Download Best Full Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Women

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/620415 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism

Author: Brooke Kroeger

Narrator: Maggie-Meg Reed

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 16 hours 32 minutes

Release date: May 16, 2023

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

An essential history of women in American journalism, showcasing exceptional careers from 1840 to the present Undaunted is a representative history of the American women who surmounted every impediment put in their way to do journalism’s most valued work. From Margaret Fuller’s improbable success to the highly paid reporters of the mid-nineteenth century to the breakthrough investigative triumphs of Nellie Bly, Ida Tarbell, and Ida B. Wells, Brooke Kroeger examines the lives of the best-remembered and long-forgotten woman journalists. She explores the careers of standout woman reporters who covered the major news stories and every conflict at home and abroad since before the Civil War, and she celebrates those exceptional careers up to the present, including those of Martha Gellhorn, Rachel Carson, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, Cokie Roberts, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault. As Kroeger chronicles the lives of journalists and newsroom leaders in every medium, a larger story develops: the nearly two-centuries-old struggle for women’s rights. Here as well is the collective fight for equity from the gentle stirrings of the late 1800s through the legal battles of the 1970s to the #MeToo movement and today’s racial and gender disparities. Undaunted unveils the huge and singular impact women have had on a vital profession still dominated by men.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/620372 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Wreck: A Daughter's Memoir of Becoming a Mother

Author: Cassandra Jackson

Narrator: Karen Murray

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 23 minutes

Release date: May 16, 2023

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

NPR's Books We Love 2023 Equal parts investigative and deeply introspective, The Wreck is a profound memoir about recognizing the echoes of history within ourselves, and the alchemy of turning inherited grief into renewal. There is a secret that young Cassandra Jackson doesn’t know, and it’s evident in the way her father cries her name out in his sleep. Through awkward encounters with family, she comes to realize that she is named after her father's niece, and looks eerily like the child’s mother, both of whom were killed in a car wreck along with her father's beloved mother, and—as she soon discovers—his first wife. Cassandra learns to keep silent about the wreck, but soon learns there is no way to outpace the claw-like grip of her family’s past trauma. In this luminous memoir, Jackson attempts to unearth her lost family, while also creating a new one--only to discover little progress separates the past from the present. As she moves back and forth between her girlhood and her journey to motherhood, Jackson reveals the chilling parallels between the harrowing inhumanity of Jim Crow medical care and the toxic discrimination that undergirds healthcare in the United States today. But as she traces the cascading effects of loss punctuated by racism, she also discovers a powerful legacy of fearless love and furious perseverance that she hopes to extend to a new generation. Lyrical, urgent, and wise, this is an unforgettable story of reclaiming the past to reclaim ourselves.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/616790 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again

Author: Joanna Biggs

Narrator: Hannah Curtis

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 20 minutes

Release date: May 16, 2023

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by the New York Times, The Week, Vulture, Elle, and The Millions A piercing blend of memoir, criticism, and biography examining how women writers across the centuries carved out intellectual freedom for themselves—and how others might do the same I took off my wedding ring for the last time—a gold band with half a line of “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath etched inside—and for weeks afterwards, my thumb would involuntarily reach across my palm for the warm bright circle that had gone. I didn’t fling the ring into the long grass, like women do in the movies, but a feeling began bubbling up nevertheless, from my stomach to my throat: it could fling my arms out. I was free. . . . A few years into her marriage and feeling societal pressure to surrender to domesticity, Joanna Biggs found herself longing for a different kind of existence. Was this all there was? She divorced without knowing what would come next. Newly untethered, Joanna returned to the free-spirited writers of her youth and was soon reading in a fever—desperately searching for evidence of lives that looked more like her own, for the messiness and freedom, for a possible blueprint for intellectual fulfillment. In A Life of One’s Own, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante are all taken down from their pedestals, their work and lives seen in a new light. Joanna wanted to learn more about the conditions these women needed to write their best work, and how they addressed the questions she herself was struggling with: Is domesticity a trap? Is life worth living if you have lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman? Why is it so important for women to read one another? This is a radical and intimate examination of the unconventional paths these women took—their pursuits and achievements but also their disappointments and hardships. And in exploring the things that gave their lives the most meaning, we find fuel for our own singular intellectual paths.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/617648 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Don't Call Me Home: A Memoir

Author: Alexandra Auder

Narrator: Alexandra Auder

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 5 minutes

Release date: May 2, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 3

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

“Don’t Call Me Home is about madness and love. Alexandra tells the best stories about her extraordinary childhood as she travels the world with her mother Viva.  Wit and wisdom wrapped and bound with love.” --Debbie Harry “Alexandra Auder’s Don’t Call Me Home is thrumming with life, in all its absurdity, vividness, and gunk. I literally laughed and cried, and cheered hard throughout for our intrepid narrator, who has gifted us an incomparable tale.”--Maggie Nelson author of The Argonauts and On Freedom A moving and wickedly funny memoir about one woman’s life as the daughter of a Warhol superstar and the intimate bonds of mother-daughter relationships Alexandra Auder’s life began at the Chelsea Hotel—New York City’s infamous bohemian hangout—when her mother, Viva, a longtime resident of the hotel and one of Andy Warhol’s superstars, went into labor in the lobby. These first moments of Alexandra’s life, documented by her filmmaker father, Michel Auder, portended the whirlwind childhood and teen years that she would go on to have. At the center of it all is Viva: a glamorous, larger-than-life woman with mercurial moods, who brings Alexandra with her on the road from gig to gig, splitting time between a home in Connecticut and Alexandra’s father’s loft in 1980s Tribeca, then moving back again to the Chelsea Hotel and spending summers with Viva’s upper-middle-class, conservative, hyperpatriarchal family of origin. In Don’t Call Me Home, Alexandra meditates on the seedy glory of being raised by two counterculture icons, from walking a pet goat around Chelsea and joining the Squat Theatre company to coparenting her younger sister, Gaby, with her mother and partying in East Village nightclubs. Flitting between this world and her present-day life as a yoga instructor, actress, mother, wife, and much-loved Instagram provocateur, Alexandra weaves a stunning, moving, and hilarious portrait of a family and what it means to move away from being your mother’s daughter into being a person of your own.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/614339 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Chita: A Memoir

Author: Chita Rivera

Narrator: Chita Rivera

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 13 hours 42 minutes

Release date: April 25, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 3 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

Read by the author The long-awaited and wildly entertaining memoir of the star of stage and screen, the legendary Chita Rivera—three-time Tony Award–winner, Kennedy Centers honoree, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero—until the entertainment world renamed her. But Dolores—the irreverent side of the sensual, dark and ferocious Chita—was always present center stage, and was influential in creating some of Broadway most iconic and acclaimed roles, including Anita in West Side Story‚ the part that made her a star—Rosie in Bye Bye, Birdie, Velma in Chicago, and Aurora in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Written in gratitude to her longstanding fans and with the hope that new generations may learn from her extraordinary experience, Chita takes us behind the curtain to reveal the highs and lows of one extraordinary showbusiness career—the creative fermentation, the ego clashes, the miraculous discoveries, the exhilaration when it all went right, and the disappointment when it all went wrong. Chita invites us into workrooms and rehearsal studies, on stage and on set as she works with some of the greatest talents of the age, including Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins, Hal Prince, Liza Minnelli, Sammy Davis Jr, Gwen Verdon, Shirley MacLaine, and many others. We also learn deeply moving, revelatory details about her upbringing and her heritage, and how they indelibly shaped her work and career. This colorful and entertaining memoir—as vital and captivating as Chita herself—is the unforgettable and engrossing personal story of a performer who blazed her own trail and inspired countless performers to forge their own unique path to success.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/614938 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Archaeology of Loss: Life, love and the art of dying

Author: Sarah Tarlow

Narrator: Sarah Tarlow

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 53 minutes

Release date: April 20, 2023

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

My whole adult life, I have made a study of death. A stunning blend of the personal and professional, The Archaeology of Loss is Sarah Tarlow’s first memoir. An accomplished archaeologist, much of Sarah’s work is concerned with the ritual and belief behind the practice of grief. In 2012, she was awarded the Chair in Archaeology at the University of Leicester. But in the years that followed this appointment, Sarah’s husband, Mark, would begin to suffer from a progressive but undiagnosed illness, finally resulting in his inability to drive, to walk, to taste or to care for himself. Though Sarah had devoted her professional life to the study of emotion, of how we anticipate and experience grief, nothing could have prepared her for the realities of care-giving, of losing someone you love and the helplessness attached to both. A fiercely honest and unique memoir, The Archaeology of Loss describes a collective experience with an unflinching and singular gaze and will undoubtedly speak to listeners of The Salt Path and H is for Hawk. Told with humour, intelligence and urgency, this is an unforgettable experience.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/619345 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: A Woman of Influence: The Spectacular Rise of Alice Spencer in Tudor England

Author: Vanessa Wilkie

Narrator: Imogen Church

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 40 minutes

Release date: April 18, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2.5 of Total 2

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

This “engrossing, fast-paced, extremely well-researched biography” (Booklist) transports us to Tudor and Stuart England as Alice Spencer, the daughter of an upstart sheep farmer, becomes one of the most powerful women in the country and establishes a powerful dynasty that endures to this day. Perfect for fans of The Duchess Countess and Georgiana. Alice Spencer was born in 1560 to a family on the rise. Her grandfather had amassed a sizeable estate of fertile grazing land and made a small fortune in sheep farming, allowing him to purchase a simple but distinguished manor house called Althorp. With her sizable dowry, Alice married the heir to one of the most powerful aristocratic families in the country, eventually becoming the Countess of Derby. Though she enjoyed modest renown, it wasn’t until her husband’s sudden death (after he turned in a group of Catholics for plotting against Queen Elizabeth I) that Alice and her family’s future changed forever. Faced with a lawsuit from her brother-in-law over her late husband’s fortune, Alice raised eyebrows by marrying England’s most powerful lawyer. Together, they were victorious, and Alice focused her attentions on securing appropriate husbands for her daughters, increasing her land ownings, and securing a bright future for her grandchildren and the entire Spencer family. But they would not completely escape scandals, and as the matriarch, Alice had to face an infamous trial that threatened everything she had worked so hard for. Now, in “this riveting tale reads more like a legal thriller than historical nonfiction” (Beth Morrison, coauthor of The Lawless Land), the full story of the remarkable Alice Spencer Stanley Egerton is revealed. A woman both ahead of and part of her time, Alice’s ruthless challenging of the status quo has inspired future generations of Spencers and will change the way you view Tudor women.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/612788 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Between Good and Evil: The Stolen Girls of Boko Haram

Author: Mellissa Fung

Narrator: Janina Edwards

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 51 minutes

Release date: April 18, 2023

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER “This work is important and astonishing, but it is also a riveting read.” —Louise Penny, author of A World of Curiosities and the Inspector Gamache novels Behind the Beautiful Forevers meets Under an Afghan Sky in this mesmerizing true story of the Nigerian girls taken captive by the terrorist group Boko Haram In April 2014, the world awoke to the shocking news that the terrorist group Boko Haram had kidnapped nearly 300 school-aged girls and taken them deep into the forests of Nigeria. When veteran journalist Mellissa Fung travelled to Nigeria, she discovered that the scope of the kidnappings had been vastly under-reported. Hundreds—possibly thousands—more girls had been taken against their will and forced to become child brides to soldiers and leaders of Boko Haram. Some of the captives escaped and returned to their villages, many with children in tow. Most of these girls, still children themselves, were shunned by their former friends and family. Other girls have never been seen again. A former captive herself, Mellissa Fung has great empathy for the kidnapped girls. Taken by Taliban sympathizers in Afghanistan, Fung shared her experience in her number-one-bestselling book, Under an Afghan Sky: A Memoir of Captivity. During several visits to Nigeria over four years, she sat down with the girls and their families and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews, listening to horrific stories of capture, rape and torture, as well as escapes and excommunications. Fung tells the stories of Gambo, Asma’u, Zara and other girls taken by Boko Haram. She also portrays strong women fighting against the terrorist group in their own powerful ways: Aisha the Hunter, who moves stealthily into the forest, taking out Boko Haram with her faithful followers, and Mama Boko Haram, an Igbo woman who knows the fighters and those haunted by their experiences and fights to empty the forests of fighters and captives alike. This is raw, honest and heartbreaking storytelling at its best.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/601090 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: My Cousin Maria Schneider: A Memoir

Author: Vanessa Schneider

Narrator: Molly Ringwald

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 3 hours 37 minutes

Release date: April 18, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

“A beautiful eulogy and a much-needed corrective” (The New York Times)—a love letter to Maria Schneider, the 1970s movie starlet who catapulted to fame in the controversial film Last Tango in Paris—only to live the rest of her life plagued by scandal, as told from the perspective of her adoring younger cousin. The late French actress Maria Schneider is perhaps best known for playing Jeanne in the provocative film Last Tango in Paris, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and released to international shock and acclaim in 1972. It was Maria’s first major role, alongside film legend Marlon Brando, when she was barely eighteen years old. The experience would haunt her for the rest of her life, traumatizing her and sparking a tabloid firestorm that only ceased when she began to retreat from the public eye nearly two decades later. To Maria’s much younger cousin, Vanessa Schneider, Maria was a towering figure of another kind—a beautiful and fearsome fixture in Vanessa’s childhood, a rising star turned pariah whose career and struggles with addiction won the family shame and pride in equal measure. Here, Vanessa recounts the challenges of their overlapping youths and fraught adulthood and reveals both the tragedy and inevitability of Maria’s path in a family plagued by mental illness and in a society rife with misogyny. Unsentimental and moving, My Cousin Maria Schneider is a love letter to a talented artist and the cousin who admired her, and a powerful story of exploitation and how its lingering effects can reverberate through a lifetime.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/576858 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: America the Beautiful?: One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Travelled

Author: Blythe Roberson

Narrator: Kendra Hoffman

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 39 minutes

Release date: April 18, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Best Book of the Year —NPR, Vulture, Book Riot, B&N ''America the Beautiful? is so funny and special and illuminating that it makes even me, a person who cannot tolerate trees or weather, wish I could've tagged along in the back seat.'' — Samantha Irby, author of Wow, No Thank You. and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. The author of How to Date Men When You Hate Men examines Americans’ obsession with freedom, travel, and the open road in this funny, entertaining travelogue that blends the humorous observations of Bill Bryson with the piercing cultural commentary of Jia Tolentino. For writer and comedian Blythe Roberson, there are only so many Mary Oliver poems you can read about being free, and only so many times you can listen to Joni Mitchell’s travel album Hejira, before you too, are itching to take off. Canonical American travel writers have long celebrated the road trip as the epitome of freedom. But why does it seem like all those canonical travel narratives are written by white men who have no problems, who only decide to go the desert to see what having problems feels like? To fill in the literary gaps and quench her own sense of adventure, Roberson quits her day job and sets off on a Great American Road Trip to visit America’s national parks. America the Beautiful? is a hilarious trip into the mind of one of the Millennial generation’s funniest writers. Borrowing her Midwestern stepfather’s Prius, she heads west to the Loop of mega-popular parks, over to the ocean and down the Pacific Coast Highway, and, in a feat of spectacularly bad timing, through the southwestern desert in the middle of July. Along the way she meets new friends on their own personal quests, learns to cope with abstinence while missing the comforts of home, and comes to understand the limits—and possibilities—of going to nature to prove to yourself and your Instagram followers that you are, in fact, free. The result is a laugh-out-loud-while-occasionally-raging-inside travelogue, filled with meditations and many, many jokes on ecotourism, conservation, freedom, traffic, climate change, and the structural and financial inequalities that limit so many Americans’ movement. Ultimately, Roberson ponders the question: Is quitting society and going on the road about enlightenment and liberty—or is it just selfish escapism?