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The Ugly History of Beautiful Things
- Essays on Desire and Consumption
- Narrated by: Cindy Kay
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
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Publisher's summary
Paris Review contributor Katy Kelleher explores our obsession with gorgeous things, unveiling the fraught histories of makeup, flowers, perfume, silk, and other beautiful objects.
April recommended reading by the New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, Goodreads, Jezebel, Christian Science Monitor, All Arts, and the Next Big Idea Club
One of Curbed’s and Globe and Mail’s (Toronto) best books of the spring
A most anticipated book of 2023 by The Millions
Katy Kelleher has spent much of her life chasing beauty. As a child, she uprooted handfuls of purple, fragrant little flowers from the earth, plucked iridescent seashells from the beach, and dug for turquoise stones in her backyard. As a teenager she applied glittery shimmer to her eyelids after religiously dabbing on her signature scent of orange blossoms and jasmine. And as an adult, she coveted gleaming marble countertops and delicate porcelain to beautify her home. This obsession with beauty led her to become a home, garden, and design writer, where she studied how beautiful things are mined, grown, made, and enhanced. In researching these objects, Kelleher concluded that most of us are blind to the true cost of our desires. Because whenever you find something unbearably beautiful, look closer, and you’ll inevitably find a shadow of decay lurking underneath.
In these dazzling and deeply researched essays, Katy Kelleher blends science, history, and memoir to uncover the dark underbellies of our favorite goods. She reveals the crushed beetle shells in our lipstick, the musk of rodents in our perfume, and the burnt cow bones baked into our dishware. She untangles the secret history of silk and muses on her problematic prom dress. She tells the story of countless workers dying in their efforts to bring us shiny rocks from unsafe mines that shatter and wound the earth, all because a diamond company created a compelling ad. She examines the enduring appeal of the beautiful dead girl and the sad fate of the ugly mollusk. With prose as stunning as the objects she describes, Kelleher invites listeners to examine their own relationships with the beautiful objects that adorn their body and grace their homes.
And yet, Kelleher argues that while we have a moral imperative to understand our relationship to desire, we are not evil or weak for desiring beauty. The Ugly History of Beautiful Things opens our eyes to beauty that surrounds us, helps us understand how that beauty came to be, what price was paid and by whom, and how we can most ethically partake in the beauty of the world.
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Hair Story
- Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America
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- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Two world wars, the Civil Rights movement, and a Jheri curl later, Blacks in America continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair. From the antebellum practice of shaving the head in an attempt to pass as a "free" person to the 2013 uproar over an Ohio school that banned Afro puffs, the issues surrounding Black hair continue to linger as we move through the 21stst century.
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Wow! I'm blown away.
- By Nira on 06-17-20
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Small Data
- The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends
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- Narrated by: Ricco Fajardo
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Martin Lindstrom, a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, harnesses the power of "small data" in his quest to discover the next big thing. Hired by the world's leading brands to find out what makes their customers tick, Martin Lindstrom spends 300 nights a year in strangers' homes, carefully observing every detail in order to uncover their hidden desires and, ultimately, the clues to a multimillion-dollar product.
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Fascinating!!
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The Perfect Scent
- A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York
- By: Chandler Burr
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
No journalist has ever been allowed into the ultrasecretive, highly pressured process of originating a perfume. But Chandler Burr, the New York Times perfume critic, spent a year behind the scenes observing the creation of two major fragrances.
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Couldn't Finish It
- By Dr. on 08-22-13
By: Chandler Burr
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Stoned
- Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World
- By: Aja Raden
- Narrated by: Justine Eyre
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
What makes a stone a jewel? What makes a jewel priceless? And why do we covet beautiful things? In this brilliant account of how eight jewels shaped the course of history, jeweler and scientist Aja Raden tells an original and often startling story about our unshakeable addiction to beauty and the darker side of human desire.
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Cringe-inducing, vapid, and self-conscious
- By Adeliese Baumann on 12-27-16
By: Aja Raden
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Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All
- A New Zealand Story
- By: Christina Thompson
- Narrated by: Sarah Mollo-Christensen
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson's marriage to a Maori man.
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a beautiful story
- By Pumpkin99 on 12-24-22
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The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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Periodic Tales
- A Cultural History of the Elements, From Arsenic to Zinc
- By: Hugh Aldersey-Williams
- Narrated by: Antony Ferguson
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Like the alphabet, the calendar, or the zodiac, the periodic table of the chemical elements has a permanent place in our imagination. But aside from the handful of common ones (iron, carbon, copper, gold), the elements themselves remain wrapped in mystery. We do not know what most of them look like, how they exist in nature, how they got their names, or of what use they are to us.
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Interesting but Rambling
- By Carolyn on 08-24-15
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Threads of Life
- A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle
- By: Clare Hunter
- Narrated by: Siobhan Redmond
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From the political propaganda of the Bayeux Tapestry, World War I soldiers coping with PTSD, and the maps sewn by schoolgirls in the New World, to the AIDS quilt, Hmong story clothes, and pink pussyhats, women and men have used the language of sewing to make their voices heard, even in the most desperate of circumstances. Threads of Life is a chronicle of identity, protest, memory, power, and politics told through the stories of needlework.
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Textile bucket list.
- By Amazon Customer on 10-18-21
By: Clare Hunter
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All That She Carried
- The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
- By: Tiya Miles
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of slavery.
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An Astonishing Feat of Scholarship, Imagination and Empathy
- By Cin on 06-30-21
By: Tiya Miles
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The Reason for Flowers
- Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives
- By: Stephen Buchmann
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Flowers, and the fruits that follow, feed, clothe, sustain, and inspire all humanity. Flowers are used to celebrate all-important occasions, to express love, and are also the basis of global industries. Americans buy 10 million flowers a day, and perfumes are a worldwide industry worth $30 billion annually. Stephen Buchmann takes us along on an exploratory journey of the roles flowers play in the production of our foods, spices, medicines, and perfumes while simultaneously bringing joy and health.
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Only for the Flower Lover
- By Anonymous User on 01-19-16
By: Stephen Buchmann
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The Sum of Our Days
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Blair Brown, Isabel Allende
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory - and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.
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She does not disappoint
- By ChiChi's Rule on 06-01-22
By: Isabel Allende
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At Home
- A Short History of Private Life
- By: Bill Bryson
- Narrated by: Bill Bryson
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to “write a history of the world without leaving home.”
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Bryson does it again
- By Robert on 10-15-10
By: Bill Bryson
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What listeners say about The Ugly History of Beautiful Things
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 06-25-23
Lovely work
The wording of this book was truly magnetic. Even when I was hearing some terrible things, I couldn’t turn away. It made me really reconsider my ideas on beauty and made me curious about what I find beautiful and why.
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- Kelly
- 05-28-23
I loved this book!
This book is absolutely gorgeous. I learned lovely things and terrible things and I couldn't put it down!
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