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Publisher's summary
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
Named a Best Book of The Year by Time, NPR, InStyle, and Good Housekeeping
"A sensational new book [that] tries to figure out whether it’s possible to live an ethical life in a capitalist society.... The results are enthralling." (Associated Press)
"A timely and arresting new look at affluence by the New York Times best-selling author, “one of the leading lights of the modern American essay." (Financial Times)
“My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts”, Eula Biss writes, “the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.” Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges - in libraries and laundromats, over barstools and backyard fences - she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism. Described by the New York Times as a writer who “advances from all sides, like a chess player,” Biss offers an uncommonly immersive and deeply revealing new portrait of work and luxury, of accumulation and consumption, of the value of time and how we spend it. Ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon, Biss asks, of both herself and her class, “In what have we invested?”
Critic reviews
“Compulsively readable ... blends research, reflection and richly rendered personal experience.... This is a book that asks to be read, absorbed and read again.” (BookPage)
“[A] strong new meditation on buying and owning in a society as a white woman where some people descend from Americans once considered property themselves.... This is an essential book for our out-of-control times.” (Lit Hub)
“A stylish, meditative inquiry into the function and meaning of twenty-first-century capitalism.... Biss doesn’t shy away from acknowledging her own privilege, and laces her reflections with unexpected insights and a sharp yet ingratiating sense of humor. . . . this eloquent, well-informed account recasts the everyday world in a sharp new light.” (Publishers Weekly)
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Cubans today, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, are hesitantly embracing the future. In his new book, Anthony DePalma, a veteran reporter with years of experience in Cuba, focuses on a neighborhood across the harbor from Old Havana to dramatize the optimism as well as the enormous challenges that Cubans face: a moving snapshot of Cuba with all its contradictions as the new regime opens the gate to the capitalism that Fidel railed against for so long.
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The real Cuba
- By Tinkerbell on 10-11-20
By: Anthony DePalma
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Confucius Never Said
- By: Helen Raleigh
- Narrated by: Helen Raleigh
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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This book is a four-generation family journey from repression and poverty in China to freedom and prosperity in the United States. Their lives overlap with many significant historical events taking....
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Wake up America
- By K and J on 12-14-19
By: Helen Raleigh
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The World According to Fannie Davis
- My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers
- By: Bridgett M. Davis
- Narrated by: Bridgett M. Davis
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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A daughter's moving homage to an extraordinary parent, The World According to Fannie Davis is also the suspenseful, unforgettable story about the lengths to which a mother will go to "make a way out of no way" to provide a prosperous life for her family - and how those sacrifices resonate over time. This original, timely, and deeply relatable portrait of one American family is essential listening.
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Fantastic
- By BK on 02-15-19
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The Shanghai Free Taxi
- Journeys with the Hustlers and Rebels of the New China
- By: Frank Langfitt
- Narrated by: Frank Langfitt
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In this adventurous, original book, NPR correspondent Frank Langfitt describes how he created a free taxi service - offering rides in exchange for illuminating conversation - to go beyond the headlines and get to know a wide range of colorful, compelling characters representative of the new China. They include folks like "Beer", a slippery salesman who tries to sell Langfitt a used car; Rocky, a farm boy turned Shanghai lawyer; and Chen, who runs an underground Christian church and moves his family to America in search of a better, freer life.
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Too political
- By dah551 on 06-26-19
By: Frank Langfitt
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1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
- A Memoir
- By: Ai Weiwei, Allan H. Barr - translator
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
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Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp.
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This book changed my life
- By Johnny Nopolis on 08-16-22
By: Ai Weiwei, and others
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Boom, Bust, Exodus
- The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities
- By: Chad Broughton
- Narrated by: Stephen McLaughlin
- Length: 15 hrs and 34 mins
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In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.
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A Story I thought I Knew
- By Meek84 on 07-08-18
By: Chad Broughton
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The Undocumented Americans
- By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
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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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Raw, heartbreaking - we can do better by others
- By RapaciousReader on 04-11-20
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Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
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- Unabridged
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In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
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Broken Glass
- Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece
- By: Alex Beam
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In 1945, Edith Farnsworth asked the German architect Mies van der Rohe, already renowned for his avant-garde buildings, to design a weekend home for her outside of Chicago. Edith was a woman ahead of her time—unmarried, she was a distinguished medical researcher, as well as an accomplished violinist, translator, and poet. The two quickly began spending weekends together, talking philosophy, Catholic mysticism, and, of course, architecture over wine-soaked picnic lunches.
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Tedious and disappointing
- By Deborah McGarr Hutchins on 02-03-23
By: Alex Beam
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Meet the Frugalwoods
- Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living
- By: Elizabeth Willard Thames
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Gideon
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
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In 2014, Elizabeth and Nate Thames were conventional 9-5 young urban professionals. But the couple had a dream to become modern-day homesteaders in rural Vermont. Determined to retire as early as possible in order to start living each day - as opposed to wishing time away working for the weekends - they enacted a plan to save an enormous amount of money: well over 70 percent of their joint take-home pay. Dubbing themselves the Frugalwoods, Elizabeth began documenting their unconventional frugality and the resulting wholesale lifestyle transformation on their eponymous blog.
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Self-congratulatory, pollyanna garbage
- By Cecelia on 08-06-18
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Under Red Skies
- Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China
- By: Karoline Kan
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A deeply personal and shocking look at how China is coming to terms with its conflicted past as it emerges into a modern, cutting-edge superpower.
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An intimate view of real life in China
- By Lonnie G. Hardy, Jr. on 08-15-19
By: Karoline Kan
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What listeners say about Having and Being Had
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Annemarie Shorter
- 05-19-21
Thought provoking content, poor microphone
Interesting essays about money, wish the speaker used better audio equipment for recording (voice was okay, but sounded tinny and had too bright tenor)
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1 person found this helpful
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- Nathan R.
- 11-24-20
Sometimes Interesting
I was really excited to get this audiobook after hearing the author on an NPR interview. It sounded light a very insightful look at modern day capitalism. I was disappointed to find that at many times, I found myself being annoyed by the author’s seemingly constant complaining about her desires and obstacles she faces during her interactions with others. The flow seemed frequently scattered, and I would often feel lost amongst her stream of consciousness. Perhaps it was due to the performance of the narrator (which seemed repetitive in her delivery), but I could help feeling as if she was on a constant rant of privilege. That said, there were some good nuggets of information here and there, and some insights that allowed me to challenge my own thinking and lived experience. I guess I just expected many more of those moments.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- M Faunt
- 02-05-23
musings on inequality and capitalism
Interesting musings on inequality and the capitalist system. I enjoyed listening to this one. An unusual format. I went with it and it's challenging me to ponder some of the questions the author poses.
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- MCS86
- 08-09-24
Okay
It was interesting in some parts, but this book wasn’t nearly as compelling as Notes From No Man’s Land.
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- Tom
- 12-13-20
Not Very Deep
The book feels like the banter college educated adults might have over a few drinks, sharing bits of insight, personal experience, and humor, but not deep research. There were occasional interesting anecdotes, but I don't expect most people who have thought about their own socioeconomic positions and sought out this book to learn very much. It is more about painting a picture of the author's feelings of privilege (the author refers to herself as an artist), rather than a deep dive into issues and solutions. That's not necessarily bad, but not what I was looking for and not what I expected before starting the book.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-06-21
A beautifully written and read meditation on capitalism
This book reads like a string of poems, sometimes repetitive and circular but also meditative and beautiful. Unlike many books about capitalism which feature policy recommendations and calls to action alongside their critiques, To Have and Be Had instead draws us into the messiness of a dehumanizing economic system and asks to stay in the discomfort of examining how complicit we are in what we see. I’ll be buying a print version of this to peruse when I’m questioning the unpaid labor of being a mother and an artist.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Trevor
- 09-21-21
Rich white lady stories
I wanted a title by a female author that wasn’t a report or a history, and the title of this book was ambiguous enough to hook me. Unfortunately, wading into it produced more of a sense of exasperation than excitement.
This book is a string of typically no more than five-minute think pieces/diary entries. Common themes include the author’s wealth, family events, feminism, vacations, love of art, and various expressions of discomfort about said wealth and privilege. The narration seemed appropriate to what I envision the author sounding like when reading the pieces aloud, though that’s not necessarily a positive.
It’s basically a rich white lady writing about how she’s indifferent to her supposedly newfound wealth, obtusely claiming artistic purity in her outlook on life and attempting to depict her circumstances in a somewhat ironic light. She occasionally weaves a novel thought into the stories, but usually they come across as overdrawn attempts at profundity, and in my view are cheapened as a result. She even claims near the end that she wrote the book to “reclaim my time” by making enough from it to not have to work as much at her job as a university assistant professor.
I assume people who enjoy this book might also enjoy shows like Emily in Paris and other content centered around female wealth, whiteness, independence, and some level of cognitive dissonance between perception and reality. I tried this book to experience something different, and am now motivated to go back to reports, exposés, and other works I see as less pretentious.
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2 people found this helpful
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- diane
- 12-15-20
self-indulgent, snarky, entitled rant
I really tried to endure this audiobook until 2;22 to try to understand why it gets such accolades. I found it to be a self-indulgent rant by a privileged white woman and narrated in an equally-offensive tone. The author officially 'lost' me when she launched into the entitled rant about the 'Mexican woman' who knocked on her door asking if she would rent an apparently empty room in her house and the author's snarky retort 'I live here!' My entire book club agreed with my take on this book. Disappointing.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Marcel
- 11-01-20
Blather
Like listening to an actress reading the transcription of a month’s worth of a child’s dreams as if she were reading the Gettysburg Address.
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- Off The Grid
- 12-30-21
a book contract book for money
Author’s admission that she wrote it for money to write was an unctuous self indulgence leaving me emptier than when I started it. maybe this book will clear out her collegiate cliff notes stuck in her brain so she can integrate and speak from the grit that almost surfaces in her point of view. prediction: she longs for hardship and when it arrives she will then become a real person who writes.
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