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Ordinary Disasters
- How I Stopped Being a Model Minority
- Narrated by: Anne Anlin Cheng
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
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Publisher's summary
The most personal writing yet to come from a noted scholar of race: a bold and moving look at race, gender, aging, and immigration that examines, through lenses both intimate and political, what it means to be an Asian American woman living in America today.
Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history, Anne Anlin Cheng’s original essays focus on art, politics, and popular culture. Through personal stories woven with a keen eye and an open heart, Cheng summons up the grief, love, anger, and humor in negotiating the realities of being a scholar, an immigrant Asian American woman, a cancer patient, a wife of a white man, and a mother of biracial children . . . all in the midst of the (extra)ordinary stresses of recent years.
Ordinary Disasters explores with lyricism and surgical precision the often difficult-to-articulate consequences of race, gender, migration, and empire. It is the story of Chinese mothers and daughters, of race and nationality, of ambition and gender, of memory and forgetting, and the intricate ways in which we struggle for interracial and intergenerational intimacies in a world where there can be no seamless identity.
Critic reviews
"From one of our most incisive scholars in race studies, Anne Anlin Cheng has written a memoir that is both astonishingly vulnerable and cutting. For the first time, she turns her brilliant acumen towards herself, using her experiences as daughter, wife, mother, divorcee, cancer patient, student, and professor to explore the painful and subtle vicissitudes of the Asian American experience. With exacting poetic rigor, Cheng unseams the psychosis that internalized the model minority myth. Her scholarly attention—that is distilled into such pleasurable clarity—to Asian female sexuality is especially a crucial contribution to the conversation on race in America. I am grateful for Ordinary Disasters which I am confident will become a classic."
—Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings
"Anne Anlin Cheng has written a book on the brink. She stares into her own abyss, fearlessly. But she also gazes into the deep well of the American soul from where racism and sexism comes, sometimes manifest in unspeakable violence, oftentimes through microaggressions that have worn down her body and spirit. But if her body has been broken, its rubble serves to hone the sharpness of her mind, its keen edge evident throughout this exhilarating work."
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and A Man of Two Faces
“Ordinary Disasters is an essay collection that will dazzle, delight, and intrigue its readers. In prose that is as vulnerable as it is exquisite, Anne Anlin Cheng manages to get at the heart of the human experience. Readers will find themselves identifying with both the tender, personal moments that the author lovingly reveals, as well as the larger cultural issues that have shaped her distinctly complex experiences on earth. This is a book about love, family, community, work, motherhood, womanhood, daughterhood, and marriage. You will enter this book and find a companion in its fascinating stories. You will close its covers with a greater understanding of what it means to be a person in this day and age—actually, any age.”
—Emily Bernard, author of Black Is the Body
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It Gets Better . . . Except When It Gets Worse
- And Other Unsolicited Truths I Wish Someone Had Told Me
- By: Nicole Maines
- Narrated by: Nicole Maines
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
For the first time, in her own words, Nicole tells the story of her journey from childhood in rural Maine to the spotlights of Hollywood, sharing the lessons she’s learned along the way. With clever wit and unflinching honesty, she tackles some of the most insidious messaging absorbed by queer kids and all young women, from the idea that any one thing can (or should) ever really “fix” you, to wondering what’s wrong with you when things don’t always feel better, and reminding us that, sometimes, a happy ending is only the beginning of the story.
By: Nicole Maines
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I Feel Real Guilty
- A Memoir of Sibling Sexual Abuse
- By: Jane Epstein
- Narrated by: Maria McCann
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Jane Epstein's brother makes this confession, a tsunami of memories floods over her. She remembers the years of sexual abuse at his hands. The pain. The shame. Suffering from trauma few talk about, Epstein searches for solace in strip clubs and hotel rooms. She finds love, loses it, and loves again. Years pass before she dares to dive into the depths of her past. Only then does she begin to heal.
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Raw, riveting and inspiring
- By Alice Wen on 09-25-24
By: Jane Epstein
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Above the Noise
- My Story of Chasing Calm
- By: DeMar DeRozan, Dave Zarum - contributor, Gregg Popovich - foreword
- Narrated by: Aaron Goodson, John Patrick Walsh
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
DeMar DeRozan, six-time NBA All-Star, has been called a “basketball savant” (ESPN) and “the best closer in the NBA” (GQ)—but when he went public with his depression, it sparked a conversation that reached far beyond the court. By breaking the stigma of speaking out, he added a new, seldom-heard voice to the mental health dialogue: a successful Black male athlete, openly naming his pain and advocating for others to do the same.
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Well Done!
