War Ready: In My Father's Shadow
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War Ready: In My Father's Shadow
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Narrated by:
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Kristen Taylor
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By:
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Mary Lou Darst
About this listen
For young Mary Lou, life was an adventure. Her father served in the military, and she traveled the world with him and her family. His assignments took them to Alaska, Virginia, Japan, Texas, and Germany, as part of the US Army's responsibilities in policing the world. This candid memoir recounts her family's life in new places and cultures following World War II. What was it like to be a child living in Japan seven years after the war? What was it like to be a thirteen-year-old living in Germany twelve years after the war? What was it like to grow up moving between cultures? This is the story of one family bound to service in the military at a time when the world was being redefined. For a young girl, it was the adventure of a lifetime as she learned the secrets of finding her own way in that new world.
The author's story was informed by reading her fathers diary, which offers up intimate and candid insight into the life of a typical soldier in a time of war. His entries describe his time serving aboard a battleship built for 800 soldiers but carrying 6,000 to war. His tales told from the perspective of a young soldier in southern England, Wales, and Scotland from 1943 to 1945 are glimpses into a life many will never know firsthand.
©2022 Mary Lou Darst (P)2022 Mary Lou DarstListeners also enjoyed...
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 30
Can trauma be inherited? It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a century-old cycle of estrangement. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family’s formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens’ lives.
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2 out of 5 stars
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some depth and some historical narration
- By turgan@monomood.com on 09-21-21
By: Alex Halberstadt
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The Yellow House
- By: Sarah M. Broom
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,189
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,021
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,013
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book. I wish the pictures had been included.
- By Lindsay on 02-28-20
By: Sarah M. Broom
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The Wapshot Chronicle
- By: John Cheever
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 130
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 110
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 109
Based in part on Cheever's adolescence in New England, the novel follows the destinies of the impecunious and wildly eccentric Wapshots of St. Botolphs, a quintessential Massachusetts fishing village. Here are the stories of Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea dog and would-be suicide; of his licentious older son, Moses; and of Moses' adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Beautiful 1950s Great Expectations-like Novel
- By Darwin8u on 05-31-13
By: John Cheever
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The Folded Leaf
- By: William Maxwell
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 69
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 61
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Story4 out of 5 stars 61
Here is a classic novel from one of our most honored writers - the author of such acclaimed works as So Long, See You Tomorrow and All the Days and Nights. The Folded Leaf is the serenely observed yet deeply moving story of two boys finding one another in the Midwest of the 1920s, when childhood lasted longer than it does today and even adults were more innocent of what life could bring.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Midwestern Misfits
- By David on 03-17-15
By: William Maxwell
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The Shadow Lines
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Raj Varma
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 87
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 68
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Story4 out of 5 stars 67
Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh’s radiant second novel follows two families - one English, one Bengali - as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian-born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Narrator Doesn't Know How to Pronounce
- By Amazon Customer on 08-27-11
By: Amitav Ghosh
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The German House
- By: Annette Hess
- Narrated by: Nina Franoszek
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 36
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 36
Set against the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963, Annette Hess’ international best seller is a harrowing yet ultimately uplifting coming-of-age story about a young female translator - caught between societal and familial expectations and her unique ability to speak truth to power - as she fights to expose the dark truths of her nation’s past.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Just ok
- By Jennifer on 12-16-19
By: Annette Hess
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My Family's Survival
- The True Story of How the Shwartz Family Escaped the Nazis and Survived the Holocaust
- By: Aviva Gat
- Narrated by: Callie Beaulieu, Neil Hellegers
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 93
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 87
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Story5 out of 5 stars 87
In 1937, the Shwartz family lived a calm life in their small village in Poland. Fifteen-year-old Rachel liked to sing and go out dancing at a local night club, while her older brother David was busy running a farm and raising a family with his wife Hinda. But all that changed when the war reached Butla. First, the Russians came and kicked them out of their house. Then, the Nazis came to cart them off. But the Shwartz family resisted. David decided that no matter what, his family would not be taken captive. Instead, he snuck his family out of their village and into Hungary.
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5 out of 5 stars
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One of the best!
- By Ian on 08-11-20
By: Aviva Gat
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All the Way to the Tigers
- By: Mary Morris
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett
- Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 25
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 26
In February 2008 a casual afternoon of ice skating derailed the trip of a lifetime. Mary Morris was on the verge of a well-earned sabbatical, but instead she endured three months in a wheelchair, two surgeries, and extensive rehabilitation. On Easter Sunday, when she was supposed to be in Morocco, Morris was instead lying on the sofa reading Death in Venice, casting her eyes over these words again and again: "He would go on a journey. Not far. Not all the way to the tigers." Disaster shifted to possibility and Morris made a decision.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Beautiful Memoir
- By Janet G. Zinn on 07-05-21
By: Mary Morris
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The Latehomecomer
- A Hmong Family Memoir
- By: Kao Kalia Yang
- Narrated by: Kao Kalia Yang
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 278
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 243
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 240
In the 70s and 80s, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to the United States, all in search of a new place to call home. Decades later, their experiences remain largely unknown. Kao Kalia Yang was driven to tell her own family's story after her grandmother’s death. The Latehomecomer is a tribute to that grandmother, a remarkable woman whose spirit held her family together.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Great Hmong history, lousy literature
- By Isadore Ducasse on 10-12-18
By: Kao Kalia Yang
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The Great Spring
- Writing, Zen, and This ZigZag Life
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 30
What does it take to have a long writing life? Drawing on her years of writing, teaching, and practicing Zen, Natalie Goldberg shares the experiences that have opened her to new ways of being alive - experiences that point the way forward in our lives and our writing. The "great spring" of this book title refers to the great rush of energy that arrives when you think no life will ever come again - the early yellow flowering forsythia, for example.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An enjoyable insight
- By Leigh A on 05-22-23
By: Natalie Goldberg
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Something Fierce
- Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter
- By: Carmen Aguirre
- Narrated by: Carmen Aguirre
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 33
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 28
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 27
Carmen Aguirre was six-year-old when she and her family fled to Canada following General Augusto Pinochet’s violent 1973 coup in Chile. She was only eleven-years-old when her mother and stepfather joined the resistance movement and returned to South America, taking Carmen and her sister went with them. As their mother and stepfather set up a safe house for resistance members in La Paz, Bolivia, the girls' own double lives began. At 18, Carmen became a militant herself, plunging further into a world of terror, paranoia and euphoria.
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4 out of 5 stars
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revolutionary read
- By David Brown on 04-05-18
By: Carmen Aguirre