I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio

By Jean Feraca

Book Overview

Jean Feraca's road to self-fulfillment has been as quirky and demanding as the characters in her memoir. A twenty-five-year veteran of public radio broadcasting, Feraca is also a writer and a poet. She is a talk show host beloved for her unique mixture of the humanities, poetry, and journalism, and is the creator of the pioneering international cultural affairs radio program Here on Earth: Radio without Borders.
In this searing memoir, Feraca traces her own emergence. She pulls back the curtain on her private life, revealing unforgettable portraits of the characters in her brawling Italian American family: Jenny, the grandmother, the devil woman who threw Casey Stengel down an excavation pit; Dolly, the mother, a cross between Long John Silver and the Wife of Bath who in battling mental illness becomes the scourge of a Lutheran nursing home; and Stephen, the brilliant but troubled older brother, an anthropologist who was adopted into a Sioux tribe.
While building a career and raising two sons, Feraca learns empathy when she faces her brother's cancer and her mother's dementia. As she finds her voice and sense of self, her story moves far afield: a sojourn in a Benedictine monastery, a courtship through the California wine country, a dip into Dante's hell in Italy's Appalachia, an expedition in the Peruvian Amazon, a day under a huppah as she marries a Jewish scientist.
Unique, eccentric, and distinctive, I Hear Voices is a memoir that tells a universal story of a woman evolving to fully embrace her life and the world. Best of all, from the many voices in Feraca's life emerges one that will be familiar to old fans--and delightful to new ones--leaping off the written page as compelling, eloquent, and surprising as ever. Outstanding Book, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association Winner, August Derleth Book-length Nonfiction Award, The Council for Wisconsin Writers

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0299223906
• ISBN13: 9780299223908
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A joy to read

This is such a wonderful book, full of life, emotion, and intelligence. Feraca infuses every experience, ordinary and extraordinary, with so much perception, compassion, and generosity that it's a total joy to read.

Read this Book!

Feraca writes the way Vermeer paints. Even the shadows in this memoir are luminous. Her stories are filled with a love that is not just emotional. The characters we meet (mother, father, aunt, brother, husband) are like something from Dostoyevsky, filled with passion, hilarity, trouble, and love. Feraca is a great storyteller, and a poet. She leads me to momentarily dwell with her characters' hearts and behind their eyes. When I finished reading I had a much greater appreciation for the quirky folks in my own life. Read this book!