Discover the Best Audio Stories in Biography & Memoir

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/719091 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Wonderland: A Tale of Hustling Hard and Breaking Even Author: Nicole Treska Narrator: Nicole Treska Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 9 minutes Release date: July 9, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A “touching memoir” (The New York Times Book Review) that “brilliantly blends a history of Boston and its surrounding areas with the history of a fascinating—and at times functional—family” (Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts) as one girl discovers how to break free from the criminal underworld that surrounds her. Nicole Treska was born to a family of gangsters. In the 1970s, during Boston’s mob wars, her grandfather’s diner was an unofficial headquarters for Whitey Bulger and other members of the Winter Hill Gang. Nicole’s father was also an associate of the gang: there was talk that, before Nicole could walk, her stroller was used as a decoy to sell drugs. In 1985, her father was arrested and tried—sentenced to two years in prison for federal drug trafficking. Wanting to offer a better life to her children, Nicole’s mother moved her and her sister out of Boston. As an adult, Nicole strove to separate herself from her past, establishing a career as a writer and professor in New York City. But when she learns her father’s sister has passed away, she returns to her hometown and reunites with her dad—now stooped and struggling to walk on a bad knee. As she gets reacquainted with him and the old neighborhood, Nicole is forced to reconcile with her harrowing childhood and its lingering impact. A “compelling portrait” (Safiya Sinclair, National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of How to Say Babylon) “written with urgency, vulnerability, and compassion” (Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebody’s Daughter), Wonderland masterfully explores and elucidates the line between helping family and hurting ourselves.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/721866 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Other Rivers: A Chinese Education Author: Peter Hessler Narrator: Peter Hessler Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 32 minutes Release date: July 9, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: An intimate and revelatory account of two generations of students in China’s heartland, by an author who has observed the country’s tumultuous changes over the past quarter century More than two decades after teaching English during the early part of China’s economic boom, an experience chronicled in his book River Town, Peter Hessler returned to Sichuan Province to instruct students from the next generation. At the same time, Hessler and his wife enrolled their twin daughters in a local state-run elementary school, where they were the only Westerners. Over the years, Hessler had kept in close contact with many of the people he had taught in the 1990s. By reconnecting with these individuals—members of China’s “Reform generation,” now in their forties—while teaching current undergrads, Hessler gained a unique perspective on China’s incredible transformation. In 1996, when Hessler arrived in China, almost all of the people in his classroom were first-generation college students. They typically came from large rural families, and their parents, subsistence farmers, could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China, as well as a new kind of student—an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious cohort of parents. At Sichuan University, many young people had a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigated its restrictions with equanimity, embracing the opportunities of China’s rise. But the pressures of extreme competition at scale can be grueling, even for much younger children—including Hessler’s own daughters, who gave him an intimate view into the experience at their local school. In Peter Hessler’s hands, China’s education system is the perfect vehicle for examining the country’s past, present, and future, and what we can learn from it, for good and ill. At a time when anti-Chinese rhetoric in America has grown blunt and ugly, Other Rivers is a tremendous, essential gift, a work of enormous empathy that rejects cheap stereotypes and shows us China from the inside out and the bottom up. As both a window onto China and a mirror onto America, Other Rivers is a classic from a master of the form.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/721853 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within Author: Cory Richards Narrator: Cory Richards Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 19 minutes Release date: July 9, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A renowned climber and National Geographic photographer shares his incredible adventures—and the early trauma that drove him to seek such heights. “An extraordinary memoir of mental illness that reads like a thriller.”—Amy Ellis Nutt, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Becoming Nicole “In order to escape madness, I will live madly. I will risk my life in order to save it.” Growing up in the mountains of Utah, Cory Richards was constantly surrounded by the outdoors. His father, a high school teacher and a ski patroller, spent years teaching Richards and his brother how to ski, climb, mountaineer, and survive in the wild. Despite a seemingly idyllic childhood, the Richards home was fraught with violence, grief, and mental illness. After being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and dropping out of high school, Richards subsumed himself in the worlds of photography and climbing, seeking out the farthest reaches of the world to escape the darkness. Then, in the midst of a wildly successful career in adventure photography, a catastrophic avalanche changed everything, forcing Richards to confront the trauma of his past, evaluate his own mental health, and learn to rewrite his story. The Color of Everything is a thrilling tale of risk and adventure, written by a man who has done it all: He’s stood at the top of the world, climbed imposing mountain faces alone in the dark, and become the only American to summit an 8,000-meter peak in winter. But it is also the story of a tumultuous life—a stirring, lyrical memoir that captures the profound musings of an unquiet mind grappling with the meaning of success, the cost of fame and addiction, and whether it is possible to outrun your demons. With exquisite prose and disarming candor, Richards excavates the roots of his trauma and shares what it took for him to climb out of it.