Access Unmissable Free Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Memoirs

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/568844 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Rage: On Being Queer, Black, Brilliant . . . and Completely Over It Author: Lester Fabian Brathwaite Narrator: Lester Fabian Brathwaite Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 34 minutes Release date: September 10, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A debut book from Entertainment Weekly writer and former Out magazine editor Lester Fabian Brathwaite, Rage is a darkly comedic exploration of Blackness, queerness, and the American Dream, at a time when creative anger feels like the best response to inequality. One romantic hopeful had greeted Lester Fabian Brathwaite on a dating app with this gem: “You into race play?” Being young, queer, gifted, and Black, Lester has found that his best tool for navigating American life is gallows humor. If you don’t laugh, you cry—or, you summon your inner rage. With biting wit, Lester’s book Rage interrogates all the ways that systemic racism and homophobia have shaped our society. All to pose that proverbial question: Can a gurl live? Rage is one part memoir, one part cultural critique, one part live grenade. He contrasts his tragic-comedic love life with the ideals he had formed from bingeing (straight, white) Hollywood depictions. And he is quick to side-eye the misogyny and internalized homophobia that some people reveal in statements like “masc for masc” on dating profiles. Lester also dives deep into representations of queer life from RuPaul’s Drag Race to The Birdcage (Robin Williams was a snack in Versace), and explores our cultural understanding of Black genius through stories of James Baldwin, Whitney Houston, and Nina Simone. Lester’s razor-sharp voice, coupled with his searing social commentary on topics such as dating, rejection, racism, sexuality, identity, and more, offer an increasingly divided world an engaging and original read.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/566783 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life Author: Anna Funder Narrator: Arianwen Parkes-Lockwood, Jane Slavin Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 39 minutes Release date: August 17, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2.33 of Total 3 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. A blazing, genre-bending masterpiece from one of the most inventive writers of our time Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own . . . When she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. Eileen O'Shaughnessy's literary brilliance shaped Orwell's work and her practical nous saved his life. But why - and how - was she written out of the story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells' marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WW II in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell's private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer - and what it is to be a wife. Compelling and utterly original, Wifedom speaks to the unsung work of women everywhere today, while offering a breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the 20th century. It is a book that speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past. PRAISE FOR ANNA FUNDER 'Funder skilfully deploys fictional techniques to make the material jump off the page: crafted scenes with their own story-arcs, naturalistic dialogue, fully-realised characters with their own plotlines' Independent on Sunday 'Meticulous and compassionate' London Review of Books 'Rigorously researched, tenderly told' Independent ©2023 Anna Funder (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/569677 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Returning Light: Thirty Years on the Island of Skellig Michael Author: Robert L. Harris Narrator: Robert L. Harris Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 30 minutes Release date: July 18, 2023 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: The Acclaimed International Bestseller “It is impossible to do justice to the beauty of Returning Light. The whole book is a poem.” — New York Times Book Review By the lighthouse keeper on the remote, otherworldly Irish island of Skellig Michael, a ''profound memoir about the importance of place and what it really means to belong'' (Belfast Telegraph) “On Skellig Michael, thousands of birds appear and disappear, erecting towers, coming together in wings of movement which build and unravel over the empty sea. Often, no one else is there to stand beside me on the island. The mind wanders; links with the past are easily made; ancient ways of viewing things come alive.” In 1987, Robert Harris happened upon an unusual job posting in the local paper—a new warden service was being set up on the island of Skellig Michael, and the deadline was imminent. Just weeks later he was on his way to set up camp in one of Ireland’s most remote locations, unaware that he would be making that same journey every May for the next 30 years. Here he transports us to the otherworldly island, a place that is teeming with natural life, including curious puffins that like to visit his hut. From the precipice he has observed a coastline that is relatively unchanged for the last thousand years—a beacon of equilibrium in an ever-changing world. But the island can be fierce too. It’s inhabitable for only five months of the year, and solitude can quickly become isolation as bad weather rolls in to create a veil between Skellig Michael and the rest of the world, when the dizzying terrain can become a very real threat to life. A beautiful and evocative work of nature writing, Returning Light is an extraordinary memoir about the profound effect a place can have on us, and how a remote location can bring with it a great sense of belonging.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/566826 to listen full audiobooks. Title: A Renaissance of Our Own: A Memoir & Manifesto on Reimagining Author: Rachel E. Cargle Narrator: Rachel E. Cargle Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 51 minutes Release date: May 16, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: From a highly lauded modern voice in feminism and racial justice comes a deeply personal and insightful testament to the power of reimagining to dismantle the frameworks and systems that no longer serve us while building new ones that do. “Powerful . . . You will leave these pages changed for the better.”