Life and Death of the American Worker
The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company
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Narrated by:
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Lori Felipe-Barkin
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By:
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Alice Driver
About this listen
Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, an explosive exposé of the toxic labor practices at the largest meatpacking company in America and the immigrant workers who had the courage to fight back.
On June 27, 2011, a deadly chemical accident took place inside the Tyson Foods chicken processing plant in Springdale, Arkansas, where the company is headquartered. The company quickly covered it up although the spill left their employees injured, sick, and terrified. Over the years, Arkansas-based reporter Alice Driver was able to gain the trust of the immigrant workers who survived the accident. They rewarded her persistence by giving her total access to their lives.
Having spent hours in their kitchens and accompanying them to doctor’s appointments, Driver has memorialized in these pages the dramatic lives of husband and wife Plácido and Angelina, who liked to spend weekends planting seeds from their native El Salvador in their garden; father and son Martín and Gabriel, who migrated from Mexico at different times and were trying to patch up their relationship; and many other immigrants who survived the chemical accident in Springdale that day.
During the course of Alice’s reporting, the COVID-19 pandemic struck the community, and the workers were forced to continue production in unsafe conditions, watching their colleagues get sick and die one by one. These essential workers, many of whom only speak Spanish and some of whom are illiterate—all of whom suffer the health consequences of Tyson’s negligence—somehow found the strength and courage to organize and fight back, culminating in a lawsuit against Tyson Foods, the largest meatpacking company in America.
Richly detailed, fiercely honest, and deeply reported, Life and Death of the American Worker will forever change the way we think about the people who prepare our food.
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- By: Sarah Smarsh
- Narrated by: Sarah Smarsh
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Compiling Smarsh’s reportage and more poetic reflections, Bone of the Bone is a singular work covering one of the most tumultuous decades in civic life. Timely, filled with perspective-shifting observations, and a pleasure to read, Sarah Smarsh’s essays—on topics as varied as the socioeconomic significance of dentistry, laws criminalizing poverty, fallacies of the “red vs. blue” political framework, working as a Hooters Girl, and much more—are an important addition to any discussion on contemporary America.
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A must read
- By Teresa Garcia on 12-03-24
By: Sarah Smarsh
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Stolen Pride
- Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
- By: Arlie Russell Hochschild
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel "stolen"? Hochschild's research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation.
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Important Fascinating. Compassionate. It may change your thinking.
- By F Shaw on 12-11-24
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The Sons of El Rey
- By: Alex Espinoza
- Narrated by: Gisela Chípe, Tony Chiroldes, Lee Osorio, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Ernesto Vega has lived many lives, from pig farmer to construction worker to famed luchador El Rey Coyote, yet he has always worn a mask. He was discovered by a local lucha libre trainer at a time when luchadores—Mexican wrestlers donning flamboyant masks and capes—were treated as daredevils or rock stars. Ernesto found fame, rapidly gaining name recognition across Mexico, but at great expense, nearly costing him his marriage to his wife Elena.
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A Nontraditional story of a very traditional family.
- By Michele on 07-19-24
By: Alex Espinoza
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Twenty Years
- Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation
- By: Sune Engel Rasmussen
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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No country was more deeply affected by 9/11 than Afghanistan: an entire generation grew up amid the upheaval that began that day. Young Afghans knew the promise of freedom, democracy, and safety, fought with each other over its meaning―and then witnessed its collapse. In Twenty Years, the Wall Street Journal correspondent Sune Engel Rasmussen draws on more than a decade of reporting from the country to tell Afghanistan’s story from a new angle.
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Highway Thirteen
- Stories
- By: Fiona McFarlane
- Narrated by: Emma Jones
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged for a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims’ families, but its impact travels even further: into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes. Highway Thirteen, Fiona McFarlane’s newest collection, takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more.
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well written and interesting
- By Kristina D. Tiedeman on 09-03-24
By: Fiona McFarlane
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Do Something
- Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of '70s New York
- By: Guy Trebay
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in the Bronx, Guy Trebay was raised in an atmosphere of privilege on Long Island’s North Shore after his entrepreneurial father struck business gold with Hawaiian Surf, a wildly successful cologne company that capitalized on the optimism of the 1960s as marketed to “an adventurous new breed of men.’’ But behind the facade of material prosperity lay the emotional disarray of a household dominated by a charismatic, con artist father, a glamorous yet lost and careless mother, a family haunted by tragedy.
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Heartache and heartbreak and the will to survive.
- By Polly B. on 07-05-24
By: Guy Trebay
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Undivided
- The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church
- By: Hahrie Han
- Narrated by: Vivienne Leheny
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The inspiring story of evangelicals in Cincinnati struggling to bridge racial divides in their own church, their community, and across the nation.
