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In Search of a Beautiful Freedom
- New and Selected Essays
- Narrated by: Farah Jasmine Griffin
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
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In Search of a Beautiful Freedom
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Publisher's summary
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by The Millions
Lively, insightful writings on Black music, feminism, literature, and events from a "masterful critic and master teacher" (Walton Muyumba, Boston Globe).
In Search of a Beautiful Freedom brings together the best work from Farah Jasmine Griffin's rich forays on music, Black feminism, literature, the crises of Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19, and the Black artists she esteems. She moves from evoking the haunting strength of Odetta and the rise of soprano popular singers in the 1970s to the forging of a Black women's literary renaissance and the politics of Malcolm X through the lens of Black feminism. She reflects on pivotal moments in recent American history—including the banning of Toni Morrison's Beloved—and celebrates the intellectuals, artists, and personal relationships that have shaped her identity and her work.
Featuring new essays along with ones first appearing in outlets such as the New York Times and NPR, In Search of a Beautiful Freedom is a captivating collection that celebrates the work of "one of the few great intellectuals in our time" (Cornel West).
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- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 443
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 388
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Story5 out of 5 stars 383
Spanning more than 200 years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into the story of the working class organizing against imperialism.
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2 out of 5 stars
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I had to return
- By Andrew Alvarez on 05-19-20
By: Paul Ortiz
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Stony the Road
- Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
- By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 388
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 339
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 336
A profound new rendering of the struggle by African Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counterrevolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Valuable examination of Jim Crow and Rise of White Supremacy in America
- By William J Brown on 05-14-19
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What Truth Sounds Like
- Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America
- By: Michael Eric Dyson
- Narrated by: Michael Eric Dyson
- Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 789
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 696
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 690
This audiobook exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy - of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Riffing on a meeting with RFK and James Baldwin
- By Adam Shields on 06-08-18
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The Trouble with White Women
- A Counterhistory of Feminism
- By: Kyla Schuller, Brittney Cooper - foreword
- Narrated by: Christine Lakin, Mela Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 70
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 64
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Story5 out of 5 stars 64
Women including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Sheryl Sandberg are commonly celebrated as leaders of feminism. Yet they have fought for the few, not the many. As award-winning scholar Kyla Schuller argues, their White feminist politics dispossess the most marginalized to liberate themselves. In The Trouble with White Women, Schuller brings to life the 200-year counter-history of Black, Indigenous, Latina, poor, queer, and trans women pushing back against White feminists and uniting to dismantle systemic injustice.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent read!
- By A. Robertson on 11-30-21
By: Kyla Schuller, and others
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African Europeans
- An Untold History
- By: Olivette Otele
- Narrated by: Olivette Otele
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 72
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 59
Conventional wisdom holds that Africans are only a recent presence in Europe. But in African Europeans, renowned historian Olivette Otele debunks this and uncovers a long history of Europeans of African descent. From the third century, when the Egyptian Saint Maurice became the leader of a Roman legion, all the way up to the present, Otele explores encounters between those defined as "Africans" and those called "Europeans."
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4 out of 5 stars
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A fascinating overview of overlooked history
- By Scott GG Haller on 09-25-21
By: Olivette Otele
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The N Word
- Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why
- By: Jabari Asim
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 307
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 262
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 263
In 2003, the book Nigger started an intense conversation about the uses and implications of that epithet. The N Word moves beyond that short, provocative book by revealing how the word has both reflected and spread the scourge of bigotry in America.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Good points, long winded
- By Amazon Customer on 02-06-21
By: Jabari Asim
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Articulate While Black
- Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S
- By: H. Samy Alim, Geneva Smitherman, Michael Eric Dyson - foreword
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 52
In Articulate While Black, two renowned scholars of Black Language address language and racial politics in the U.S. through an insightful examination of President Barack Obama's language use--and America's response to it. In this eloquently written and powerfully argued book, H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman provide new insights about President Obama and the relationship between language and race in contemporary society.
