A Drop of Midnight
A Memoir
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $20.00
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Jason Diakité
About this listen
World-renowned hip-hop artist Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité’s vivid and intimate journey through his own and his family’s history - from South Carolina slavery to twenty-first-century Sweden.
Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakité grew up between worlds - part Swedish, American, black, white, Cherokee, Slovak, and German, riding a delicate cultural and racial divide. It was a no-man’s-land that left him in constant search of self. Even after his hip-hop career took off, Jason fought to unify a complex system of family roots that branched across continents, ethnicities, classes, colors, and eras to find a sense of belonging.
In A Drop of Midnight, Jason draws on conversations with his parents, personal experiences, long-lost letters, and pilgrimages to South Carolina and New York to paint a vivid picture of race, discrimination, family, and ambition. His ancestors’ origins as slaves in the antebellum South, his parents’ struggles as an interracial couple, and his own world-expanding connection to hip-hop helped him fashion a strong black identity in Sweden.
What unfolds in Jason’s remarkable voyage of discovery is a complex and unflinching look at not only his own history but also that of generations affected by the trauma of the African diaspora, then and now.
Paid In Full Words and Music by Eric Barrier and William Griffin © 1987 Universal - Songs of Polygram International, Inc. and Robert Hill Music. Peter Piper Words and Music by Darryl McDaniels and Joseph Simmons © 1986 Protoons, Inc. It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) Words and Music by Duke Ellington and Irving Mills © 1932 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and EMI Mills Music, Inc. in the U.S.A. I Know You Got Soul Words and Music by Bob Byrd, James Brown and Charles Bobbitt © 1971 (Renewed) Crited Music, Inc. Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud Words and Music by James Brown and Alfred James Ellis © 1968 (Renewed) Dynatone Publishing Company. Who’s That Knocking by The Genies © 1959 (Renewed) Time Music
©2016 Jason Timbuktu Diakité. Translation © 2020 by Rachel Willson-Broyles. (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
-
The Unspoken
- Ashe Cayne, Book 1
- By: Ian K. Smith
- Narrated by: Amir Abdullah
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After refusing to participate in a police department cover-up involving the death of a young black man, Chicago detective Ashe Cayne is pushed out of the force. But he won’t sit quietly on the sidelines: he’s compelled to fight for justice as a private investigator. When a young woman, Tinsley Gerrigan, goes missing, her wealthy parents from the North Shore hire Cayne to find her. As Cayne looks into her life and past, he uncovers secrets Tinsley’s been hiding from her family. Cayne fears he may never find Tinsley alive.
-
-
Too many street details
- By La Smurf on 10-16-20
By: Ian K. Smith
-
The Storyteller's Secret
- A Novel
- By: Sejal Badani
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nothing prepares Jaya, a New York journalist, for the heartbreak of her third miscarriage and the slow unraveling of her marriage in its wake. Desperate to assuage her deep anguish, she decides to go to India to uncover answers to her family’s past. Intoxicated by the sights, smells, and sounds she experiences, Jaya becomes an eager student of the culture. But it is Ravi - her grandmother’s former servant and trusted confidant - who reveals the resilience, struggles, secret love, and tragic fall of Jaya’s pioneering grandmother during the British occupation.
-
-
Nope
- By rmp on 11-06-20
By: Sejal Badani
-
Honeysuckle Season
- By: Mary Ellen Taylor
- Narrated by: Megan Tusing
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Adrift in the wake of her father's death, a failed marriage, and multiple miscarriages, Libby McKenzie feels truly alone. Though her new life as a wedding photographer provides a semblance of purpose, it's also a distraction from her profound pain. When asked to photograph a wedding at the historic Woodmont estate, Libby meets the owner, Elaine Grant. Hoping to open Woodmont to the public, Elaine has employed young widower Colton Reese to help restore the grounds and asks Libby to photograph the process.
-
-
Eh... average, I guess
- By Kimberly on 09-05-20
-
The Direction of the Wind
- A Novel
- By: Mansi Shah
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sophie Shah was six when she learned her mother, Nita, had died. For twenty-two years, she shouldered the burden of that loss. But when her father passes away, Sophie discovers a cache of hidden letters revealing a shattering truth: her mother didn’t die. She left.
