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Glad to the Brink of Fear
- A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
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Publisher's summary
An engaging reassessment of the celebrated essayist and his relevance to contemporary audiences.
More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces listeners to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness.
This Emerson is a rebel. He is also a lover, a friend, a husband, and a father.
Having declared his great topic to be “the infinitude of the private man,” he is nonetheless an intensely social being who develops Transcendentalism in the company of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Theodore Parker. And although he resists political activism early on—hoping instead for a revolution in consciousness—the burning issue of slavery ultimately transforms him from cloistered metaphysician to fiery abolitionist.
Drawing on telling episodes from Emerson’s life alongside landmark essays like “Self-Reliance,” “Experience,” and “Circles,” Glad to the Brink of Fear reveal show Emerson shares our preoccupations with fate and freedom, race and inequality, love and grief. It shows, too, how his desire to see the world afresh, rather than accepting the consensus view, is a lesson that never grows old.
“Of all of Emerson’s biographers, James Marcus is the first to make the man and his thought come alive in the present. His Emerson is a marvel—a skeptic and an apostle, a creature of flawed feelings and noble ideals, a lover, a mourner, a wit, and a visionary. How lucky we are to encounter him through Marcus’s wonderfully exact and affable prose.”—Merve Emre, Wesleyan University, contributing writer at The New Yorker
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- Unabridged
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From bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steve Coll, the definitive story of the decades-long relationship between the United States and Saddam Hussein, and a deeply researched and news breaking investigation into how human error, cultural miscommunication, and hubris led to one of the costliest geopolitical conflicts of our time.
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From the Saddam’s Point of View.
- By philip on 03-08-24
By: Steve Coll
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Notes from the Henhouse
- On Marrying a Poet, Raising Children and Chickens, and Writing
- By: Elspeth Barker
- Narrated by: Raffaella Barker
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Following the publication of her acclaimed, darkly funny novel O Caledonia, Elspeth Barker’s sharp and witty essays appeared regularly in the national press. Notes from the Henhouse, a selection of the most personal of these pieces, welcomes listeners into the celebrated writer’s life.
By: Elspeth Barker
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A Dying Colonialism
- By: Frantz Fanon
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Psychiatrist, humanist, revolutionary, Frantz Fanon was one of the great political analysts of our time. He has had a profound impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world. A Dying Colonialism is Fanon’s incisive and illuminating account of how, during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria changed centuries-old cultural patterns and embraced certain ancient cultural practices long derided by their colonialist oppressors as “primitive,” in order to destroy those oppressors.
By: Frantz Fanon
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Great Expectations
- A Novel
- By: Vinson Cunningham
- Narrated by: Aaron Goodson
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator’s idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he’ll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States’ first Black president.
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Portrait of an Artist as a Black Man
- By Books on 05-29-24
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Whiskey Tender
- A Memoir
- By: Deborah Taffa
- Narrated by: Charley Flyte
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Deborah Jackson Taffa was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society.
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A lovingly crafted story of family and history
- By Larry C on 04-07-24
By: Deborah Taffa
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Worry
- A Novel
- By: Alexandra Tanner
- Narrated by: Helen Laser
- Length: 7 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy, a year and a half out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn while Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.
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I Hated It
- By RM on 04-16-24
By: Alexandra Tanner
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Challenger
- A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
- By: Adam Higginbotham
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 16 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of the crew, which included New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like the assassination of JFK, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in twentieth-century history—one that forever changed the way America thought of itself and its optimistic view of the future. Yet the full story of what happened, and why, has never been told.
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Even though I have read a lot of books about this disaster. This has been the most comprehensive and enjoyable.
- By Andy on 05-25-24
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This Strange Eventful History
- By: Claire Messud
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara; of Chloe, the result of that union.
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Riveting , Elegiac, perfectly Evocative
- By ann on 05-26-24
By: Claire Messud
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Out of the Darkness
- The Germans, 1942-2022
- By: Frank Trentmann
- Narrated by: Patty Nieman
- Length: 37 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. Its citizens stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and war of extermination. But by the end of Angela Merkel’s tenure in 2021, Germany looked like the moral voice of Europe. How did a nation whose past has been marked by mass murder reinvent themselves, and how much? Trentmann tells this dramatic story of the German people from the middle of the Second World War through the Cold War and the division of East and West to the fall of the Berlin Wall and their struggle to find their place in the world today.
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A very long book
- By Georjaneknighthawk on 03-20-24
By: Frank Trentmann
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The Bond King
- How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All
- By: Mary Childs
- Narrated by: Mary Childs
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Before Bill Gross was known among investors as the Bond King, he was a gambler. In 1966, a fresh college grad, he went to Vegas armed with his net worth ($200) and a knack for counting cards. Ten thousand dollars and countless casino bans later, he was hooked, so he enrolled in business school. The Bond King is the story of how that whiz kid made American finance his casino.
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Being a good writer does not make you a good narrator
- By John Mallory on 05-14-22
By: Mary Childs
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What listeners say about Glad to the Brink of Fear
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- James Strock
- 04-10-24
Excellent book and recording
Emerson and James Marcus are inspired combination. Good narration of material that can be read or listened to—or both.
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