Explore New Full Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Women

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/451809 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California's Wildfires

Author: Jaime Lowe

Narrator: Jaime Lowe, Frankie Corzo

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 11 minutes

Release date: July 27, 2021

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

This program features a bonus clip with archival recordings from several of the inmate firefighters and the author. A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires. Shawna was overcome by the claustrophobia, the heat, the smoke, the fire, all just down the canyon and up the ravine. She was feeling the adrenaline, but also the terror of doing something for the first time. She knew how to run with a backpack; they had trained her physically. But that’s not training for flames. That’s not live fire. California’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year — fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews. In Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine. She has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program and spoken to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders. The result is a rare, illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate — a story that encompasses California’s underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, and historical injustice, but also draws on deeply personal histories, relationships, desires, frustrations, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting. Lowe’s reporting is a groundbreaking investigation of the prison system, and an intimate portrayal of the women of California’s Correctional Camps who put their lives on the line, while imprisoned, to save a state in peril. A Macmillan Audio production from MCD

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/504479 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain's Wars for America

Author: Julie Flavell

Narrator: Polly Lee

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 17 hours 21 minutes

Release date: July 20, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

Finalist • George Washington Book Prize New York Times Book Review • Editors’ Choice Finally revealing the family’s indefatigable women among its legendary military figures, The Howe Dynasty recasts the British side of the American Revolution. In December 1774, Benjamin Franklin met Caroline Howe, the sister of British General Sir William Howe and Richard Admiral Lord Howe, in a London drawing room for “half a dozen Games of Chess.” But as historian Julie Flavell reveals, these meetings were about much more than board games: they were cover for a last-ditch attempt to forestall the outbreak of the American War of Independence. Aware that the distinguished Howe family, both the men and the women, have been known solely for the military exploits of the brothers, Flavell investigated the letters of Caroline Howe, which have been blatantly overlooked since the nineteenth century. Using revelatory documents and this correspondence, The Howe Dynasty provides a groundbreaking reinterpretation of one of England’s most famous military families across four wars. Contemporaries considered the Howes impenetrable and intensely private—or, as Horace Walpole called them, “brave and silent.” Flavell traces their roots to modest beginnings at Langar Hall in rural Nottinghamshire and highlights the Georgian phenomenon of the politically involved aristocratic woman. In fact, the early careers of the brothers—George, Richard, and William—can be credited not to the maneuverings of their father, Scrope Lord Howe, but to those of their aunt, the savvy Mary Herbert Countess Pembroke. When eldest sister Caroline came of age during the reign of King George III, she too used her intimacy with the royal inner circle to promote her brothers, moving smoothly between a straitlaced court and an increasingly scandalous London high life. With genuine suspense, Flavell skillfully recounts the most notable episodes of the brothers’ military campaigns: how Richard, commanding the HMS Dunkirk in 1755, fired the first shot signaling the beginning of the Seven Years’ War at sea; how George won the devotion of the American fighters he commanded at Fort Ticonderoga just three years later; and how youngest brother General William Howe, his sympathies torn, nonetheless commanded his troops to a bitter Pyrrhic victory in the Battle of Bunker Hill, only to be vilified for his failure as British commander-in-chief to subdue Washington’s Continental Army. Britain’s desperate battles to guard its most vaunted colonial possession are here told in tandem with London parlor-room intrigues, where Caroline bravely fought to protect the Howe reputation in a gossipy aristocratic milieu. A riveting narrative and long overdue reassessment of the entire family, The Howe Dynasty forces us to reimagine the Revolutionary War in ways that would have been previously inconceivable.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/484993 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Stolen: A Memoir

Author: Elizabeth Gilpin

Narrator: Elizabeth Gilpin

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 22 minutes

Release date: July 20, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.67 of Total 3