-
-
As wordy & predictable as they come
- By AlexWals on 03-12-23
By: Mansi Shah
-
The Dressmaker's Gift
- By: Fiona Valpy
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik, Justine Eyre
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the best-selling author of The Beekeeper’s Promise comes a gripping story of three young women faced with impossible choices. How will history - and their families - judge them? Paris, 1940. With the city occupied by the Nazis, three young seamstresses go about their normal lives as best they can. But all three are hiding secrets. War-scarred Mireille is fighting with the Resistance; Claire has been seduced by a German officer; and Vivienne’s involvement is something she can’t reveal to either of them.
-
-
Fifty/Fifty
- By Eliza McNally on 10-28-19
By: Fiona Valpy
-
Kindred
- By: Octavia E. Butler
- Narrated by: Kim Staunton
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning White boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes she's been given a challenge.
-
-
The Past of Slavery Still Moves and Wounds Us
- By Jefferson on 12-05-10
-
The Unspoken
- Ashe Cayne, Book 1
- By: Ian K. Smith
- Narrated by: Amir Abdullah
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After refusing to participate in a police department cover-up involving the death of a young black man, Chicago detective Ashe Cayne is pushed out of the force. But he won’t sit quietly on the sidelines: he’s compelled to fight for justice as a private investigator. When a young woman, Tinsley Gerrigan, goes missing, her wealthy parents from the North Shore hire Cayne to find her. As Cayne looks into her life and past, he uncovers secrets Tinsley’s been hiding from her family. Cayne fears he may never find Tinsley alive.
-
-
Too many street details
- By La Smurf on 10-16-20
By: Ian K. Smith
-
The Storyteller's Secret
- A Novel
- By: Sejal Badani
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nothing prepares Jaya, a New York journalist, for the heartbreak of her third miscarriage and the slow unraveling of her marriage in its wake. Desperate to assuage her deep anguish, she decides to go to India to uncover answers to her family’s past. Intoxicated by the sights, smells, and sounds she experiences, Jaya becomes an eager student of the culture. But it is Ravi - her grandmother’s former servant and trusted confidant - who reveals the resilience, struggles, secret love, and tragic fall of Jaya’s pioneering grandmother during the British occupation.
-
-
Nope
- By rmp on 11-06-20
By: Sejal Badani
-
Honeysuckle Season
- By: Mary Ellen Taylor
- Narrated by: Megan Tusing
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Adrift in the wake of her father's death, a failed marriage, and multiple miscarriages, Libby McKenzie feels truly alone. Though her new life as a wedding photographer provides a semblance of purpose, it's also a distraction from her profound pain. When asked to photograph a wedding at the historic Woodmont estate, Libby meets the owner, Elaine Grant. Hoping to open Woodmont to the public, Elaine has employed young widower Colton Reese to help restore the grounds and asks Libby to photograph the process.
-
-
Eh... average, I guess
- By Kimberly on 09-05-20
-
The Direction of the Wind
- A Novel
- By: Mansi Shah
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sophie Shah was six when she learned her mother, Nita, had died. For twenty-two years, she shouldered the burden of that loss. But when her father passes away, Sophie discovers a cache of hidden letters revealing a shattering truth: her mother didn’t die. She left.
-
-
As wordy & predictable as they come
- By AlexWals on 03-12-23
By: Mansi Shah
-
The Dressmaker's Gift
- By: Fiona Valpy
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik, Justine Eyre
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the best-selling author of The Beekeeper’s Promise comes a gripping story of three young women faced with impossible choices. How will history - and their families - judge them? Paris, 1940. With the city occupied by the Nazis, three young seamstresses go about their normal lives as best they can. But all three are hiding secrets. War-scarred Mireille is fighting with the Resistance; Claire has been seduced by a German officer; and Vivienne’s involvement is something she can’t reveal to either of them.
-
-
Fifty/Fifty
- By Eliza McNally on 10-28-19
By: Fiona Valpy
-
Kindred
- By: Octavia E. Butler
- Narrated by: Kim Staunton
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning White boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes she's been given a challenge.
-
-
The Past of Slavery Still Moves and Wounds Us
- By Jefferson on 12-05-10
-
Winter Loon
- A Novel
- By: Susan Bernhard
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Abandoned by his father after his mother drowns in a frozen Minnesota lake, fifteen-year-old Wes Ballot is stranded with coldhearted grandparents and holed up in his mother’s old bedroom, surrounded by her remnants and memories. As the wait for his father stretches unforgivably into months, a local girl, whose own mother died a brutal death, captures his heart and imagination, giving Wes fresh air to breathe in the suffocating small town.