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Very good ethnography study
- By Adam Shields on 12-14-24
By: Hahrie Han
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Scotland Yard
- A History of the London Police Force’s Most Infamous Murder Case
- By: Simon Read
- Narrated by: Harry Myers
- Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The idea of Scotland Yard is steeped in atmospheric stories of foggy London streets, murder by lamplight, and fiendish killers pursued by gentleman detectives. From its establishment in 1829 through the eve of World War II, Scotland Yard—the world’s first modern, professional, and centrally organized police force—set new standards for policing and investigating. Based on official case files, contemporary newspaper reporting, trial transcripts, and the first-hand accounts of the detectives on the beat, Scotland Yard tells the tales of some of history’s most notorious murders.
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Super gory, amazingly well researched
- By Jane on 10-05-24
By: Simon Read
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No Road Leading Back
- An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust
- By: Chris Heath
- Narrated by: Vas Eli
- Length: 21 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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No Road Leading Back is the remarkable story of a dozen prisoners who escaped from the site where more than 70,000 Jews were shot in the Lithuanian forest of Ponar after the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941. Anxious to hide the incriminating evidence of the murders, the S.S. later in the war enslaved a group of Jews to exhume every one of the bodies and incinerate them all in a months-long labor—an episode whose specifics are staggering and disturbing, even within the context of the Holocaust.
By: Chris Heath
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Wish I Was Here
- By: M. John Harrison
- Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, and magical and literary realism. But is there even an M. John Harrison and if so, where do we find him? This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of notetaking: “A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked.” Are these notebooks records of failed presence?
By: M. John Harrison
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The Sisterhood
- The Secret History of Women at the CIA
- By: Liza Mundy
- Narrated by: Liza Mundy
- Length: 18 hrs
- Unabridged
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Created in the aftermath of World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency relied on women even as it attempted to channel their talents and keep them down. Women sent cables, made dead drops, and maintained the agency’s secrets. Despite discrimination—even because of it—women who started as clerks, secretaries, or unpaid spouses rose to become some of the CIA’s shrewdest operatives.
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Tried- just no there, there
- By Janet Uri-Jones on 07-10-24
By: Liza Mundy
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I Am Maroon
- The True Story of an American Political Prisoner
- By: Russell Shoatz, Kanya D'Almeida - contributor
- Narrated by: Avery Kidd Waddell, Kanya D'Almeida - introduction
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Inspired by Malcolm X, Russell Shoatz became a lifelong crusader for justice, a soldier in the most militant units of the Black Liberation Army. Shoatz was convicted to life in prison following a coordinated attack on a park police station that left one guard dead.The prison walls, however, could not deter Shoatz’s battle for personal and collective freedom. He escaped state prisons twice, making him a living legend, and endowed him with the moniker “Maroon,” once used to honor runaway slaves from plantations.
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Phenomenally written
- By Amazon Customer on 10-02-24
By: Russell Shoatz, and others
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Why the Dose Matters
- Assessing the Health Risk of Exposure to Toxicants
- By: Urs A. Boelsterli
- Narrated by: Mike Lenz
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Each day we are exposed to a myriad of natural and human-made chemicals in our food, drinking water, air, soil, at home or at the workplace-pesticide residues, food additives, drugs, household products-but how can we gauge the human health risk posed by these chemicals? Should we believe the somber headlines that depict a serious threat for humans and the environment, or should we follow the reassuring voices of others who claim that the angst is totally unfounded?
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Enlightenment
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Perry
- Narrated by: Alex Jennings
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London.
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So lost
- By Kindle Customer on 07-13-24
By: Sarah Perry
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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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A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later.
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Amazing book
- By Annie H on 11-22-24
By: Rebecca Nagle
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Vertigo
- The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany
- By: Harald Jähner
- Narrated by: Sam Peter Jackson
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Out of the ashes of the First World War, Germany launched an unprecedented political project: its first democratic government. The Weimar Republic, named for the city where it was established, endured for only fifteen years before it was toppled by the insurgent Nazi Party in 1933. In Vertigo, prizewinning historian Harald Jähner tells the Republic’s full story, capturing a nation caught in a whirlwind of uncertainty and struggling toward a better future.
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How. Did It Happen?
- By Bettyb on 10-19-24
By: Harald Jähner
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Keeping the Faith
- God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
- By: Brenda Wineapple
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The dramatic story of the 1925 Scopes trial, which captivated the nation and exposed profound divisions in America that still resonate today—divisions over the meaning of freedom, religion, education, censorship, and civil liberties in a democracy.
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A retelling but with more detail
- By WH Griesar on 09-14-24
By: Brenda Wineapple