Discover the Best Audio Stories in Biography & Memoir, Memoirs

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/777408 to listen full audiobooks. Title: [French] - Les Lieux du Courage Author: Muguette Myers Narrator: Louise Philippe, Muguette Myers, Naomi Azrieli Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 16 minutes Release date: July 16, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Muguette Szpajzer, fillette de 10 ans, a quitté Paris avec sa famille pour aller se réfugier non loin de la capitale, dans le village de Champlost. Les mémoires de Muguette, présentés en une série de petits tableaux, ont l’innocence et le charme de l’enfance. Ils offrent un aperçu unique de la vie rurale en France durant la tourmente de la guerre, et rendent hommage à la fois à la force de caractère de sa mère et au courage des habitants de Champlost. Préface de Susan Zuccotti

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/777218 to listen full audiobooks. Title: To the Gorge: Running, Grief, Resilience & 460 Miles on the Pacific Crest Trail Author: Emily Halnon Narrator: Emily Halnon Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 47 minutes Release date: July 9, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: When Emily Halnon lost her beloved mother to a rare uterine cancer at just sixty-six years old, she wanted to do something monumental to honor the person her mother had been. Emily's mom had taken up running in her late forties; she ran her first marathon at fifty. She even went skydiving to celebrate her sixtieth birthday. Emily, already an accomplished ultrarunner, decided to try to break the record for the Fastest Known Time by a woman on the Pacific Crest Trail's 460 miles across Oregon. To the Gorge takes the listener through her seven days, nineteen hours, and twenty-three minutes on the trail, covering nearly sixty miles a day on foot over rugged terrain, and battling all the issues that could arise during such a monstrous undertaking. All the while, she simultaneously struggles with how to get through the profound grief of losing her mom. Interwoven with Halnon's eight-day effort are her remembrances from her mother's life and death, exploring the complicated experience of grief—and what shines through it. Filled with adventure and heart, To the Gorge invites listeners to consider what our greatest losses can teach us about how to live the one life we get.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/775455 to listen full audiobooks. Title: I Can Give You Anything But Love Author: Gary Indiana Narrator: Daniel Henning Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 17 minutes Release date: July 9, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Described by the London Review of Books as one of 'the most brilliant critics writing in America today,' Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments. With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work—from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post-summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this—his most personal book yet—the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing book and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/768700 to listen full audiobooks. Title: My Family: The Memoir Author: David Baddiel Narrator: David Baddiel Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 33 minutes Release date: July 4, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: 'One of the funniest books I have ever read' HADLEY FREEMAN ‘A masterpiece’ SATHNAM SANGHERA 'The read of the summer' THE SUNDAY TIMES 'Brilliant … funny and moving' ADAM KAY A searingly honest, funny and moving family memoir in which David Baddiel exposes his mother’s idiosyncratic sex life, and his father’s dementia, to the same affectionate scrutiny. On the surface, David Baddiel’s childhood was fairly standard: a lower-middle-class Jewish family living in an ordinary house in Dollis Hill, north-west London. But David came to realise that his mother was in fact not ordinary at all. Having escaped extermination by fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, she was desperate to make her life count, which took the form of a passionate, decades-long affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman. David’s detailing of the affair – including a hilarious focus on how his mother turned their household over to golf memorabilia, and an eye-popping cache of her erotic writings – leads to the inescapable conclusion that Sarah Baddiel was a cross between Jack Niklaus and Erica Jong. Meanwhile, as Baddiel investigates his family’s past, his father’s memories are fading; dementia is making him moodier and more disinhibited, with an even greater penchant for obscenity. As with his mother’s affair, there is both comedy and poignancy to be found: laughter is a constant presence, capable of transforming the darkest of experiences into something redemptive. My Family: The Memoir is David Baddiel’s candid examination of his childhood, family and memory offering a twisted love letter to his parents. 'An extraordinary, hilarious book' OBSERVER ‘I lost count of how many times I gasped’ CAITLIN MORAN 'Outrageously funny…profoundly thoughtful' THE SUNDAY TIMES 'Explosively funny, brilliantly written' DAVID WALLIAMS 'Infernally funny' HOWARD JACOBSON ‘A triumph’ NINA STIBBE 'Baddiel has done his parents proud’ GUARDIAN 'Had me howling' PANDORA SYKES

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/771553 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Afterlife Confessional Author: William Edgar Narrator: William Edgar Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 56 minutes Release date: July 2, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A private investigator with a haunting past, Bill Edgar's life was never destined to be ordinary. Rising to international fame as the 'Coffin Confessor' - the man who crashes funerals on behalf of the deceased, giving voice to their last wishes - Bill dismantled many of the assumptions we hold about truth, dignity and the business of dying. Swindlers, cheaters, vultures, liars and con-artists - there isn't a musty corner of the human soul Bill hasn't confronted. Loved and loathed in equal measure, his only concern is being the caretaker of the secrets and desires his clients have entrusted to him. Shame and outrage, healing and comfort are left up to those left behind. But it's a request from one woman to hand-deliver a bottle of wine to her husband on the anniversary of her death that raises deeper questions: What do we make out of the handful of days we're given? If hate and injustice are so hard to bury, why does love have a knack for triumphing? Are the most profound acts in life sometimes the most quiet ones? The Afterlife Confessional follows Bill's journey for answers as he looks through the dizzying kaleidoscope of his clients' lives - the widower who escaped an aged-care trap to take her husband's ashes on the road trip of a lifetime; the man who spent his life paying it forward to try to make up for one shameful act; the closet dominatrix who quietly confronts her husband's infidelity by comforting those truly in need; the devoted couple who insist on going hand-in-hand into the afterlife.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/760629 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Us, After: A Memoir of Love and Suicide Author: Rachel Zimmerman Narrator: Rachel Zimmerman Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 6 minutes Release date: June 30, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: When a state trooper appeared at Rachel Zimmerman’s door to report that her husband had jumped to his death off a nearby bridge, she fell to her knees, unable to fully absorb the news. How could the man she’d married, a devoted father and robotics professor at MIT, have committed such a violent act? How would she explain this to her young daughters? And could she have stopped him?A longtime journalist, she probed obsessively, believing answers would help her survive. She interviewed doctors, suicide researchers, and a man who jumped off the same bridge and lived.Us, After examines domestic devastation and resurgence, digging into the struggle between public and private selves, life’s shifting perspectives, the work of motherhood, and the secrets we keep. In this memoir, Zimmerman confronts the unimaginable and discovers the good in what remains.“This poignant, soul-baring memoir is truly one of the most moving accounts of grief, loss and resilience that I’ve read.”—Tara Parker-Pope, The Washington Post

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/760834 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Straight Up Author: Ruby Tui Narrator: Ruby Tui Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 21 minutes Release date: June 27, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: This is Ruby Tui. An open, raw and honest account of her journey from a troubled and unstable childhood, searching for a better option in life, to Olympic champion and the world's best rugby sevens player. After a childhood filled with neglect Ruby yearned for another path. Determined not to let her upbringing limit her, she survived abuse, drugs and tragedy to become one of the most successful women's rugby players in the world. The explosion of women's rugby on the global stage has matched the rise of Ruby's stellar career, as she has grown with the game from amateur to professional. In Straight Up Ruby looks herself in the eye, understanding that she can turn pain into purpose. It's time to be straight up.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/768831 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Waiting for the Thaw: The Journey, The Unspeakable Loss, and The Transformation Author: Patricia Ann Narrator: Ashley Clark Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 2 hours 14 minutes Release date: June 25, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Waiting for the Thaw is an inspirational story of one woman’s journey through the darkest depths of loss and her eventual ascension back to a life rich with fulfillment. Patricia Ann’s wonderfully descriptive retelling of her life’s story is absolutely captivating. Pulling the listener in immediately, she describes meeting her future husband, Don, in the most humorous and unexpected way. Their subsequent rollercoaster of life’s challenges includes the joy of becoming parents to two beautiful daughters and eventually becoming grandparents of three grandchildren. With a thriving business and a loving family, they were enjoying life to the fullest. Then, suddenly, the lights of a young life go dark. Don’s unexpected death is a crushing blow to Patricia and her family. Dreams unfulfilled, unbearable grief, and now, for the first time in her life, Patricia is fighting for the strength to go on. That is where this amazing, inspirational story delivers on all levels. The author beautifully articulates the struggle to get back into life and run a business on her own. It gives hope to all who have suffered or will suffer the devastating loss of a loved one. Patricia’s story is not only about everlasting love but also about survival and what it takes to make life worth living again.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/773550 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Vegas or Bust: A Family Man Takes On the Poker Pros Author: Johnny Kampis Narrator: Chris Abernathy Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 57 minutes Release date: June 25, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Can a former semi-pro win against the best poker players in the world? In 2006, Johnny's pie-in-the-sky dreams of becoming world champion were dashed when his kings ran into aces in the World Series of Poker Main Event. But lady luck was with him when he met Amy, the woman of his dreams, who soon became his wife. Like many players, he drifted away from the game after Congress passed a law later that year that cut off funds to online poker and harkened the decline of the game. But even as Johnny returned to the working world, the itch remained. A decade later, now with two small kids in tow, Johnny convinces Amy to take a six-week family trip from their home in rural Alabama to Las Vegas, where he will risk his $10,000 bankroll in hopes of playing in the Main Event again and winning millions. Along the way, he examines how the game has changed since 2006. Although the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was the beginning of the end of the poker boom, the game still thrives, and WSOP is Exhibit A. Johnny also muses on the outlandishness of the adult fairyland that is Vegas.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/760329 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Tony Benn at the BBC: The Benn Tapes, Free at Last! and more Author: Tony Benn Narrator: Tony Benn Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 25 minutes Release date: June 20, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A collection of Tony Benn’s private audio diaries, documentaries and archive interviews Tony Benn was the patriarch of the Labour left, a radical statesman, orator and anti-war campaigner who spent over 50 years as an MP, serving in the Cabinet under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. A prolific diarist, his political memoirs have been compared to Pepys in their detail, scope and accuracy. Three volumes are included here, read by Benn himself, together with four fascinating programmes focussing on the man behind the diaries. Part I: Tony Benn’s Diaries The Benn Tapes 1 – For over 25 years, Tony Benn sat late into the night dictating his personal account of the daily happenings at the heart of government. In this unique series, he shares his remarkable recordings from history’s front line, recalling events such as Harold Wilson’s surprise 1976 resignation; the miners’ strike of 1984-1985 and the 1992 general election. The Benn Tapes 2 – This second series of behind-the-scenes revelations sees Benn recounting why he believes nuclear power is unsafe, disclosing what went on during Cabinet reshuffles and tracing the split in the party following its 1979 defeat, the emergence of the Social Democratic Party, and his challenge to deputy leader Denis Healy. Free at Last!: The Diaries 1991-2001 – Spanning Tony Benn’s final decade as an MP, this third volume covers the Gulf War, the rise of New Labour, the death of Diana Princess of Wales and peace in Northern Ireland. Mixing political observations with a moving account of family life, it is full of humour, insight, joy and sadness. Part 2: Tony Benn’s Life In the Psychiatrist’s Chair: Tony Benn – Dr Anthony Clare talks to the legendary parliamentarian about his life, his career and how his guiding principles were influenced by his parents’ social and political convictions. Sentimental Journey: Tony Benn – Arthur Smith accompanies Tony Benn on a trip back to the place where he was born, grew up, and spent most of his political life – the City of Westminster. With Great Pleasure: Tony Benn – The veteran politician presents a selection of the prose and poetry that has shaped his personal philosophy, including the words of Mahatma Gandhi, Dwight D Eisenhower, Oscar Wilde and John Bunyan. Night Waves: Tony Benn – In an event from the 2008 Free Thinking festival, Tony Benn talks about the value of experience and discusses his own life experience with presenter Susan Hitch and the audience. Cast and credits The Benn Tapes Read by Tony Benn Produced by Keith Jones First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 21 Jul-8 Sep 1993 (Series 1), 17 Oct- 5 Dec 1994 (Series 2) Free at Last!: The Diaries 1991-2001 Read by Tony Benn Produced by Jane Ray First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 13-17 Oct 2003 In the Psychiatrist’s Chair: Tony Benn Presented by Dr Anthony Clare A Michael Ember production First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 13 Aug 1995 Sentimental Journey: Tony Benn With Arthur Smith and Tony Benn Produced by Dilly Barlow First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 29 Jul 2006 With Great Pleasure: Tony Benn Presented by Tony Benn Readers: Saffron Burrows, Jim Findley and Carl Prekopp Produced by Christine Hall First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 26 Jul 2007 Night Waves: Tony Benn Presented by Susan Hitch With Tony Benn Produced by Allegra McIlroy First broadcast BBC Radio 3, 11 Dec 2008 © 2024 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2024 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd