When Normal Blew Up
The Story of the People Who Died and the People Who Lived On
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When Normal Blew Up
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Narrated by:
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Jim Willison
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By:
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Joni Foster
About this listen
In 1967, in the small town of Circleville, Ohio, a man walked into an old-fashioned drug store on a busy Saturday and laid a smoking package on the pharmacy counter. He shouted for everyone to leave; he had a bomb.
Five people died that day, and the mystery surrounding this event was never fully solved until, 50 years later, Joni Foster went looking for the details. Over nine months, she would interview first responders and survivors to hear stories about what happened and how they and the town moved forward. The event was so shocking, many of those closest to the event had never spoken about their trauma, even to their own families.
The story is a tragedy, a history lesson on the slow, painful emancipation of women, and ultimately a love story to the families trying to live normal lives.
The author, Joni Foster, is the daughter of one of the people who died that day. Joni has spent her life helping communities around the globe as an organizer, developer, and storyteller.
Read by Jim Willison. Jim is a professional voice-over and audiobook narrator. It is a special honor to have Jim read this book as he and his family were a part of this tragic story. Growing up right outside of Circleville, Jim’s mother died in the event described in this audiobook.
©2017 Joni Foster (P)2019 Joni FosterListeners also enjoyed...
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 31
At the height of WW2, 22-year-old Nina Raff learns that her beloved pilot husband has been killed in plane crash. To escape her grief, she upends her life, moves across country, and plunges into another marriage far too soon. For the next 20 years, she buries her sadness and ignores the past to appease her jealous alcoholic second husband. But when her teenage daughter discovers a long-hidden wedding photo, an unforgettable story of love, heartbreaking loss, oppression, and family secrets tumbles out, compounded by a mystery the daughter is determined to solve.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Beautifully done!
- By Cdg on 07-10-20
By: Nadine Taylor
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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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One Day
- The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America
- By: Gene Weingarten
- Narrated by: Johnathan McClain
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 157
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 140
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 140
On New Year’s Day 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Gene Weingarten asked three strangers to, literally, pluck a day, month, and year from a hat. That day - chosen completely at random - was Sunday, December 28, 1986, by any conventional measure a most ordinary day. Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing. That Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s turned out to be filled with comedy, tragedy, implausible irony, cosmic comeuppances, kindness, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, genius, idiocy, and much more....
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3 out of 5 stars
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I'm giving this book more credit for its concept
- By J. F. Boyd on 12-24-19
By: Gene Weingarten
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Say I'm Dead
- A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love
- By: E. Dolores Johnson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 31
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 31
Fearful of prison time - or lynching - for violating Indiana’s anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's Black father and White mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her family that she was the victim of foul play, either dead or sold into white slavery.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Deeply meaningful important read
- By A.M.Rousseau on 12-21-21
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Mitka’s Secret
- A True Story of Child Slavery and Surviving the Holocaust
- By: Steven W. Brallier, Joel N. Lohr, Lynn G. Beck
- Narrated by: Trevor Thompson
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 28
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 23
This is Mitka’s account of facing the past, confronting his captors, connecting with lost relatives, and finding peace in the rediscovery of his origins. For Mitka, this also meant reclaiming his Jewish heritage - a journey that gave him a new sense of purpose and freedom from the lingering effects of trauma that had filled his life to that point. By the end, Mitka’s Secret is less a story of survival and more one of redemption and transformation - from hidden suffering to abundant joy.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This should be a movie!!!
- By Amazon Customer on 09-11-21
By: Steven W. Brallier, and others
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The Undocumented Americans
- By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Narrated by: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,028
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 889
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 882
Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants—and to find the hidden key to her own.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Raw, heartbreaking - we can do better by others
- By RapaciousReader on 04-11-20
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West of the West
- Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State
- By: Mark Arax
- Narrated by: Mark Arax
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 26
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 22
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Story5 out of 5 stars 22
Teddy Roosevelt once exclaimed, "When I am in California, I am not in the West. I am west of the West", and in this book, Mark Arax spends four years travelling up and down the Golden State to explore its singular place in the world. This is California beyond the clichés. This is California as only a native son, deep in the dust, could draw it.
By: Mark Arax
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Reclamation
- Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant's Search for Her Family's Lasting Legacy
- By: Gayle Jessup White
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 23
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 23
A Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ family explores America’s racial reckoning through the prism of her ancestors - both the enslaver and the enslaved.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Slow start, eventually a worthwhile story
- By ChocolateDweller on 12-17-21
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The Survivors
- A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing
- By: Adam Frankel
- Narrated by: Adam Frankel, Rob Shapiro
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 136
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 123
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 121
Adam Frankel’s maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust and built new lives, with new names, in Connecticut. Though they tried to leave the horrors of their past behind, the pain they suffered crossed generational lines - a fact most apparent in the mental health of Adam’s mother. When Adam sat down with her to examine their family history in detail, he learned another shocking secret, this time one that unraveled Adam’s entire understanding of who he is.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing story
- By Alissa on 12-26-19
By: Adam Frankel
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Home Baked
- My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco
- By: Alia Volz
- Narrated by: Alia Volz
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 80
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 65
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Story5 out of 5 stars 66
During the '70s in San Francisco, Alia's mother ran the underground Sticky Fingers Brownies, delivering upwards of 10,000 illegal marijuana edibles per month throughout the circus-like atmosphere of a city in the throes of major change. She exchanged psychic readings with Alia's future father, and thereafter had a partner in business and life. Exhilarating, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreaking, Home Baked celebrates an eccentric and remarkable extended family, taking us through love, loss, and finding home.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Everything and more
- By Becky Love on 10-20-24
By: Alia Volz
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Lone Stars
- By: Justin Deabler
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 27
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Story4 out of 5 stars 26
Lone Stars follows the arc of four generations of a Texan family in a changing America. Julian Warner, a father at last, wrestles with a question his husband posed: what will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they're gone? Finding the answers takes Julian back in time to Eisenhower's immigration border raids, an epistolary love affair during the Vietnam War, crumbling marriages, queer migrations to Cambridge and New York, up to the disorienting polarization of Obama's second term.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Read for bookclub but fell in Love
- By Ericka Lawson on 09-11-22
By: Justin Deabler
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This Is Chance!
- The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together
- By: Jon Mooallem
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 175
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 147
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 146
In the spring of 1964, Anchorage, Alaska, was a modern-day frontier town yearning to be a metropolis - the largest, proudest city in a state that was still brand-new. But just before sundown on Good Friday, the community was jolted by the most powerful earthquake in American history, a catastrophic 9.2 on the Richter Scale. This Is Chance! is the thrilling, cinematic story of a community shattered by disaster - and the extraordinary woman who helped pull it back together.
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4 out of 5 stars
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amazing story
- By Dani L on 02-07-21
By: Jon Mooallem
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Before and After
- The Incredible Real-Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children's Home Society
- By: Judy Christie, Lisa Wingate
- Narrated by: Emily Rankin
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,715
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,486
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,472
From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of 15 adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Badly written
- By Stacie on 02-25-20
By: Judy Christie, and others
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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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Once Upon a Town
- The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen
- By: Bob Greene
- Narrated by: Fritz Weaver
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 128
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 99
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 100
During World War II, American soldiers from every city and walk of life rolled through North Platte, Nebraska, on troop trains, en route to Europe and the Pacific. The tiny town transformed its modest railroad depot into the North Platte Canteen, a place where soldiers could enjoy coffee, music, home-cooked food, magazines, and friendly conversation during a stopover that lasted only a few minutes.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Long Tale of a Truly Inspiring Short Tale
- By Suzy on 02-25-11
By: Bob Greene
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The Forest City Killer
- A Serial Murderer, a Cold-Case Sleuth, and a Search for Justice
- By: Vanessa Brown
- Narrated by: Vivienne Leheny
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 56
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 48
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
Fifty years ago, a serial killer prowled the quiet city of London, Ontario, marking it as his hunting grounds. As young women and boys were abducted, raped, and murdered, residents of the area held their loved ones closer and closer, terrified of the monster - or monsters - stalking the streets. Homicide detective Dennis Alsop began hunting the killer in the 1960s, and he didn’t stop searching until his death 40 years later.
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1 out of 5 stars
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All Wrong
- By Merkavius on 11-02-19
By: Vanessa Brown
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The Ground Breaking
- An American City and Its Search for Justice
- By: Scott Ellsworth
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 10 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 41
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 41
Over the course of less than 24 hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s infamous “Black Wall Street” was wiped off the map - and erased from the history books. Official records were disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than 50 years. But there were some secrets that would not die. A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa race massacre.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent book on the Tulsa Massacre
- By vivabooks on 08-15-21
By: Scott Ellsworth