- By David Johnson on 10-19-24
By: DeMar DeRozan, and others
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By the Fire We Carry
- The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
- By: Rebecca Nagle
- Narrated by: Rebecca Nagle
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Here Rebecca Nagle recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our country.
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Truth
- By Taylor G on 09-30-24
By: Rebecca Nagle
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The Indian Card
- Who Gets to Be Native in America
- By: Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz
- Narrated by: Amy Hall
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In The Indian Card, Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz grapples with these contradictions. Through in-depth interviews, she shares the stories of people caught in the mire of identity-formation, trying to define themselves outside of bureaucratic processes. With archival research, she pieces together the history of blood quantum and tribal rolls and federal government intrusion on Native identity-making.
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Minor Feelings
- An Asian American Reckoning
- By: Cathy Park Hong
- Narrated by: Cathy Park Hong
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.
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Essential
- By Realness on 03-04-20
By: Cathy Park Hong
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First in the Family
- A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream
- By: Jessica Hoppe
- Narrated by: Jessica Hoppe
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm. For fans of The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, and Heavy by Kiese Laymon. During the first year of quarantine, drug overdoses spiked, the highest ever recorded. And Hoppe’s cousin was one of them. “I never learned the true history of substance use disorder in my family,” Hoppe writes. “People just disappeared.” At the time of her cousin’s death, she’d been in recovery for nearly four years, but she hadn’t told anyone.
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What a beautiful story of survival and strength
- By Jessica Henriquez on 10-10-24
By: Jessica Hoppe
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Cher
- The Memoir, Part One
- By: Cher
- Narrated by: Cher, Stephanie J. Block
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Cher: The Memoir, Part One promises to be an engaging and exciting audiobook experience, befitting this incredible book. Read in part by Cher herself, the book is introduced, and each chapter launched, by the author. Rounding out each chapter as she continues the narrative is celebrated stage actor Stephanie J. Block. Stephanie starred on Broadway in The Cher Show for which she won a Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award.
By: Cher
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Entitlement
- A Novel
- By: Rumaan Alam
- Narrated by: Nicole Lewis
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?
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so disappointing
- By K. Wagner on 09-22-24
By: Rumaan Alam
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What I Ate in One Year
- (and related thoughts)
- By: Stanley Tucci
- Narrated by: Stanley Tucci
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Food has always been an integral part of Stanley Tucci’s life: from stracciatella soup served in the shadow of the Pantheon, to marinara sauce cooked between scene rehearsals and costume fittings, to home-made pizza eaten with his children before bedtime. Now, in What I Ate in One Year Tucci records twelve months of eating—in restaurants, kitchens, film sets, press junkets, at home and abroad, with friends, with family, with strangers, and occasionally just by himself.
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Boring. Don't bother.
- By Anonymous User on 10-17-24
By: Stanley Tucci
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Connie
- A Memoir
- By: Connie Chung
- Narrated by: Connie Chung
- Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Connie Chung is a pioneer. In 1969 at the age of 23, this once-shy daughter of Chinese parents took her first job at a local TV station in her hometown of Washington, D.C. and soon thereafter began working at CBS news as a correspondent. Profoundly influenced by her family’s cultural traditions, yet growing up completely Americanized in the United States, Chung describes her career as an Asian woman in a white male-centered world.
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OUTSTANDING MEMOIRE!
- By Brenda C. on 09-24-24
By: Connie Chung
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An Academy for Liars
- By: Alexis Henderson
- Narrated by: Tracie Frank
- Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Lennon Carter’s life is falling apart. Then she gets a mysterious phone call inviting her to take the entrance exam for Drayton College, a school of magic hidden in a secret pocket of Savannah. Lennon has been chosen because—like everyone else at the school—she has the innate gift of persuasion, the ability to wield her will like a weapon, using it to control others and, in rare cases, matter itself.
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It’s Fine…
- By Dave on 09-27-24
By: Alexis Henderson
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Over the Influence
- A Memoir
- By: Joanna "JoJo" Levesque
- Narrated by: Joanna "JoJo" Levesque
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Signed to a major recording deal at just 12 years old, JoJo catapulted to the top of the pop-and-R&B-infused charts in the mid 2000's. The relatability of her youth and the appeal of her cool-girl mystique earned her millions of fans around the world. JoJo was an undeniable superstar and pop culture fixture, spanning roles in major studio films, omnipresence on Top 40 radio, frequenting magazine covers, and appearing on national TV. Then, out of the blue, everything came to a halt and JoJo seemingly stepped out of the spotlight, leaving many fans to wonder: What happened to JoJo?
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Honest, relatable, and entertaining
- By Cameron Riggs on 10-31-24