-
-
Warning
- By Dale Carleton on 02-25-19
By: Susan Bernhard
-
Unspeakable Things
- By: Jess Lourey
- Narrated by: Caitlin Kelly
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cassie McDowell’s life in 1980s Minnesota seems perfectly wholesome. She lives on a farm, loves school, and has a crush on the nicest boy in class. Yes, there are her parents’ strange parties and their parade of deviant guests, but she’s grown accustomed to them. All that changes when someone comes hunting in Lilydale. One by one, local boys go missing. One by one, they return changed - violent, moody, and withdrawn. What happened to them becomes the stuff of shocking rumors. The accusations of who’s responsible grow just as wild, and dangerous town secrets start to surface.
-
-
Oof
- By Derek Brown on 01-07-20
By: Jess Lourey
-
The Quarter Storm
- A Novel (Mambo Reina, Book 1)
- By: Veronica G. Henry
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Haitian-American Vodou priestess Mambo Reina Dumond runs a healing practice from her New Orleans home. Gifted with water magic since she was a child, Reina is devoted to the benevolent traditions of her ancestors. After a ritual slaying in the French Quarter, police arrest a fellow vodouisant. Detective Roman Frost, Reina’s ex-boyfriend - a fierce nonbeliever - is eager to tie the crime, and half a dozen others, to the Vodou practitioners of New Orleans. Reina resolves to find the real killer and defend the Vodou practice and customs.
-
-
One of the best books I've read in a long time
- By Lisa B. on 04-07-22
-
Death in the Sunshine
- The Retired Detectives Club, Book 1
- By: Steph Broadribb
- Narrated by: Sarah Zimmerman
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After a long career as a police officer, Moira hopes a move to a luxury retirement community will mean she can finally leave the detective work to the youngsters and focus on a quieter life. But it turns out The Homestead is far from paradise. When she discovers the body of a young woman floating in one of the pools, surrounded by thousands of dollar bills, her crime-fighting instinct kicks back in and she joins up with fellow ex-cops - and new neighbours - Philip, Lizzie and Rick to investigate the murder.
-
-
Left me wanting more!
- By Eileen on 09-19-22
By: Steph Broadribb
-
The Keeper of Happy Endings
- By: Barbara Davis
- Narrated by: Robin Siegerman, Hope Newhouse
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Soline Roussel is well schooled in the business of happy endings. For generations her family has kept an exclusive bridal salon in Paris, where magic is worked with needle and thread. It’s said that the bride who wears a Roussel gown is guaranteed a lifetime of joy. But devastating losses during World War II leave Soline’s world and heart in ruins and her faith in love shaken. She boxes up her memories, stowing them away, along with her broken dreams, determined to forget.
-
-
French accent
- By Lilya on 10-22-21
By: Barbara Davis
-
A Train to Moscow
- A Novel
- By: Elena Gorokhova
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Knowelden
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a small, provincial town behind the Iron Curtain, Sasha lives in a house full of secrets, one of which is her own dream of becoming an actress. When she leaves for Moscow to audition for drama school, she defies her mother and grandparents and abandons her first love, Andrei. Before she leaves, Sasha discovers the hidden war journal of her uncle Kolya, an artist still missing in action years after the war has ended. His pages expose the official lies and the forbidden truth of Stalin’s brutality.
-
-
Impressive from start to finish
- By brian on 03-02-22
By: Elena Gorokhova
-
The Good Immigrant
- 26 Writers Reflect on America
- By: Nikesh Shukla - editor, Chimene Suleyman - editor
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, full cast
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An urgent collection of essays by first- and second-generation immigrants, exploring what it's like to be othered in an increasingly divided America.
-
-
Loved it!
- By Kristie Smith on 11-06-19
By: Nikesh Shukla - editor, and others
-
Choose Me
- By: Tess Gerritsen, Gary Braver
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Taryn Moore is young, beautiful, and brilliant…so why would she kill herself? When Detective Frankie Loomis arrives on the scene to investigate the girl’s fatal plunge from her apartment balcony, she knows in her gut there’s more to the story. Her instincts are confirmed when surprise information is revealed that could have been reason enough for Taryn’s suicide - or a motive for her murder.
-
-
WONDERFUL!!!!
- By shelley on 07-02-21
By: Tess Gerritsen, and others
-
Homeland Elegies
- A Novel
- By: Ayad Akhtar
- Narrated by: Ayad Akhtar
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.
-
-
a mishmash of political theory and porn
- By LC on 02-06-21
By: Ayad Akhtar
-
A Day Like This
- A Novel
- By: Kelley McNeil
- Narrated by: Amanda Leigh Cobb
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Annie Beyers has everything - a beautiful house, a loving husband, and an adorable daughter. It’s a day like any other when she takes Hannah to the pediatrician…until she wakes hours later from a car accident. When she asks for her daughter, confused doctors tell Annie that Hannah never existed. In fact, nothing after waking from the crash is the same as Annie remembers. Five happy years of her life apparently never happened.
-
-
Great writing and narration
- By Anonymous User on 11-29-21
By: Kelley McNeil
-
The Yellow House
- By: Sarah M. Broom
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Great book. I wish the pictures had been included.
- By Lindsay on 02-28-20
By: Sarah M. Broom
-
Memorial Drive
- A Daughter's Memoir
- By: Natasha Trethewey
- Narrated by: Natasha Trethewey
- Length: 5 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At age 19, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief.
-
-
poetic
- By Amazon Customer on 08-03-20
Critic reviews
“His writing has an ethereal, questioning quality, in sync with his background...the author’s prose is often nimble and observant, sharply considering the burdens surrounding race and masculinity. A vibrant, thoughtful memoir reflecting contemporary black cultural concerns.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“This touching exploration of race and heritage is incisive, heartbreaking, and heartwarming.” (Library Journal)
“Diakité smooths out the conflicting complications of his heritage and upbringing to create a positive form of complexity.” (Booklist)
Related to this topic
-
The Song and the Silence
- A Story About Family, Race, and What Was Revealed in a Small Town in the Mississippi Delta While Searching for Booker Wright
- By: Yvette Johnson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"Have to keep that smile", said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time Wright was a waiter in a Whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: Before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.
-
-
Exceeded every expectation
- By ZeeJ84 on 05-23-21
By: Yvette Johnson
-
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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Deeply meaningful important read
- By A.M.Rousseau on 12-21-21
-
The Yellow House
- By: Sarah M. Broom
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Great book. I wish the pictures had been included.
- By Lindsay on 02-28-20
By: Sarah M. Broom
-
Unforgetting
- A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas
- By: Roberto Lovato
- Narrated by: Roberto Lovato
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato’s memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time - and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten.
-
-
Difficult to hear but important to know.
- By M. Lindquist on 12-18-20
By: Roberto Lovato
-
The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
-
-
Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
-
My Father's Paradise
- A Son's Search For His Family's Past
- By: Ariel Sabar
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.
-
-
Great story, poorly narrated
- By Oren Kessler on 09-10-24
By: Ariel Sabar
-
The Song and the Silence
- A Story About Family, Race, and What Was Revealed in a Small Town in the Mississippi Delta While Searching for Booker Wright
- By: Yvette Johnson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"Have to keep that smile", said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time Wright was a waiter in a Whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: Before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.
-
-
Exceeded every expectation
- By ZeeJ84 on 05-23-21
By: Yvette Johnson
-
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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Deeply meaningful important read
- By A.M.Rousseau on 12-21-21
-
The Yellow House
- By: Sarah M. Broom
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Great book. I wish the pictures had been included.
- By Lindsay on 02-28-20
By: Sarah M. Broom
-
Unforgetting
- A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas
- By: Roberto Lovato
- Narrated by: Roberto Lovato
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato’s memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time - and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten.
-
-
Difficult to hear but important to know.
- By M. Lindquist on 12-18-20
By: Roberto Lovato
-
The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
-
-
Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
-
My Father's Paradise
- A Son's Search For His Family's Past
- By: Ariel Sabar
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.
-
-
Great story, poorly narrated
- By Oren Kessler on 09-10-24
By: Ariel Sabar
-
Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
-
-
Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
-
What Storm, What Thunder
- By: Myriam J.A. Chancy
- Narrated by: Ella Turenne
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Earth had buckled, and, in that movement, all that was not in its place fell upon the Earth’s children, upon the blameless as well as the guilty, without discrimination. At the end of a long sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster
-
-
We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
- By AuthorAnnaBella on 03-15-22
-
He Came in with It
- A Portrait of Motherhood and Madness
- By: Miriam Feldman
- Narrated by: Ann Richardson
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In an idyllic Los Angeles neighborhood, where generations enjoy deep roots in old homes, the O’Rourke family fits right in. Miriam and Craig are both artists and their four children carry on the legacy. When their teenage son, Nick, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, a tumultuous decade ensues in which the family careens off the conventional course. Like the 10 Biblical plagues, they are hit by one catastrophe after another: violence, evictions, arrests, a suicide attempt, a near-drowning - even cancer and a brain tumor - play against the backdrop of a wild teenage bacchanal.
-
-
So Beautifully Written
- By Michael on 08-01-22
By: Miriam Feldman
-
The Undocumented Americans
- By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Narrated by: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Raw, heartbreaking - we can do better by others
- By RapaciousReader on 04-11-20
-
The Fire This Time
- A New Generation Speaks About Race
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Michael Early, Kevin R. Free, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.
-
-
Delusion shattering
- By Matthew A. Burnett on 06-12-20
By: Jesmyn Ward
-
Angels Burning
- By: Tawni O'Dell
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the surface, Chief Dove Carnahan is a true trailblazer who would do anything to protect the rural Pennsylvanian countryside where she has lived all 50 of her years. Traditional and proud of her blue-collar sensibilities, Dove is loved by her community. But beneath her badge lies a dark and self-destructive streak, fed by a secret she has kept since she was 16.
-
-
It was just ok
- By ckal36 on 06-27-23
By: Tawni O'Dell
What listeners say about A Drop of Midnight
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- CAMT
- 05-23-21
Excellent n was narration
The narration was excellent. It was wonderful to hear the story first hand from Jason. The constant foul language was unnecessary. I feel you were trying to be real about how everyone talks but it was a turn off. I am glad I finished it though.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Beth
- 12-05-23
Finding oneself with the help of others
I really enjoyed this book and loved that Jason narrated it himself. I’m still processing all of my feelings about this book, I feel I can’t find the right words to express them, but I definitely would recommend it.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Penchant
- 03-18-20
Thank you Jason!
Your book is healing, beautifully honest, brave and your love shines through it all. really great!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Mark A. Stiles
- 11-18-20
Not Often
Not often do I find myself so in tuned with an author that I convert from the book to the voice. I read and felt as if I, as a son of a Black man and White woman, that my thoughts, doubts, desires, corrections, and innermost dialogue matches Jason’s. Converting to audio let me hear his voice, telling a story from a perspective that matched but was an outsiders opinion. A son of the US, but a child of Sweden, Jason brings an understanding of past, a reality of present, and a message of the future. My son and daughter will too only have a Drop of Midnight, but this book will be a required reading so they understand where we came from, who we are in 2020, and they can use it to reflect on how their 2030-2040s have taken steps forward. MUST READ.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- michelle ross
- 08-25-22
Deepening
I appreciate the depth of research, Cate personal transformation of the author for me. Thanks.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Commoncent$
- 08-01-20
Incredible Personal Narrative
This was biting and so personal and I was completely drawn into Jason's "Timbuktu" life story. His prose and storytelling were riveting and compelling. I couldn't get over how much American history I learned from this multicultural, multi-talented, Swedish-American as he struggled with his racial identity, his parents, and his father's genealogy.
Highly recommend
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Sarah D.
- 05-24-20
So sad to finish this moving, intimate book!
Like many people, I knew Jason Diakite's music long before I knew his story. As Timbuktu, he writes and raps (mostly) in Swedish, so as a Swedish language student, I listen to him for inspiration, insight, and great beats. ;)
This book is so well-written - accessibly poetic - just like his lyrics, but what's remarkable is his openness about this personal journey and his family relationships. It's also fun to read about his young adult obsession with hip-hop culture and the opening of his mind to both African American history and the twists and turns of the US's persistent racism, which happened around the same time for me here in America.
Most of the historical information won't be new to American readers; it is so important, though to hear it again from the author's retelling, and it adds much to the story's strength. But Diakite's unique perspective on race on a super-personal level, and his vulnerability, emphasized even more by his voice in this performance, makes this so special. I own the book in hardback form, but I'm so glad that my first "reading" came through my ears, as Timbuktu has for the past few years.
I feel like I've made a new old friend, a friend who has evolved as a person right before our eyes in this text, and I can't wait to see what he does next.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful