Discover the Best Audio Stories in Biography & Memoir, Memoirs

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/767031 to listen full audiobooks. Title: My Thirty-Minute Bar Mitzvah Author: Denis Hirson Narrator: Denis Hirson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 10 minutes Release date: June 6, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A bestselling South African writer known for tackling history and memory finally makes his American debut Witty and deeply poignant, My Thirty-Minute Bar Mitzvah is a breathtaking account of one man being confronted by his past and, ultimately, how his daughter proved to be the key in understanding his own father. Recreating 1960s Johannesburg through his adolescent eyes, bestselling South African author Denis Hirson gradually reveals the details of his extraordinary thirteenth birthday as he explores the familial and political divisions in Apartheid South Africa that weighed on him and his developing consciousness of his Jewish heritage. My Thirty-Minute Bar Mitzvah is a gem of a book about becoming a man. It's also a valuable account of a forgotten time of white, Jewish activists, their families, their community, and most importantly, their children, who had to stumble through life in the aftermath of their commitment to racial justice.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/769431 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Strange Little Girl Author: Jessica Knight Narrator: Rebekah Hill Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 50 minutes Release date: June 5, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Maybe you don't need heaven, maybe you just need to find yourself. My father tells it because he made it up. A little bedtime story of my origin. They are not really my parents, the people who I call Mum and Dad. Those are not my siblings, the kids who I know as my brother and sisters. I am not really human. I am an alien from another planet in a far distant constellation. Jessica Knight grew up on a dairy farm in rural Victoria, her crib next door to where all the cows were milked. It's a loving Mormon household, a god-fearing home. While they don't have very much, it's their values and good humour that allows them to laugh at what scares them. All young Jessica wants is to be good and make her parents and her Heavenly Father happy. She cleans the house and helps out with her siblings; all the while being subjected to intensive medical tests and major surgeries. Doctors consider her a puzzle and a medical mystery. But what if you decide you want to be open about your fears? This is the story of how one young woman learned to move on from the life she was expected to have, embraced what she was scared of, and looked to her future with an open heart and mind.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/757223 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Most Human: Reconciling with My Father, Leonard Nimoy Author: Adam Nimoy Narrator: Adam Nimoy Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 18 minutes Release date: June 4, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 2 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Living with Dad was like living with a stranger—as a kid I often had trouble connecting and relating to him. But I was always proud of him. Even before Star Trek, I’d see him popping up in bit roles on some of my favorite TV shows like Get Smart, Sea Hunt, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. And then one night he brought home Polaroids of himself in makeup and wardrobe for a pilot he was working on. It was December 1964 and nobody had heard of Star Trek. Still, the eight-year-old me had watched enough Outer Limits and My Favorite Martian to understand exactly what I was looking at. Spock’s popularity happened quickly, and soon the fan magazines were writing about dad’s personal life, characterizing us as a “close family.” But the awkwardness that defined our early relationship blossomed into conflict, sometimes smoldering, sometimes open and intense. There were occasional flashes of warmth between the arguments and hurt feelings—even something akin to love—especially when we were celebrating my father’s many successes. The rest of the time, things between us were often strained. My resentment towards my father kept building through the years until we were estranged. I wanted things to be different for my children. I wanted to be the father I never had, so I did all the things dads are supposed to do. And then I got Dad's letter. That marked a turning point in our lives, a moment that cleared the way for a new relationship between us.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/765279 to listen full audiobooks. Title: To Be Loved: A Story of Truth, Trauma, and Transformation Author: Frank G. Anderson MD Narrator: Frank G. Anderson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 46 minutes Release date: June 4, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Rarely does a trauma therapist disclose their own trauma history . . . yet it's the untold, brutally honest, incredibly heartbreaking story of Dr. Frank Anderson that made him the world-renowned trauma expert he is today. Known for his magnetic and radiant personality, Frank spends his time training thousands of clinicians around the world on how to help clients with complex trauma make sense of their suffering. But underneath this charismatic exterior are his dark family secrets, including the marks of child abuse from his father and the invisible scars of shame. In To Be Loved, Frank shares his confusing experience of growing up an outsider in a typical Midwestern Italian American home that was at one turn fiercely loving but at the same time unaccepting, abusive, and rife with secrets. After enduring six years of therapy as a child in the 1970s, he was programmed to be something that he wasn't for decades, and became driven to create the perfect life—until it all fell apart. It was only then that he realized resilience, forgiveness, and facing his trauma were the keys to living an authentic life—and finally knowing what it feels like to be loved.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/769035 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative Author: Glenn Loury Narrator: Glenn Loury Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 18 hours 27 minutes Release date: June 4, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A shockingly frank memoir from a prize-winning economist, reflecting on his remarkable personal odyssey and his changing positions on identity, race, and belief. Economist Glenn C. Loury is one of the most prominent public intellectuals of our time: he's often radically opposed to the political mainstream, and delights in upending what's expected of a Black public figure. But more so than the arguments themselves—on affirmative action, institutional racism, Trumpism—his public life has been characterized by fearlessness and a willingness to recalibrate strongly held and forcefully argued beliefs. Loury grew up on the south side of Chicago, earned a PhD in MIT's economics program, and became the first Black tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of thirty-three. He has been, at turns, a young father, a drug addict, an adulterer, a psychiatric patient, a born-again Christian, a lapsed born-again Christian, a Black Reaganite who has swung from the right to the left and back again. In Late Admissions, Loury examines what it means to chart a sense of self over the course of a tempestuous, but well-considered, life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/745334 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Zev's Los Angeles: A Political Memoir: From Boyle Heights to the Halls of Power Author: Zev Yaroslavsky Narrator: Graham Rowat Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 16 hours 52 minutes Release date: May 28, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: This is the story of Zev Yaroslavsky, the son of Ukrainian Jews who immigrated to the United States in the early 1920s. His memoir charts the journey of a young social activist who battled to free Soviet Jews before becoming one of the most consequential elected officials in Southern California. Fiercely independent, he combined an activist's passion with a seasoned politician's skill to challenge the region's power brokers. He fought the Los Angeles Police Department's excessive force and political spying policies, led the effort to ban local taxes from funding the 1984 Olympics, teamed with President Clinton to avert a catastrophic county bankruptcy, helped develop LA's modern transit system, won a bruising battle with real estate interests to save the Santa Monica Mountains from rapacious development, and was pivotal in the development of Walt Disney Concert Hall and the modernization of the iconic Hollywood Bowl. 'I may be part of the establishment,' he said on the day he was first sworn into office, 'but the establishment is not part of me.'

