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The Underground Railroad (Television Tie-in)
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
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Publisher's summary
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. • Now an original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!
Critic reviews
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE, THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, THE ALA ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL AND THE HURSTON/WRIGHT AWARD
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, WALL STREET JOURNAL, WASHINGTON POST, TIME, PEOPLE, NPR AND MORE
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“Get it, then get another copy for someone you know because you are definitely going to want to talk about it once you read that heart-stopping last page.” --Oprah Winfrey (Oprah's Book Club 2016 Selection)
“[A] potent, almost hallucinatory novel... It possesses the chilling matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift…He has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present.” --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Featured Article: Outstanding Black Authors Across Various Genres and Styles
Stories have the power not only to transport us, but to allow us to connect, understand, and feel represented. The work of phenomenal Black authors—like those featured in this list—has expanded the ambition, scope, and perspective of storytelling. These must-hear titles from some of the best Black authors of all time are also indisputably some of the most remarkable works of literature in both the contemporary and historical canon.
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Dated.
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Tiana was a Cherokee woman. She grew up learning the magic, spells, and nature religion of her people. Before Sam Houston became the father of Texas, he was a young man who had run away from his home in Tennessee to live among the Cherokee. He came to love Tiana. As the Cherokee would say, she walked in his soul. But Sam was a white man, and Tiana, a Cherokee. And the dreams each had for their land and their people were far apart.
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This is the story of an extraordinary friendship between two remarkable women, both caught in the shadow of slavery in the 19th-century South. One is an escaped black slave under sentence of death; the other is white, yet committed to end the horrors her neighbors accept as a matter of course. Ruby Dee's passionate and sensitive readings gives a poignant sense of reality to this magnificent novel of courage, daring and love.
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One Star from Perfect
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Beautiful example of magical realism.
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Story
Tiana was a Cherokee woman. She grew up learning the magic, spells, and nature religion of her people. Before Sam Houston became the father of Texas, he was a young man who had run away from his home in Tennessee to live among the Cherokee. He came to love Tiana. As the Cherokee would say, she walked in his soul. But Sam was a white man, and Tiana, a Cherokee. And the dreams each had for their land and their people were far apart.
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i honestly don't know what is going in this book
- By Bryntainia Holloway on 09-21-19
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Dessa Rose
- A Novel
- By: Sherley Anne Williams
- Narrated by: Ruby Dee
- Length: 2 hrs and 56 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This is the story of an extraordinary friendship between two remarkable women, both caught in the shadow of slavery in the 19th-century South. One is an escaped black slave under sentence of death; the other is white, yet committed to end the horrors her neighbors accept as a matter of course. Ruby Dee's passionate and sensitive readings gives a poignant sense of reality to this magnificent novel of courage, daring and love.
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One Star from Perfect
- By Marty on 01-26-18
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She Would Be King
- A Novel
- By: Wayétu Moore
- Narrated by: Wayétu Moore
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him.
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Beautiful example of magical realism.
- By Danielle on 10-07-18
By: Wayétu Moore
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The Known World
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: Kevin Free
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.
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A meandering audiobook...
- By Daniel on 09-03-04
By: Edward P. Jones
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Andersonville
- By: MacKinlay Kantor
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 37 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Acclaimed as the greatest novel ever written about the War Between the States, this searing Pulitzer Prize-winning book captures all the glory and shame of America's most tragic conflict in the vivid, crowded world of Andersonville, and the people who lived outside its barricades. Based on the author's extensive research and nearly 25 years in the making, MacKinlay Kantor's best-selling masterwork tells the heartbreaking story of the notorious Georgia prison where 50,000 Northern soldiers suffered.
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Worthy of the Pulitzer
- By Gillian on 03-22-15
By: MacKinlay Kantor
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The Sugar Camp Quilt
- By: Jennifer Chiaverini
- Narrated by: Christina Moore
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jennifer Chiaverini's New York Times best-selling Elm Creek Quilt novels, with their irresistible blend of storytelling magic and quilting lore, have captured the hearts of countless fans. In this moving novel about morality, freedom, and the power of human courage, Chiaverini whisks listeners back to antebellum America.