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

A gripping chronicle of psychological manipulation and abuse at a “therapeutic” boarding school for troubled teens, and how one young woman fought to heal in the aftermath. At fifteen, Elizabeth Gilpin was an honor student, a state-ranked swimmer and a rising soccer star, but behind closed doors her undiagnosed depression was wreaking havoc on her life. Growing angrier by the day, she began skipping practices and drinking to excess. At a loss, her parents turned to an educational consultant who suggested Elizabeth be enrolled in a behavioral modification program. That recommendation would change her life forever. The nightmare began when she was abducted from her bed in the middle of the night by hired professionals and dropped off deep in the woods of Appalachia. Living with no real shelter was only the beginning of her ordeal: she was strip-searched, force-fed, her name was changed to a number and every moment was a test of physical survival.  After three brutal months, Elizabeth was transferred to a boarding school in Southern Virginia that in reality functioned more like a prison. Its curriculum revolved around a perverse form of group therapy where students were psychologically abused and humiliated. Finally, at seventeen, Elizabeth convinced them she was rehabilitated enough to “graduate” and was released. In this eye-opening and unflinching book, Elizabeth recalls the horrors she endured, the friends she lost to suicide and addiction, and—years later—how she was finally able to pick up the pieces of her life and reclaim her identity.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/513755 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Burn: How Grit, Innovation, and a Dash of Luck Ignited a Multi-Million Dollar Success Story

Author: Mei Xu

Narrator: Nancy Wu

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 17 minutes

Release date: July 13, 2021

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

The American Dream continues to resonate with immigrants from around the world. Millions of people hope to come to the United States to build a better life for themselves and their families, often by creating and growing new ventures and companies. While not everyone succeeds, many do. Mei Xu is one of those successes. In Burn, entrepreneur and international business­woman Mei Xu tells her story of ingenuity, determination, and luck. Spanning three decades, from 1991 when she arrived at Washington's Dulles Airport, to today, Xu's story is one of stunning success. She built a multi-million dollar company, met and counseled thousands of entrepreneurs and businesspeople, and even advised President of the United States Barack Obama on the topic of job creation. In Burn, you'll learn: ● About the creation of Mei Xu's international lifestyle business and the success stories of other female leaders who triumphed over adversity to achieve their dreams ● Why the American Dream is still within your grasp, and how to reach for it ● How creators like Xu think differently about innovation and how you can harness her insights to build something new and exciting for yourself

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/499186 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Permanent Damage: Memoirs of an Outrageous Girl

Author: Mercy Fontenot

Narrator: Natasha Soudek

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 49 minutes

Release date: July 13, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

Mercy Fontenot was a Zelig who grew up in the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury scene, where she crossed paths with Charles Manson, went to the first Acid Test, and was friends with Jimi Hendrix (she was later in his movie Rainbow Bridge). She predicted the Altamont disaster when reading the Rolling Stones's tarot cards at a party and left San Francisco for the climes of Los Angeles in 1967 when the Haight 'lost its magic.' Miss Mercy's work in the GTOs, the Frank Zappa–produced all-female band, launched her into the pages of Rolling Stone in 1969. Her adventures saw her jumping out of a cake at Alice Cooper's first record release party, while high on PCP, and had her travel to Memphis where she met Al Green and got a job working for the Bar-Kays. Along the way, she married and then divorced Shuggie Otis, before transitioning to punk rock and working with the Rockats and Gears. This is her story as she lived and saw it. Written just prior to her death in 2020, Permanent Damage shows us the world of the 1960s and 1970s music scene through Mercy's eyes, as well as the fallout of that era—experiencing homelessness before sobering up and putting her life back together. Miss Mercy's journey is a can't-miss for anyone who was there and can't remember, or just wishes they'd been there.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/495240 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Don't Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body

Author: Savala Nolan

Narrator: Savala Nolan

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 46 minutes

Release date: July 13, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

A “brutal, beautifully rendered” (The New York Times Book Review) collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between society’s most charged, politicized, and intractable polar spaces—between black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat. Savala Nolan knows what it means to live in the in-between. Descended from a Black and Mexican father and a white mother, Nolan’s mixed-race identity is obvious, for better and worse. At her mother’s encouragement, she began her first diet at the age of three and has been both fat and painfully thin throughout her life. She has experienced both the discomfort of generational poverty and the ease of wealth and privilege. It is these liminal spaces—of race, class, and body type—that the essays in Don’t Let It Get You Down excavate, presenting a clear and nuanced understanding of our society’s most intractable points of tension. The twelve essays that comprise this collection are rich with “gorgeous prose” (Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks) and are as humorous and as full of Nolan’s appetites as they are of anxiety. The result is lyrical and magnetic. In “On Dating White Guys While Me,” Nolan realizes her early romantic pursuits of rich, preppy white guys weren’t about preference but about self-erasure. In the titular essay “Don’t Let it Get You Down,” we traverse the cyclical richness and sorrow of being Black in America as Black children face police brutality, “large Black females” encounter unique stigma, and Black men carry the weight of other people’s fear. In “Bad Education,” we see how women learn to internalize rage and accept violence to participate in our own culture. And in “To Wit and Also,” we meet Filliss, Grace, and Peggy, the enslaved women owned by Nolan’s white ancestors, reckoning with the knowledge that America’s original sin lives intimately within our present stories. Over and over again, Nolan reminds us that our true identities are often most authentically lived not in the black and white, but in the grey of the in-between. Perfect for fans of Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, Don’t Let It Get You Down delivers a “deeply personal insight” (Layla F. Saad, New York Times bestselling author of Me and White Supremacy) on race, class, bodies, and gender in America today.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/488623 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Well, This Is Exhausting: Essays

Author: Sophia Benoit

Narrator: Sophia Benoit

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 34 minutes

Release date: July 13, 2021

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

From Bustle columnist and Twitter sensation Sophia Benoit, this “charming and often laugh-out-loud funny” (Vogue) memoir-in-essays explores the ins and outs of modern womanhood—from finding feminism, the power of pop culture, and how to navigate life’s constant double standards—perfect for fans of Shrill and PEN15. Like so many women, Sophia spent her formative years struggling to do the “right” thing—to make others comfortable, to take minimal and calculated risks, to live up to society’s expectations—only to realize that there was so little payoff to this tiresome balancing act. Tired of trying so hard, Sophia finally let go of the crushing pressure to be perfect. She navigates the highs and lows of the dating world (high: being a beta tester for Bumble; low: hastily shaving her legs before a hotel hookup and getting blood all over the sheets), and walks the line between being a “chill” girl and making sure her boyfriend’s nonchalance about altitude sickness doesn’t get him killed. She learns what it means to be a feminist, how to embrace her own voice, and when to listen to women who have been through more and have been doing the work longer. With topics ranging from how to be the life of the party (even when you have crippling anxiety), to an ill-fated consultation with a dietician who deemed Sophia’s overindulgence in ketchup a serious health risk, to a masterful argument for why no one should judge you for having an encyclopedic knowledge of reality TV, Well, This Is Exhausting is not only “one of the funniest books you’ll read this year, but it’s also one of the most important” (Shondaland).

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/508380 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: London's Number One Dog-Walking Agency: A Memoir

Author: Kate Macdougall

Narrator: Anna Popplewell

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 22 minutes

Release date: July 6, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

“ Sparkles with humor, joy and wit. London’s Number One Dog-Walking Agency bounds along with the energy of a rambunctious pup and exudes the wisdom of a beloved canine with an old soul (you know the type).'' — BookPage The irresistibly charming memoir of a young woman who started her own business as a dog walker for London’s busy, well-heeled dog lovers. A true love letter to London, dogs, and growing up.  Aside from the odd biter or growler, the occasional bolter and the one dog who didn’t want to walk, the canines were the easy part. They were a muddy, messy joy in all shapes, sizes and breeds, from greedy Labradors to pampered pugs and everything in between. It was the owners who were the real challenge, a giddy mix of the over-protective, the clueless, the eccentrics and the perfectionists. There is no rule book on how to navigate the obsessions of the London dog owner. A degree in human psychology would have been far preferable to any sort of animal qualification. Not that I had either… In 2006, Kate MacDougall was working a safe but dull job at the venerable auction house Sotheby’s in London. After a clumsy accident nearly destroyed a precious piece of art, she quit Sotheby’s and set up her own dog-walking company. Kate knew little about dogs and nothing about business, and no one thought being a professional dog walker was a good use of her university degree. Nevertheless, Kate embarked upon an entirely new and very much improvised career walking some of the city’s many pampered pooches, branding her company “London's Number One Dog Walking Agency.”  With sharp wit, delightful observations, and plenty of canine affection, Kate reveals her unique and unconventional coming-of-age story, as told through the dogs, and the London homes and neighborhoods they inhabit. One walk at a time, she journeys from a haphazard twentysomething to a happily—and surprisingly—settled adult, with love, relationships, drama, and home ownership along the way. But, as Kate says, “It’s all down to the dogs” and what they taught her about London—and life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/463180 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Sunset Route: Freight Trains, Forgiveness, and Freedom on the Rails in the American West

Author: Carrot Quinn

Narrator: Erin Spencer

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 27 minutes

Release date: July 6, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

The unforgettable story of one woman who leaves behind her hardscrabble childhood in Alaska to travel the country via freight train—a beautiful memoir about forgiveness, self-discovery, and the redemptive power of nature, perfect for fans of Wild or Educated. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER • “An urgent read. A courageous life. Quinn’s story burns through us and bleeds beauty on every page.”—Noé Álvarez, author of Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land After a childhood marked by neglect, poverty, and periods of homelessness, with a mother who believed herself to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, Carrot Quinn moved out on her own. She found a sense of belonging among straight-edge anarchists who taught her how to traverse the country by freight trains, sleep in fields under the stars, and feed herself by foraging in dumpsters. Her new life was one of thrilling adventure and freedom, but still she was haunted by the ghosts of her lonely and traumatic childhood. The Sunset Route is a powerful and brazenly honest adventure memoir set in the unseen corners of the United States—in the Alaskan cold, on trains rattling through forests and deserts, as well as in low-income apartments and crowded punk houses—following a remarkable protagonist who has witnessed more tragedy than she thought she could ever endure and who must learn to heal her own heart. Ultimately, it is a meditation on the natural world as a spiritual anchor, and on the ways that forgiveness can set us free.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/451444 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer

Author: Doree Shafrir

Narrator: Doree Shafrir

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 49 minutes

Release date: June 29, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.13 of Total 8

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

An honest, witty, and insightful memoir about what happens when your coming-of-age comes later than expected “Thanks for Waiting is the loving, wise, cuttingly funny older sister we all need in book form.”—Tara Schuster, author of Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies Doree Shafrir spent much of her twenties and thirties feeling out of sync with her peers. She was an intern at twenty-nine and met her husband on Tinder in her late thirties, after many of her friends had already gotten married, started families, and entered couples’ counseling. After a long fertility struggle, she became a first-time mom at forty-one, joining Mommy & Me classes where most of the other moms were at least ten years younger. And while she was one of Gawker’s early hires and one of the first editors at BuzzFeed, she didn’t find professional fulfillment until she co-launched the successful self-care podcast Forever35—at forty.   Now, in her debut memoir, Shafrir explores the enormous pressures we feel, especially as women, to hit particular milestones at certain times and how we can redefine what it means to be a late bloomer. She writes about everything from dating to infertility, to how friendships evolve as you get older, to why being pregnant at forty-one is unexpectedly freeing—all with the goal of appreciating the lives we’ve lived so far and the lives we still hope to live.   Thanks for Waiting is about how achieving the milestones you thought were so important don’t always happen on the time line you imagined. In a world of 30 Under 30 lists, this book is a welcome reminder that it’s okay to live life at your own speed.