—Gabrielle Union, New York Times bestselling author of We’re Going to Need More Wine There are breaking points in all our lives when we realize that the way things have been done before just don’t work for us anymore, be it the way we approach our relationships, our belief systems, our work, our education, even our rest. For activist, philanthropist, and CEO Rachel E. Cargle, reimagining—the act of creating in our minds that which does not exist but that we believe can and should—has been a lifelong process. Reimagining served as the most powerful catalyst for Cargle’s personal transformation from a small-town Christian wife to an incisive queer feminist voice of a generation. In A Renaissance of Our Own, we witness the sometimes painful but always inspiring breaking points in Cargle’s life that fostered a truer identity. These defining moments offer a blueprint for how we must all use our imagination—the space that sees beyond limits—to live in alignment with our highest values and to craft a world independent of oppressive structures, both personal and societal. Cargle now invites you to acknowledge ways of being that stem from societal expectations instead of your personal truth, and to embark on a renaissance of your own. She provides the very tools and prompts that she used to unearth her own truth, tools that opened her up to being a more authentic feminist and purpose-driven matriarchal leader.  A Renaissance of Our Own gives us the courage to look at the world and say “I want something different.” It serves as a reminder of the power and possibility of reimagining a life that feels right, all the way down to the marrow of your bones.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/559025 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint Author: Lee Durkee Narrator: Matt Godfrey Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 35 minutes Release date: April 18, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.67 of Total 3 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: *Winner of the 2024 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award for Life Writing* “A wickedly entertaining” (The New York Times) detective story that chronicles one Mississippi man’s relentless search for an authentic portrait of William Shakespeare. Following his divorce, down-and-out writer and Mississippi exile Lee Durkee holed himself up in a Vermont fishing shack and fell prey to a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevalence of popular portraits, no one really knows what Shakespeare looked like. That the Bard of Avon has gotten progressively handsomer in modern depictions seems only to reinforce this point. “Intensely readable…with bust-out laughing moments” (Garden & Gun), Stalking Shakespeare is Durkee’s fascinating memoir about a hobby gone awry, the 400-year-old myriad portraits attached to the famous playwright, and Durkee’s own unrelenting search for a lost picture of the Bard painted from real life. As Durkee becomes better at beguiling curators into testing their paintings with X-ray and infrared technologies, we get a front-row seat to the captivating mysteries—and unsolved murders—surrounding the various portraits rumored to depict Shakespeare. Whisking us backward in time through layers of paint and into the pages of obscure books on the Elizabethans, Durkee travels from Vermont to Tokyo to Mississippi to DC and ultimately to London to confront the stuffy curators forever protecting the Bard’s image. For his part, Durkee is the adversary they didn’t know they had—a self-described dilettante with nothing to lose, the “Dan Brown of Elizabethan portraiture.” A bizarre and surprisingly moving blend of biography, art history, and madness, Stalking Shakespeare is a “gripping, poignant, and enjoyable” (The Washington Post) journey that will forever change the way you look at one of history’s greatest cultural and literary icons.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/562621 to listen full audiobooks. Title: On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory Author: Thomas Hertog Narrator: Ethan Kelly Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 10 minutes Release date: April 11, 2023 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Stephen Hawking’s closest collaborator offers the intellectual superstar’s final thoughts on the cosmos—a dramatic revision of the theory he put forward in A Brief History of Time. “This superbly written book offers insight into an extraordinary individual, the creative process, and the scope and limits of our current understanding of the cosmos.”—Lord Martin Rees Perhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life. In order to solve this mystery, Hawking studied the big bang origin of the universe, but his early work ran into a crisis when the math predicted many big bangs producing a multiverse—countless different universes, most of which would be far too bizarre to ​harbor life. Holed up in the theoretical physics department at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking and his friend and collaborator Thomas Hertog worked on this problem for twenty years, developing a new theory of the cosmos that could account for the emergence of life. Peering into the extreme quantum physics of cosmic holograms and venturing far back in time to our deepest roots, they were startled to find a deeper level of evolution in which the physical laws themselves transform and simplify until particles, forces, and even time itself fades away. This discovery led them to a revolutionary idea: The laws of physics are not set in stone but are born and co-evolve as the universe they govern takes shape. As Hawking’s final days drew near, the two collaborators published their theory, which proposed a radical new Darwinian perspective on the origins of our universe. On the Origin of Time offers a striking new vision of the universe’s birth that will profoundly transform the way we think about our place in the order of the cosmos and may ultimately prove to be Hawking’s greatest legacy. * Includes a downloadable PDF containing evidence-based diagrams and illustrations, figures, works of art, and personal portraits.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/569526 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Undercooked: How I Let Food Become My Life Navigator and How Maybe That's a Dumb Way to Live Author: Dan Ahdoot Narrator: Dan Ahdoot Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 43 minutes Release date: March 21, 2023 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A collection of hilarious essays about how food became one man’s obsession and coping mechanism, and how it came to rule—and sometimes ruin—his relationships, from the Cobra Kai actor, stand-up comic, and host of Food Network’s Raid the Fridge “When most people say they have an unhealthy relationship with food, they mean they eat too much of it or too little. When I say I have an unhealthy relationship with food, I mean it’s what gives my life meaning. That’s a really dumb way to live your life, as the stories in this book will attest to.” Despite an impressive résumé as an actor and writer, Dan Ahdoot realized that food has been the through line in the most important moments of his life. Growing up as a middle child, Ahdoot struggled to find his place in the family until he and his father discovered their shared love for la gourmandise. But when the tragic death of his brother pushed his parents to strengthen their Jewish faith and adopt a strictly kosher diet, Ahdoot and his father lost that savored connection. To fill the absence left by his brother and father, Ahdoot began to obsess over food and make it central in all his relationships. This, he admits, is probably crazy, but it makes for good stories. From breaking up with girlfriends over dietary restrictions, to hunting just off the Long Island Expressway, to savoring his grandmother’s magical food that was his only tactile connection to his family’s home country of Iran, to jetting off to Italy to dine at the one of the world’s best restaurants, only to send the risotto back, Ahdoot’s droll observations on his unconventional adventures bring an absurdly funny yet heartfelt look at what happens when you let your stomach be your guide.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/559024 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Code Gray: Death, Life, and Uncertainty in the ER Author: Farzon A Nahvi Narrator: Farzon A Nahvi, Aden Hakimi Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 14 minutes Release date: February 21, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A powerful, compelling firsthand account of the moral and ethical questions ER doctors face even as they scramble to diagnose patients on the brink of death. Code Gray​ is the riveting story of a seemingly healthy forty-three-year-old woman who arrives in the ER in sudden cardiac arrest. The cause of her condition is unknown, and as the ER team tries desperately to revive her, they cannot seem to find why her heart stopped. Eventually the cause is discovered—too late to save her—and it raises an unexpected ethical concern for Dr. Nahvi and the woman’s husband. With this narrative as background, Dr. Nahvi shares other stories of moral and ethical challenges, among them an elderly woman and her adult daughter who each want to enlist him in a conspiracy to shield the other from knowledge of the mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Dr. Nahvi worked in two of New York’s most heavily impacted ER’s in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. He describes the frantic exchange of information among the city’s ER doctors as they collectively encountered an illness none of them had ever seen before. Ranging from the Covid outbreak to the perennial glaring inequities in healthcare that it highlighted, Code Gray is a beautifully written, heartfelt memoir that will appeal to readers of Atul Gawande and Siddhartha Mukherjee. THIS AUDIOBOOK MAY INCLUDE INFORMATION REGARDING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC. INFORMATION RELATED TO COVID-19 CONTINUES TO EVOLVE. AUDIOBOOKS.COM ENCOURAGES YOU TO SEEK UP-TO-DATE INFORMATION AND GUIDANCE FROM YOUR LOCAL PUBLIC HEALTH UNIT.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/571020 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Ugly: Why the world became beauty-obsessed and how to break free Author: Anita Bhagwandas Narrator: Anita Bhagwandas Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 6 minutes Release date: February 16, 2023 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: We've all had those moments. The ones where you look in the mirror and nothing feels ok. For Anita Bhagwandas, this started when she was a child and it created an enduring internal torment about her looks. We're all told that this is just part of growing up, but it stays with us, evolving as we age. The internet tells us we should love ourselves, whilst bombarding us with images of airbrushed perfection, upholding centuries-old beauty standards which we can't always see. Our beauty rituals are so often based around things we think we need to fix, grow and develop - sometimes tipping into dangerous obsession. So, what seismic shift does it take to break free from this mentality? In Ugly, Anita uncovers where these beauty standards started, unpicks why they've been perpetuated and unmasks the structures that continue to support them. From the ever-growing cosmetic surgery industry, to the hidden pitfalls of 'pretty privilege', it is time to finally break free from those limiting beauty standards, because feeling ugly should have nothing to do with how we look, and everything to do with who wants us to feel lacking.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/569535 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Down and Back: On Alcohol, Family, and a Life in Hockey Author: Justin Bourne Narrator: Justin Bourne Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 5 minutes Release date: February 14, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: For readers of Nine Lessons I Learned from My Father and Hockey Confidential, Down and Back tells broadcaster Justin Bourne’s story of following his Hall-of-Fame father not only to the NHL, but also into rehab. Bob Bourne was everything a son wants to emulate—an NHL All-Star, a Sports Illustrated “Sportsman of the Year,” a Stanley Cup champion. Justin Bourne followed in those huge footsteps, leading his teams in scoring year after year, and finally garnering an invitation to the New York Islanders’ training camp—the same team his father had played for. But Bourne was also following his father down a darker path. Though he hadn’t begun drinking until he was 21, by 36 his drinking had nearly swamped his career and his marriage. In an act of brutal self-honesty—which may not have been possible if not for his understanding of how lying spurred by alcoholism can cause a family pain—Bourne got help, got sober, and confronted what his father and the game mean to him. Down and Back is a frank and unflinching appraisal of the game and Bourne’s relationship with it: the violence and danger, the booze and drugs, the consequences of fame. But it is also an honest look at what is redeeming about the sport, through the eyes of someone who grew up in NHL dressing rooms, who has skated on NHL ice as both a player and a coach, and who inherited the game from a man he’s grown to better understand by looking more closely at himself.