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Take Two
- By Nana Quilter on 06-09-06
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Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
- By: Kelly Link - editor, Gavin J. Grant - editor
- Narrated by: Sarah Coomes, Nico Evers-Swindell, Shannon McManus, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Imagine an alternate universe where romance and technology reign. Where tinkerers and dreamers craft and recraft a world of automatons, ornate clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that. Where scientists and schoolgirls, fair folk and Romans, intergalactic bandits, and intrepid orphans - decked out in corsets, clockwerk suits, and tall black boots - solve dastardly crimes, escape from monstrous predicaments, consult oracles, and hover over volcanoes in steam-powered airships.
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MMMM, Orca Bacon
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 09-14-13
By: Kelly Link - editor, and others
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Crockett of Tennessee
- A Novel Based on the Life and Times of David Crockett
- By: Cameron Judd
- Narrated by: Allan Robertson
- Length: 17 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From humble beginnings in rural Tennessee to his heroic death defending the Alamo, frontiersman, adventurer, and politician David Davy Crockett embodies the spirit and ideals of the national character. Even during his lifetime, tales of the sharpshooting, skilled woodsman were - to his delight - told, retold, and elaborated on. As a US congressman, the former Creek War militiaman steadfastly opposed President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act.
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I highly recommend
- By That Man They Call Shad on 05-05-21
By: Cameron Judd
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
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Guernica
- A Novel
- By: Dave Boling
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 13 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Calling to mind such timeless war-and-love classics as Corelli's Mandolin and The English Patient, Guernica is a transporting novel that thrums with the power of storytelling and is peopled with characters driven by grit and heart.
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Guernica a good historical novel
- By ARLEENE on 04-26-11
By: Dave Boling
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The Last Ballad
- A Novel
- By: Wiley Cash
- Narrated by: Karen White, Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Twelve times a week, 28-year-old Ella May Wiggins makes the two-mile trek to and from her job on the night shift at American Mill No. Two in Bessemer City, North Carolina. The insular community considers the mill's owners - the newly arrived Goldberg brothers - white but not American and expects them to pay Ella May and other workers less because they toil alongside African Americans like Violet, Ella May's best friend. While the dirty, hazardous job at the mill earns Ella May a paltry nine dollars for 72 hours of work each week, it's the only opportunity she has.
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Dryer than a popcorn fart
- By Scott Wilson on 02-11-18
By: Wiley Cash
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March
- By: Geraldine Brooks
- Narrated by: Richard Easton
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story "filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man" (Sue Monk Kidd). With "pitch-perfect writing" (USA Today), Brooks follows March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs.
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Great book, greatly narrated
- By Paula on 07-30-06
By: Geraldine Brooks
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Finn
- A Novel
- By: Jon Clinch
- Narrated by: Ed Sala
- Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One hundred and twenty years ago, Mark Twain left Huckleberry Finn’s father dead in a room crowded with oddities: a wooden leg, women’s underclothing, two black cloth masks, and more. Now, in a resonant and remarkable new novel, Jon Clinch tells the story of how the brutal and explosive Finn met his end in a room jammed with the telltale artifacts of his strange and mysterious life.
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Finn brought to life in Clinch's homage to Twain.
- By Darrell on 03-21-12
By: Jon Clinch
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Far North
- A Novel
- By: Marcel Theroux
- Narrated by: Yelena Schmulenson
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
My father had an expression for a thing that turned out bad. He'd say it had gone west. But going west always sounded pretty good to me. After all, westwards is the path of the sun. And through as much history as I know of, people have moved west to settle and find freedom. But our world had gone north, truly gone north, and just how far north I was beginning to learn.
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Spellbinding!
- By Joan on 01-14-10
By: Marcel Theroux
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- By: Maya Angelou
- Narrated by: Maya Angelou
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age - and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. But years later, she learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors.
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Emotional & Powerful
- By Miss Toni on 06-30-13
By: Maya Angelou
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Was I supposed to feel sorry?
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Imagine if you made one little mistake when you were young and were punished for it for the rest of your life. Well, that’s what happened to Lydia (yes, that Lydia, the youngest Bennet sister from Pride and Prejudice), and she’s here to set the record straight. Hold on to your teacups and get ready for sophisticated (and a little bit naughty) hot takes and witty banter that’ll make you laugh—and think. We meet Lydia just as she is denounced by her family, exiled miles from home, and married to the rogue George Wickham, who seems to love all women...except his own wife.
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Anna is at a stage of her life when she's beginning to wonder who she really is. She has separated from her husband, her daughter is all grown up, and her mother - the only parent who raised her - is dead. Searching through her mother's belongings one day, Anna finds clues about the African father she never knew. His student diaries chronicle his involvement in radical politics in 1970s London. Anna discovers that he eventually became the president - some would say dictator - of a small nation in West Africa. And he is still alive.
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Harlem Shuffle
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To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Ray Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.
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What a rare pleasure
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Little Princes
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In search of adventure, 29-year-old Conor Grennan traded his day job for a year-long trip around the globe, a journey that began with a three-month stint volunteering at the Little Princes Children's Home, an orphanage in war-torn Nepal. Conor was initially reluctant to volunteer, unsure whether he had the proper skill, or enough passion, to get involved in a developing country in the middle of a civil war. But he was soon overcome by the herd of rambunctious, resilient children.
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Amazing experience + Inspiring tale
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Girls & Boys
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Overall
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Performance
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When they met at an airport, it was love at first sight. But in time, everything collapsed. As an unnamed but unforgettable woman muses on her life—from meet cute to marriage and parenthood—her recollections inexorably build to a devastating truth. In this shattering performance, Carey Mulligan, star of the critically lauded drama An Education, captivates audiences with playwright Dennis Kelly’s harrowing ruminations on family, ambition, gender, and violence.
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Be aware of the content before listening
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Invisible Man
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching—yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places. It is a book that has a great deal to say and which is destined to have a great deal said about it.
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How Did This Escape Me?
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By: Ralph Ellison
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The Kite Runner
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Why we think it’s a great listen: Never before has an author’s narration of his fiction been so important to fully grasping the book’s impact and global implications. Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of its monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them.
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A Worhty Read
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El ferrocarril subterráneo [The Underground Railroad]
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Cora es una joven esclava de una plantación de algodón en Georgia. Abandonada por su madre, vive sometida a la crueldad de sus amos. Cuando César, un joven de Virginia, le habla del ferrocarril subterráneo, ambos deciden iniciar una arriesgada huida hacia el Norte para conseguir la libertad.
By: Colson Whitehead
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Lincoln in the Bardo
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.”
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"Where might God stand?"
- By Mel on 02-17-17
By: George Saunders
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John Henry Days
- By: Colson Whitehead
- Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez
- Length: 17 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
J. Sutter is a bonafide junketeer - a freelance writer, travelling from city to city, hungry for free meals and the discarded sales receipts of others to claim on his expense account. Travelling into the backwoods of West Virginia to write a piece on the unveiling of the new John Henry postage stamp and the ensuing John Henry Days festival, J. continues his nearly record-setting, three-month junket binge.
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Well-crafted story
- By Lora S. on 05-10-20
By: Colson Whitehead
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The Colossus of New York
- A City in Thirteen Parts
- By: Colson Whitehead
- Narrated by: Colson Whitehead
- Length: 3 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
New York Times best-selling author and New York native Colson Whitehead composes a breathtaking tribute to his hometown. Whitehead captures the very essence of New York, infusing his reflections with the energy that permeates the city.
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Just not entertaining
- By Rebecca on 09-07-09
By: Colson Whitehead
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The Intuitionist
- By: Colson Whitehead
- Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Lila Mae Watson - the first black female inspector in the world's tallest city - has the highest performance rating of anyone in the Department of Elevator Inspectors. This upsets her superiors, because Lila is an Intuitionist: she inspects elevators simply by the feelings she gets riding in them. When a brand new elevator crashes, Lila becomes caught in the conflict between her Intuitionist methods and the beliefs of the power-holding Empiricists.
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Fires on all cylinders; GREAT ! ! !
- By Robert on 08-24-12
By: Colson Whitehead
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The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
- By: Dawnie Walton
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Overall
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Opal is a fiercely independent young woman pushing against the grain in her style and attitude, Afro-punk before that term existed. Coming of age in Detroit, she can’t imagine settling for a 9-to-5 job—despite her unusual looks, Opal believes she can be a star. So when the aspiring British singer/songwriter Neville Charles discovers her at a bar’s amateur night, she takes him up on his offer to make rock music together for the fledgling Rivington Records.
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Outstanding and timely
- By Darrell HANSCHEN on 04-26-21
By: Dawnie Walton
What listeners say about The Underground Railroad (Television Tie-in)
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- JQR
- 12-01-16
Stupendous book, hard to follow in audio
I started this on a drive but ended up buying the Kindle version and reading it. It's one of the best books I ever read; deeply moving, vivid, and important. But his time cuts and character introductions make it hard to follow as a listener. The reader was fine; it's the book's structure that's challenging.
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156 people found this helpful
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- Nicole
- 06-01-17
Hard to follow in audio format
Any additional comments?
The story is fascinating and important, but there are aspects to the story that make it hard to follow in this format. It felt like there were opening quotes, or ads searching for missing slaves at the introduction of each chapter, which didn't translate well in audio. There is also quite a bit of reminiscing done by the characters which also became difficult to understand.I may go back and re-read this sometime because I feel like I kept missing parts. I would recommend the book, but I would recommend reading it as opposed to listening.
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103 people found this helpful
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- serine
- 08-07-16
Great info, weak story
The subject matter is wonderful and I applaud the efforts of the author to include many details that are often isolated to academic articles. However, though strong on the academic side, the storytelling failed to engage me in the way that really good historical fiction should. I feel almost bad giving a book with a fantastic subject less than a fantastic review, but it simply didn't live up to the hype. The good news is that there is still room for an author who can provide excellent research *and* an engaging story.
I would say that the subject matter is important enough that I would recommend this book, even if the story could have been better.
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- Mel
- 08-14-16
Imagining a railroad underground
Whether an author resents the spotlight (Franzen) or views the distinction as manna from heaven, once a book has been branded with The Oprah Winfrey Book Club sticker, I generally feel inclined to pass – only because I am concerned my opinion will be swayed by the shadow of the mega-star. Even here, with a subject I am drawn to, I have to wonder if this is a book that I would have read, and in hindsight I think it's a good book that got a boost. Either way, it was a worthwhile read that I would recommend on its own merits. My early desire to learn about slavery in America was actually ignited by way of Siam (Thailand), circa 1860....
Margaret Landon wrote a novel based on the diaries of Anna Harriette Leonowens that in 1956 would become the fifth musical by the acclaimed team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. The novel was Anna and the King of Siam; the musical was The King and I starring Yul Bryner and Deborah Kerr. As a young child, I saw the film on TV, but I wasn’t too young to experience one of my first *Aha Moments.* The servants of the king stage a surreally beautiful Siamese version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: "The Small House of Uncle Thomas." I told my mother I wanted to be a dancer, and more importantly, I wanted to read the book about Uncle Tom's Cabin. I wouldn't sit down with Eliza, Tom, and the monstrously cruel Simon Legree until years later, but Stowe’s 1852 novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly,” even though less grand than I expected, ignited the initial spark that helped me understand the inhumanity of slavery.
Author Colson Whitehead sets out to give us history through the haze of a nightmare, imagining the legendary Underground Railroad as an actual train that actually runs underground. Whitehead's railroad is a white-knuckle dark journey where the desperate passengers must blindly put their trust in shadowy strangers; directions and destinations are obscure; the cost to ride may very likely be the escapee's life, or possibly abuse that could make them wish to be dead. To set out to even find the passage to freedom is to step off into the unknown. It is a riveting and emotional read that’s hard to put down. Parts of the story felt nightmarish, otherworldly: the towns where the slaves would hideout, the weekly hanging spectacles, the betrayal by neighbors; at times it had a bizarre carnival atmosphere.
The story succeeds in the tradition of most books in this genre, reminding us of the barbarism and unimaginable cruelties endured by these men, women and children. Additionally, I felt it was more psychological, drawing the reader into the strategies and thinking of Cora. The writing needs to be noted; it is incredible. Whitehead has plenty of official accolades and awards -- it's obvious as you read Underground Railroad that he is an author that deserves the attention. In the future, if considering a novel, his name will be a selling point for me
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My feelings, however, were conflicted. I didn't love the actualized metaphor of the underground railroad. I felt in some way it simplified the journey of these people in an otherwise excellent novel. Underground Railroad is worth a read, a reminder – it’s another chapter of the experience, but it didn't enlarge the facts or expand the experience for me. The perspective of imagining, the *what-if* hovered over the story like an interruption. It might be the specter of The Oprah Winfrey Book Club sticker, but it's hard for me to rate this completely objectively. I stick to my first opinion...a good book that got a boost.
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67 people found this helpful
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- Shelley
- 08-09-16
Hard to follow
I was interested in the premise of the book. For there to be an actual Underground Railroad is a very interesting concept. However, the story was very difficult to follow because you were constantly changing back and forth in time. Trying to maintain who was speaking in reference to what was confusing. It was just not as interesting as I'd hoped it would be.
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- Brandie
- 08-03-16
Gripping
The narrator was excellent! I was unable to out it down! I plan to recommend this book to friends and family.
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- Darwin8u
- 02-18-20
Sometimes a useful delusion > a useless truth.
“Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
I loved the book. I read it right after reading the recent Blight biography of Frederick Douglass - Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. I was in the mood. I also read it after Whitehead's most recent, devastating novel - The Nickel Boys. So, I was definitely well prepared to step down into Whitehead's world.
Interestingly, a lot of what I enjoyed about this novel were items called out by other reviewers as negatives. I loved the structure of the novel. The Underground Railroad being literal adds a bit of magical realism to the novel. It isn't a novel about the Underground Railroad. It IS a novel about slavery and being black in America, and the Underground Railroad is simply the frame that allows Whitehead to move the narrator forward and backward through time and space to describe different characteristics of what it means to be a slave in the South in America. Fantastic.
A second critique of the novel that I actually found both critical and important is that just as you were getting to know a character, they would die or disappear (clearly, these reviewers weren't fans of Game of Thrones). That perceived flaw, for me, was a brilliant device where Whitehead is able to transfer to the reader just a bit of how disruptive and disjoined the life of a slave must have felt. You form connections and BAM you are sold. You love someone and SNAP they are ripped from you. In life, those connections are never tied off neatly. People disappear. They die. Stories get left untold. Those shifts come suddenly and painfully, especially under slavery's hard hand and cruel lash.
Some reviewers were irritated by some of the language, behavior, or cultural anachronisms of the novel. This isn't meant to be historical fiction. This is magical realism. This is emotional fiction. So, I'm not sure I need it to have a perfect verisimilitude to pre-Civil War America. If Whitehead's anachronisms were accidental, which I doubt, that might be different, but I believe Colson Whitehead is aiming not just to tell a story about slavery, but about racism and his target isn't the Antebellum South, but our modern racist present AND the way we enslave others beyond chains. What? You mean there weren't actually trains running back and forth underneath the South? I might be wrong, but I wouldn't bet your freedom on it.
Finally, there is the irritation about it winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017. It must be bad. It won a prize. First, I'm fond appropriating a quote from Willam Gass where he apologized after winning some prize, saying he would try better next time. There is a certain truth to the fact that prize winners tend to often gravitate towards safe picks. Often, those committees steer towards consensus and safe, but that doesn't also mean they sometimes don't get it right. Whitehead has produced, again and again, great fiction. Is he also writing fiction that sells? Sure, but so did Dickens and Twain. Does winning the Pulitzer Prize somehow diminish the book itself? No, that is silly. Does it mean in 2017 there were no better novels published? Absolutely not. I could almost guarantee that outside the realm of prize fiction, and bestsellers, some of the best fiction lies under-appreciated and unread by most. That was the case for Moby-Dick for years and a lot of people consume mediocre shit most of the time (just look at the most popular restaurants). But popular and well-known novels can also kick ass. Q.E.D.
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51 people found this helpful
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- J.B.
- 08-06-16
Does Not Make the Grade
The Underground Railroad (Oprah's Book Club) by Colson Whitehead, and read by Banhi Turpin. The novel, although with some qualities just does not do its job. A disappointment.
This is a potentially very well-conceived story. The account covers a history of a Georgian slave starting with her grandmother’s removal from Africa, to her abandonment by her mother, to slavery life in the South, and then mostly her efforts to escape, and her path in that journey. Does she escape? Is there even such a concept of escape to one who was previously enslaved? Well to find out you can read the book.
The story is excellent in portraying the horrific life of those enslaved. In fact, one could characterize the book as being a horror novel and it could put the The Texas Chain Saw Massacre series to shame for its dismemberment of the human condition. It teaches us the frailty of humankind particularly to each other and chiefly where we can distinguish between ourselves given an inconsequential factor such as skin tones. If you need to be more disgusted about one human owning another this book will provide a plethora of human on human repulsive acts.
The Underground Railroad, itself though, never enthralls the reader. It lumbers on and on and on like the overworked motor of an old refrigerator grumbling in an effort to keep its inners cool. The reader, Ms. Turpin, an iconic reader of black lives novels, is a dullard in this production. Thus, although the story has purpose and potential it never reaches the status of an engrossing tale. One must struggle to complete the book. (Toward the end the story does finally draw you into the plot but that is only about 30 minutes in over ten hours of not too involving literature.)
In addition there is not too much about the Underground Railroad. Yes, its existence is always here and we do learn of the courageous acts of some of its station masters, but there is not much more about its history or what caused its coming into existence or how it operated.
Oprah has had better picks, and although it is not a total waste of time I think there is better literature out there. Not a total flop, just not a whopper.
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- ibillinsly@gmail
- 08-18-17
Narrator is fantastic and the story is a Good one
What did you love best about The Underground Railroad (Oprah's Book Club)?
I like the narrator a lot. I can't make it through a novel unless the narrator is competent, no matter how good the narrative is.
Who was your favorite character and why?
I liked all of the characters. Even the unlikable characters were fun to hear about.
Have you listened to any of Bahni Turpin’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
No I have not, but I will listen to more in the future if she narrates novels in which I am interested. She was the perfect narrator for this story.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
I did not laugh, as this is not a comedic novel, and I have never cried while listening to an audiobook. My reaction was not extreme, but I was interested in the story for the entire way through it.
Any additional comments?
This is brilliant concept in regards to the actual Underground Railroad. I like what the author has done here, and I imagine this novel will be studied in literature classes in the future. I do suggest giving it a try.
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- JoAnn
- 08-09-16
Do not recommend
Worst book I ever listened too. Slow, drawn out, too detailed. I kept wanting to quit. Finally skipped to last chapter just to finish. It became a challenge.
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