The Hooligan's Return
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The Hooligan's Return
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Narrated by:
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Victor Bevine
About this listen
At the center of The Hooligan's Return is the author himself, always an outcast, on a bleak lifelong journey through Nazism and communism to exile in America. But while Norman Manea's book is in many ways a memoir, it is also a deeply imaginative work, traversing time and place, life and literature, dream and reality, past and present. Autobiographical events merge with historic elements, always connecting the individual with the collective destiny. Manea speaks of the bloodiest time of the 20th century and of the emergence afterward of a global, competitive, and sometimes cynical modern society.
Both a harrowing memoir and an ambitious epic project, The Hooligan's Return achieves a subtle internal harmony as anxiety evolves into a delicate irony and a burlesque fantasy. Beautifully written and brilliantly conceived, this is the work of a writer with an acute understanding of the vast human potential for both evil and kindness, obedience and integrity.
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-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 39
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
The gripping story of the author's aunt, a Jewish dance instructor who was betrayed to the Nazis by the two men she loved, yet managed to survive WWII by teaching dance lessons to the SS at Auschwitz. Her epic life becomes a window into the author's own past and the key to discovering his Jewish roots.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing Unique
- By Nordic Artisan on 05-11-19
By: Paul Glaser
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The Pendulum
- A Granddaughter's Search for Her Family's Forbidden Nazi Past
- By: Julie Lindahl
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 253
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 225
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 225
This powerful memoir traces Brazilian-born American Julie Lindahl's journey to uncover her grandparents' role in the Third Reich, as she is driven to understand how and why they became members of Hitler's elite, the SS. Out of the unbearable heart of the story - the unclaimed guilt that devours a family through the generations - emerges an unflinching will to learn the truth.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Exceptional
- By Jean on 01-14-19
By: Julie Lindahl
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Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 61
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Story4 out of 5 stars 53
A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
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Stalin's Daughter
- The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
- By: Rosemary Sullivan
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 19 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 208
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 187
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 187
The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators—her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Insightful and thoroughly researched
- By Jean on 06-16-15
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Death Is Hard Work
- A Novel
- By: Khaled Khalifa, Leri Price - translator
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 57
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is - after all - only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There's only one problem: Their country is a war zone.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The bleakness of living in a war-torn country!
- By Susan on 03-20-19
By: Khaled Khalifa, and others
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The House of Government
- A Saga of the Russian Revolution
- By: Yuri Slezkine, Claire Bloom - director
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 45 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 179
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 158
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 157
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Inside saga of the leaders of Bolshevism & the USSR
- By Edward V. Blanchard on 11-05-17
By: Yuri Slezkine, and others
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Enemies of the People
- My Family's Journey to America
- By: Kati Marton
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 103
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 52
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 52
In this true-life thriller, Kati Marton draws on her skill as an investigative reporter to discover who her journalist parents really were---and how they survived the Nazis in Budapest and imprisonment by the Soviets during the Cold War.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Couldn't stop listening
- By Jane on 04-09-10
By: Kati Marton
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The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 327
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 246
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Story4 out of 5 stars 246
Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
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5 out of 5 stars
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one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
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The Possessed
- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 72
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 58
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 59
In The Possessed we watch Elif Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Dear Russian Literary Diary...
- By Darwin8u on 08-29-17
By: Elif Batuman
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 87
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 81
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Story4 out of 5 stars 78
Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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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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Out of the Depths
- The Story of a Child of Buchenwald Who Returned Home at Last
- By: Rabbi Israel Meir Lau
- Narrated by: Steve Blane
- Length: 15 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 118
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 100
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 100
Israel Meir Lau, one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald, was just eight years old when the camp was liberated in 1945. Descended from a 1,000-year unbroken chain of rabbis, he grew up to become Chief Rabbi of Israel--and like many of the great rabbis, Lau is a master storyteller. Out of the Depths is his harrowing, miraculous, and inspiring account of life in one of the Nazis' deadliest concentration camps, and how he managed to survive against all possible odds.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing Book, Amazing Man
- By Shari on 01-14-13
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The Home That Was Our Country
- By: Alia Malek
- Narrated by: Alia Malek
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 45
At the Arab Spring's hopeful start, Alia Malek returned to Damascus to reclaim her grandmother's apartment, which had been lost to her family since Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970. Its loss was central to her parents' decision to make their lives in America. In chronicling the people who lived in the Tahaan building, past and present, Alia portrays the Syrians—the Muslims, Christians, Jews, Armenians, and Kurds—who worked, loved, and suffered in close quarters, mirroring the political shifts in their country
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5 out of 5 stars
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Syria as never read before
- By rami hachwi on 09-17-18
By: Alia Malek
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Mosaic
- By: Diane Armstrong
- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 19 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 208
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 167
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 171
>i>Mosaic is compelling storytelling at its best - from the fascinating details of Polish-Jewish culture and the rivalries and dramas of family life, to its moving account of lives torn apart by war and persecution, this an extraordinary true story of a family, and of one woman's journey to reclaim her heritage.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Absolutely excellent!
- By Roberta on 09-22-11
By: Diane Armstrong
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The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 87
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 77
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Story4 out of 5 stars 76
On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk