This Audio CD Book item from HarperAudio was reviewed on 10-Dec-2008.
Search ISBN:0060852909 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. All Aunt Hagar's Children CD: Selected Stories Reference Book. Classifications : Short Stories Literature & Fiction Books on CD Audiobooks Formats Custom Stores Specialty Stores Books Unabridged Literature & Fiction Books on CD Audiobooks Formats Custom Stores Specialty Stores Boo . Click the following link to view the cover of All Aunt Hagar's Children CD: Selected Stories. Related topics: Short Stories. Books on CD. Audiobooks. Formats. Custom Stores. Specialty Stores. Books. Unabridged. Books on CD. Audiobooks. requestid: 2e6f30f0-a6b0-47fa-96f0-63a1005f771c
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1) Audio CD Book All Aunt Hagar's Children CD: Selected Stories by HarperAudio.
Some things are well worth waiting for and Edward P. Jonses´s follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize winning debut novel "The Known World" (2003) is most assuredly one of them. Once again he uses short story formats to illuminate and make memorable his characters, ordinary people, really, but to the listener they are unforgettable. This author´s evocation of black life in America is incomparable.
Another stellar offering is the reading by voice performer Peter Francis James. He brings both strength and sympathetic understanding to the author´s words. James has a host of television appearances to his credit, as well as Broadway and film roles. His delivery is unhesitating, distinct, and highly listenable.
The 14 stories that comprise "All Aunt Hagar´s Children" are set in in Washington, the city where the author was raised and now lives. He opens with "In The Blink of God´s Eye," the story of Ruth and Aubrey, a young couple in their late teens and recently married. Ruth does not always rest well in "godforsaken Washington" while Aubrey "always slept the sleep of a man not long out of boyhood." One night when Ruth was wakeful she went out in back where she found a baby tied in a bundle hanging from a tree limb. Thus, she thought Washington was "a city where they hung babies in night trees."
As is his wont Jones treats readers to the earlier lives of his characters, rendering them all the more accessible and sympathetic. This is especially true in "Resurrecting Methuselah" in which we meet Anita Channing who sits by the bedside of Bethany, her ill daughter. She sits in a wooden chair built a century and a half ago by a former slave. Anita´s husband, Percival, is serving in Okinawa, where he spends much time with a prostitute, Sara Lee. When Percival discovers he has breast cancer he calls Anita and asks her to come to him. She reaches Honolulu, a stopover in her flight, where she has an opportunity to look back on her childhood and wonder what the future holds for herself and her child.
"All Aunt Hagar´s Children" concludes with "Tapestry," another story of a young couple, Anne and George, marrying and leaving their rural roots behind. George is a porter on a train, the train that carries them to Washington. As the train slows close to its destination Anne whispers, Mama, Papa, "I´m a long way from home."
For this listener that was the gist of all of these marvelous stories, people seeking a better life a long way from home.
Jones is such an incredibly gifted writer, his prose is succinct, true, impeccably crafted. Listening to his work is not only a pleasure but a privilege as well.
- Gail Cooke¤ 2) Audio CD Book All Aunt Hagar's Children CD: Selected Stories by HarperAudio. In fourteen sublime stories, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever. Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city´s power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar´s Children turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them in the city, people who in Jones´s masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them. With the legacy of slavery just a stone´s throw behind them and the future uncertain, Jones´s cornucopia of characters will haunt readers for years to come. ¤Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 7-Jan-2009, 00608529099781599570020, 670-3X0-090-040-180-650-0UB-8 
All Aunt Hagar's Children CD: Selected Stories, Book, Image © HarperAudio
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