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5 out of 5 stars
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best book on language
- By Amazon Customer Bishop Dr Arthur Lewis PhD on 12-07-18
By: H. Samy Alim, and others
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The Black Church
- This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song
- By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 198
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 172
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 172
From the New York Times best-selling author of Stony the Road and one of our most important voices on the African-American experience, a powerful new history of the Black church in America as the Black community's abiding rock and its fortress.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A must read for all Christians
- By Carol Hamilton on 02-16-21
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On Freedom
- Four Songs of Care and Constraint
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 72
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 55
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Story5 out of 5 stars 54
So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Just great
- By Kristi Strong on 12-14-21
By: Maggie Nelson
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Music
- A Subversive History
- By: Ted Gioia
- Narrated by: Jamie Renell
- Length: 17 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 126
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 107
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 107
Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact, and disguised their sources. In Music: A Subversive History, Ted Gioia reclaims the story of music for the riffraff, insurgents, and provocateurs. Gioia tells a 4,000-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Squeezing cherry-picked facts into a simplistic narrative
- By Erik A. Ritland on 11-24-20
By: Ted Gioia
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The Long March
- How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
- By: Roger Kimball
- Narrated by: Raymond Todd
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 118
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 97
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 99
The architects of America's cultural revolution of the 1960s were Beat authors like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and celebrated figures like Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver, and Susan Sontag. In examining the lives and works of those who spoke for the 1960s, Roger Kimball conceives a series of cautionary tales, an annotated guidebook of wrong turns, dead-ends, and blind alleys.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Long March
- By Suzanne on 05-16-06
By: Roger Kimball
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A Bound Man
- Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win
- By: Shelby Steele
- Narrated by: Richard Allen
- Length: 3 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 19
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 19
From the New York Times best-selling and controversial author Shelby Steele comes an illuminating examination of the complex racial issues that confront presidential candidate Barack Obama in his race for the White House, a quest that will be one of those galvanizing occasions that forces a national dialogue on the current state of race relations in America.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Masks We Wear
- By C. Matthew Hawkins on 09-01-20
By: Shelby Steele
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Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody
- The Making of a Black Theologian
- By: James H. Cone
- Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 133
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 117
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Story5 out of 5 stars 116
In this powerful and passionate memoir - his final work - Cone describes the obstacles he overcame to find his voice, to respond to the signs of the times, and to offer a voice for those - like the parents who raised him in Bearden, Arkansas, in the era of lynching and Jim Crow - who had no voice. Recounting lessons learned both from critics and students, and the ongoing challenge of his models King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, he describes his efforts to use theology as a tool in the struggle against oppression and for a better world.
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5 out of 5 stars
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You need to understand Cone to get his Theology
- By Adam Shields on 02-11-20
By: James H. Cone
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Culture and Imperialism
- By: Edward Said
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 19 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 189
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 150
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 153
A landmark work from the intellectually auspicious author of Orientalism, this book explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. This classic study, the direct successor to Said's main work, is read by Peter Ganim ( Orientalism).
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5 out of 5 stars
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BRAVO, AUDIBLE!! WE NEED MORE SAID!! REAL BOOKS!!
- By AnthonyStevens on 02-27-11
By: Edward Said
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Bet on Black
- The Good News About Being Black in America Today
- By: Eboni K. Williams
- Narrated by: Eboni K. Williams
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 110
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 100
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Story5 out of 5 stars 100
When The Real Housewives of New York City hired its first black cast member after more than 13 years on the air, attorney, speaker, and journalist Eboni K. Williams knew that the public would consider her a diversity hire. But instead of accepting the label, Williams re-envisioned her role as a “Diversity Higher,” an opportunity to prove the significance of Black excellence in the workspace and in society at-large. In this book, she shares all the benefits and advantages that have helped her and many others historically reach great heights in their careers and beyond.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great information
- By whittley on 01-20-24
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