed indestructible-until two men, a Slovak and a Czech recruited by the British secret service-killed him in broad daylight on a bustling street in Prague, and thus changed the course of History.
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4 out of 5 stars
-
Himlers Hirn heisst Heydrich
- By Darwin8u on 02-02-13
By: Laurent Binet
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Launched in the 1880s by the first baron, the Empain industrial empire spread from Belgium and France to span more than a dozen countries. When Baron Édouard-Jean “Wado” Empain took over, he further expanded the company, became a key player in France’s nuclear sector, and, by the mid-1970s, was one of the country’s most powerful business leaders - a self-described “master of the universe”. Wado’s vertiginous rise caught the eye of Alain Cailloll, a small-time gangster who had grown up in a wealthy family before embracing a life of crime.
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Edda Mussolini was the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s oldest and favorite child. At 19, she was married to Count Galleazzo Ciano, Il Duce’s Minister for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, the most turbulent decade in Italy’s fascist history. In the years preceding World War II, Edda ruled over Italy’s aristocratic families and the cultured and middle classes while selling Fascism on the international stage. How a young woman wielded such control is the heart of Moorehead’s fascinating history.
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 10
Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Affecting Memoir Mixed with Audiophile Musings
- By Stephen W on 08-10-24
By: Garrett Hongo
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Battle of Ink and Ice
- A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, and the Making of Modern Media
- By: Darrell Hartman
- Narrated by: Mack Sanderson
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 40
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 33
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Story4 out of 5 stars 33
In the fall of 1909, a pair of bitter contests captured the world’s attention. The American explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook both claimed to have discovered the North Pole, sparking a vicious feud that was unprecedented in international scientific and geographic circles. At the same time, the rivalry between two powerful New York City newspapers—the storied Herald and the ascendant Times—fanned the flames of the so-called polar controversy, as each paper financially and reputationally committed itself to an opposing explorer and fought desperately to defend him.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating weaving of journalism and exploration history
- By Jolene Sharp on 11-16-24
By: Darrell Hartman
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Time's Echo
- The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance
- By: Jeremy Eichler
- Narrated by: Jeremy Eichler, Sherrill Milnes
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 29
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 28
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Story5 out of 5 stars 28
In 1785, when the great German poet Friedrich Schiller penned his immortal “Ode to Joy,” he crystallized the deepest hopes and dreams of the European Enlightenment for a new era of peace and freedom, a time when millions would be embraced as equals. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony then gave wing to Schiller’s words, but barely a century later these same words were claimed by Nazi propagandists and twisted by a barbarism so complete that it ruptured, as one philosopher put it, “the deep layer of solidarity among all who wear a human face.”
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5 out of 5 stars
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Beautiful
- By Chuck Millar, PhD on 05-18-24
By: Jeremy Eichler
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A Castle in Wartime
- One Family, Their Missing Sons, and the Fight to Defeat the Nazis
- By: Catherine Bailey
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 17 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 27
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 21
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 21
As war swept across Europe in 1940, the idyllic life of Fey von Hassell seemed a world away from the conflict. The daughter of Ulrich von Hassell, Hitler's Ambassador to Italy, her marriage to Italian aristocrat Detalmo Pirzio-Biroli brought with it a castle and an estate in the north of Italy. Beautiful and privileged, Fey and her two young sons lead a tranquil life undisturbed by the trauma and privations of war. But with Fascism approaching its zenith, Fey's peaceful existence is threatened when Ulrich and Detalmo take the brave and difficult decision to resist the Nazis.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent account
- By Francis J. Slobodnik on 03-22-20
By: Catherine Bailey
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To Boldly Grow
- Finding Joy, Adventure, and Dinner in Your Own Backyard
- By: Tamar Haspel
- Narrated by: Tamar Haspel
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 17
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 12
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 12
Journalist and self-proclaimed “crappy gardener” Tamar Haspel is on a mission: to show us that raising or gathering our own food is not as hard as it’s often made out to be. When she and her husband move from Manhattan to two acres on Cape Cod, they decide to adopt a more active approach to their diet: raising chickens, growing tomatoes, even foraging for mushrooms and hunting their own meat. They have more ambition than practical know-how, but that’s not about to stop them from trying…even if sometimes their reach exceeds their (often muddy) grasp.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Funny, Smart, and Growth Encouraging
- By CLF on 03-28-23
By: Tamar Haspel
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Confirmation Bias
- Inside Washington's War Over the Supreme Court, from Scalia's Death to Justice Kavanaugh
- By: Carl Hulse
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 39
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
The Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times presents a richly detailed, news-breaking, and conversation-changing look at the unprecedented political fight to fill the Supreme Court seat made vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death - using it to explain the paralyzing and all but irreversible dysfunction across all three branches in the nation’s capital.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Bias is right
- By Shelle Houser on 07-07-19
By: Carl Hulse
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Write for Your Life
- By: Anna Quindlen
- Narrated by: Anna Quindlen
- Length: 3 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 36
What really matters in life? What truly lasts in our hearts and minds? Where can we find community, history, humanity? In this lyrical new book, the answer is clear: through writing. This is a book for what Quindlen calls “civilians,” those who want to use the written word to become more human, more themselves.
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4 out of 5 stars
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An inspiring telling
- By JV in FL on 08-22-22
By: Anna Quindlen
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Super Fly
- The Unexpected Lives of the World's Most Successful Insects
- By: Jonathan Balcombe
- Narrated by: Jonathan Balcombe
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 57
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 57
For most of us, the only thing we know about flies is that they're annoying, and our usual reaction is to try to kill them. In Super Fly, the myth-busting biologist Jonathan Balcombe shows the order Diptera in all of its diversity, illustrating the essential role that flies play in every ecosystem in the world as pollinators, waste-disposers, predators, and food source; and how flies continue to reshape our understanding of evolution.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wonderful
- By Chris on 02-13-22
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Anonymous User
- 04-23-21
Amazing
I loved the book. It has a great story and I am glad to have learned a small part of what happened in Syria in the past years
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