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/733674 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Language of War Author: Oleksandr Mykhed Narrator: Greg Kolpakchi Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 49 minutes Release date: July 4, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. ‘We were so happy and didn’t know it…’ A thirty-three-year-old writer lives in a quiet European suburb with his wife and his dog. His parents have bought an apartment nearby. On weekends they go out for brunch, cook and see friends. Life is good; it is normal. Then the invaders come. Language of War is about what happens when your world changes overnight. When you wake up to the sound of helicopters and the smell of gunpowder. When your home is hit by shells or broken into by gunmen, and you spend another night in a basement-turned-bomb shelter. When, even though you’ve never held a weapon before, you realise the only choice is to fight back. It is about things one can never forget, or forgive. Bringing together Oleksandr Mykhed’s vivid day-by-day chronicles of the invasion of Ukraine with a chorus of other voices – his family, friends in exile, those who have fought and have witnessed unimaginable atrocities – this book is both a record, and a reckoning. Haunting and timeless, it asks how it is possible to find the words to describe a new reality; how you can still make sense of the world when the only language you can speak is the language of war. ©2024 Oleksandr Mykhed (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/734532 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Guitar Author: Earl Slick, Jeff Slate Narrator: Earl Slick, Nathan Osgood Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 36 minutes Release date: July 4, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. A rollicking rock 'n' roll memoir of the last 50 years of rock history, from David Bowie's longest serving lead guitarist and legendary sideman, Earl Slick. He's played with everyone from John Lennon to the New York Dolls - and he's got the stories to prove it. Earl Slick was barely out of his teens when David Bowie hired him to play guitar on the ground-breaking 1974 Diamond Dogs tour. It marked the beginning of a relationship that would endure through thick and thin for the next forty years. Gracing classic albums like Young Americans, Station to Station and the 2013 comeback, The Next Day, Slick played on the tour that followed Bowie’s smash hit Let’s Dance album and was at his side for the epic Glastonbury show in 2000. But it wasn’t just Bowie. The young guitarist was in John Lennon’s band at the time of the former Beatle’s tragic murder. Other collaborations read like a roll call of rock ‘n’ roll royalty including Mick Jagger, The Cure, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Joe Cocker, Buddy Guy, Ian Hunter, David Coverdale and Eric Clapton. And in the ‘80s he became an MTV star in his own right with the success of Phantom, Rocker and Slick. Through it all he lived the rock ‘n’ roll life to the hilt. Until it nearly killed him. One of rock’s great sidemen, Earl Slick was in the room when music history was made. Guitar takes us there, shining a light on superstars like Bowie and Lennon, while recounting the extraordinary story of the boy from New York City who became a real life Johnny B. Goode. ©2024 Earl Slick (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/721832 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Do Something: Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of '70s New York Author: Guy Trebay Narrator: Edoardo Ballerini Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 29 minutes Release date: June 25, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: An evocative coming-of-age memoir—the story of the education of a wayward wild child and acidhead who, searching for meaning and purpose, found refuge in the demimonde of the ruined but magical metropolis that was New York City in the 1970s. “In his beautiful memoir, Do Something, Guy Trebay paints a picture of a vanished, pre-AIDS Gotham that’s both gritty and dazzling.” —The New York Times Book Review 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. By the time Trebay established a foothold at the fringes of Andy Warhol’s Factory and the diverse artistic tribes that thrived in Manhattan in that pre-digital era, his father had lost his fortune, his younger sister had been arrested for armed robbery and fled underground, the family house was in ashes, and his mother was dead. Unschooled and on his own, Trebay became a striver, wending his way through a seemingly apocalyptic landscape populated by a vibrant cast of characters, including washed-up Hollywood screenwriters of the ’30s; Warhol superstars like Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling; fashion geniuses like Charles James; and emerging artists, filmmakers, writers, designers, photographers, and deejays who would powerfully influence mainstream culture in the decades to come.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/738474 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew Author: Avi Shlaim Narrator: Neil Shah Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 54 minutes Release date: June 25, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: In July 1950, Avi Shlaim, only five, and his family were forced into exile, fleeing their beloved Iraq to the new state of Israel. Today the once flourishing Jewish community of Iraq, at one time numbering over 130,000 and tracing its history back 2,600 years, has all but vanished. Why so? One explanation speaks of the timeless clash between Arab and Jewish civilizations and a heroic Zionist mission to rescue Eastern Jews from backward nations and unceasing persecution. Avi Shlaim tears up this script. His parents had many Muslim friends in Baghdad and no interest in Zionism. As anti-Semitism surged in Iraq, the Zionist underground fanned the flames. Yet when Iraqi Jews fled to Israel, they faced an uncertain future, their history was rewritten to serve a Zionist narrative. This memoir breathes life into an almost forgotten world. Weaving together the personal and the political, Three Worlds offers a fresh perspective on Arab-Jews, caught in the crossfire of Zionism and nationalism.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/716267 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Going Fast and Fixing Things: True Stories from the World's Most Popular DIY Repair Expert and Car Aficionado Author: Rich Benoit Narrator: Rich Benoit, Hayden Daviau Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 37 minutes Release date: June 11, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: An entertaining and inspirational memoir by the world’s most popular DIY expert and car aficionado, revealing how Rich Benoit went from buying a left-for-dead Tesla to becoming a successful entrepreneur.   People are fascinated by Tesla: the cars, the stock price, and especially its headline-grabbing CEO.  Rich Benoit was the first YouTuber to pull back the curtain on the cult-like business model that is the Tesla company, and he’s personally battled its consumer-unfriendly business practices. In Going Fast and Fixing Things, Rich provides readers with behind-the-scenes access not only to his Rich Rebuilds YouTube channel but to his off-camera life as well.  Throughout his life, Rich has almost always been the proverbial “only Black guy in the room,” but despite the fact that online car culture—especially electric vehicle fandom—skews overwhelmingly white, he has become the most popular car rebuilding guy on the internet. His voice on the page is funny and intimate and a little goofy—just like his video persona—but always tempered by a passion for the right to repair and a clear determination to create success for himself as well as for his fans. Going Fast and Fixing Things also includes tips to help readers fix, drive, and buy their own cars, along with advice on how to defy the disposable-is-better consumerist ethos that saturates our current culture.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/723017 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Playing from the Rough: A Personal Journey through America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses Author: Jimmie James Narrator: Jimmie James Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 15 minutes Release date: June 11, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A “wonderful story of passion, commitment, resilience, and determination,” (Paul Gasol, former NBA All-Star) about one man’s quest to become the first person to play each of America’s 100 greatest golf courses in a single year, an odyssey that brings him face to face with the gulf between his impoverished childhood in the Jim Crow South and the successful executive he became. When he set out to play each of Golf Digest’s America’s100 greatest golf courses in one year, Jimmie James knew he was attempting the impossible. But then again, he’d spent his entire life defying the odds. James was born invisible. His birth certificate, long since filed away in some clerk’s office in East Texas, recorded facts about him that were deemed most relevant in the late 1950s: “colored” and “illegitimate.” His great-great-grandmother was enslaved, and his early life was confided by the privation and segregation of the late Jim Crow-era South. Four decades later—having put himself through an HBCU and determinedly risen through the executive ranks at ExxonMobil—he embarked on his journey to play the 100 greatest golf courses in the United States. In a single year. From the first tee at Augusta National, the distance between the world he grew up in and the world of extreme privilege to which he’d now managed to gain access was impossible to ignore. Playing from the Rough is a “delightful” (Kirkus Reviews), “beautiful story” (Andrew Campion, former COO of Nike) about race, class, family, and the power of perseverance, as James braids his love of golf with reflections on the path that took him from childhood poverty to the most exclusive and opulent golf courses in America.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/720884 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Consent: A Memoir Author: Jill Ciment Narrator: Eileen Stevens Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 0 minutes Release date: June 11, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: From the acclaimed novelist (“A virtuoso”—Donna Seaman, Booklist), a deft, shocking memoir that asks whether we can judge past behavior by today’s moral codes, as the author reevaluates her decades-long marriage to the forty-seven-year-old man she met when she was seventeen, revisiting a singular passion in the 21st-century aftermath of #MeToo. “Few writers can tackle the bedroom—or female libido . . . but Ciment is a master: in exquisitely spare prose, she nails it.” — The New York Times In this unflinching account of the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s, when she was a teenager and he was married with two children, Ciment not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1996 memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself if she told the whole truth back then, and what truth looked like to her in the even longer-ago era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love, when no one asked who was served by the permissibility around a May-December romance. In the light of #metoo, with new understanding about the balance of power between an older man and an underage girl, Ciment re-explores the erotic wild ride and intellectual flowering that shaped an improbable but blissful marriage that lasted for forty-five years, until her husband’s death at ninety-three. This riveting book about art, memory, and morality asks many questions along the way: Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning? Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later? Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself? Suffused with the wisdom that comes with time, Consent is an author’s brave recasting of her life’s settled narrative, and an urgent read for women of all ages.