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/753896 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Looking for Andy Griffith: A Father's Journey Author: Evan Dalton Smith Narrator: Evan Dalton Smith Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 34 minutes Release date: May 28, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Andy Griffith (1926-2012) is one of North Carolina's most beloved exports, capturing America's heart as Sheriff Andy Taylor. Evan Dalton Smith was born in the North Carolina Piedmont over four decades after Andy, just an hour south of Griffith's hometown of Mount Airy. Both were small-town boys who grew up in similar places, where the counties were dry and the churches plentiful. But for both, there was darkness, crushed hopes, and tragedy, hidden just below the surface. For Smith and many generations in North Carolina, Andy Griffith was like the air—everywhere, all the time, a part of daily life. Even after he left the state, Smith always felt the pull of home and the lingering ghost of Andy alongside it. This is an exploration on celebrity and the self, on home and what that means when you leave it, and why we love and admire the people we do—even if we've never met them—all told through the entwined lives of iconic actor Andy Griffith and writer Evan Dalton Smith. It is through Smith's telling of Griffith's life that he finds his own story, one that is both informed by and freed from the legacy of one of North Carolina's most famous sons.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/767003 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Hidden Fires: A Cairngorms Journey with Nan Shepherd Author: Merryn Glover Narrator: Merryn Glover Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 59 minutes Release date: May 28, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature Elemental, fierce, and full of wonder, the Cairngorm mountains are the high and rocky heart of Scotland. To know them would take forever, to love them demands a kind of courageous surrender. In The Hidden Fires, Merryn Glover undertakes that challenge with Nan Shepherd as companion and guiding light. Following in the footsteps and contours of The Living Mountain, she explores the same landscapes and themes as Shepherd's seminal work. This is a journey separated by time but unified by space and purpose, a conversation between two women across nearly a century that explores how entering the life of a mountain can illuminate our own. An Australian who grew up in the Himalayas, her early experiences of the Scottish hills and weather left her cold. But gradually acclimatizing and with an approach like Shepherd's, that is more mountain wandering than mountaineering, she discovers the spark that sets the hills and herself on fire. Through Glover's deepening encounter, the wild majesty and iridescence of the Cairngorms is revealed in this beautiful evocation of landscape, place, and identity.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/769428 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Surf Like a Woman Author: Pauline Menczer, Luke Benedictus Narrator: Eva Seymour Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 24 minutes Release date: May 28, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: In the 80s and 90s, surf culture was toxic, especially towards women. But Pauline Menczer - a dirt-poor, chronically ill, freckle-faced teen from Bondi - defied insults and intimidation to ride the waves. The reason: she simply loved to surf. But when Pauline's determination propelled her onto the pro circuit, her battle for acceptance and equality didn't end there. The endemic sexism of the industry meant prize money for women was a pittance, while sponsors ignored her because she was a lesbian and didn't have the beach babe look. Despite these challenges, Pauline became the 1993 World Champion and played a key role in bringing greater equality to the sport. This is the inspirational story of a true underdog battler, whose fearlessness and grit broke down the door of surfing's boys' club for the next generation of women.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/771452 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Never Better: Two Kids, Their Dad, and His Wife's Ghost Author: Gonzalo Riedel Narrator: Kyle Snyder Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 52 minutes Release date: May 28, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: His wife died before their second son turned one. How can he keep her memory alive when there's so much he wants to forget? There was a time before his wife got sick when Gonzalo could think about other things. Where humor was more than a coping mechanism. Life wasn't all about treatments and recovery, or the emptiness he felt when she died. They had kids together. Young kids. Less than a year after their youngest was born and suddenly he was strapping them both into their car seats to drive to their mother's funeral. He used to think he was the glue holding the household together. It didn't take long for him to realize how wrong he'd been. A grieving husband is in no condition to raise kids alone. There were times when he wanted to toss himself into a raging river that would suck him under and bash his skull on the rocks. That's always an option for another day. For now, he'll just squash those feelings and drive the kids to daycare. Does it get easier? Of course. But not right away. They say that hope only comes at the end of a long dark journey, but that isn't entirely true because the journey never really ends. But that means there's good news: hope is everywhere you look.