Free Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Memoirs

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/714427 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Two-Headed Whale: Life, Loss, and the Tangled Legacy of Whaling in the Antarctic Author: Sandy Winterbottom Narrator: Lisa S. Ware Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 57 minutes Release date: November 7, 2023 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: An elegant blend of 'polemic, industrial history, nautical writing, elegy, and ecology' (The Scotsman), The Two-Headed Whale charts the tragic history of the post-war whaling industry alongside the author's thrilling memoir of sailing the Antarctic. In 2016, Sandy Winterbottom embarked on an epic six-week tall-ship voyage from Uruguay to Antarctica. At the mid-way stop in South Georgia, her pristine image of the Antarctic was shattered when she discovered the dark legacy of twentieth century industrial-scale whaling. Enraged by what she found, she was quick to blame the men who undertook this whole scale slaughter, but then she stumbled upon the grave of an eighteen-year-old whaler from Edinburgh who she could not allow to bear the brunt of blame. There are two sides to every story. The Two-Headed Whale vividly brings to life the spectacular scenery and wildlife of the vast Southern Oceans, set alongside the true-life story of Anthony Ford, the boy in the grave, as he sailed the same seas and toiled in an industry where profits outranked human life. Drawing together threads of nature and travel writing with an unflinching narrative of life aboard a whaling factory ship and the legacy it left behind, The Two-Headed Whale leaves us questioning our troubled relationship with the extraordinary abundance of this planet.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/706070 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Dirty Linen: The Troubles In My Home Place Author: Martin Doyle Narrator: Eugene O'hare Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 25 minutes Release date: November 2, 2023 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Martin Doyle, Books Editor of The Irish Times, offers a personal, intimate history of the Troubles seen through the microcosm of a single rural parish, his own, part of both the Linen Triangle – heartland of the North's defining industry – and the Murder Triangle – the Badlands roamed by the Glenanne gang of security forces colluding with loyalist paramilarites. He lifts the veil of silence drawn over the horrors of the past, recording in heartrending detail the terrible toll the conflict took – more than 20 violent deaths in a few square miles – and the long tail of trauma it has left behind. He also conveys the texture of the times, the high streets where cars could not be left unattended, the newsflashes, the constant background buzz of threat and fear. Neighbours and classmates who lost loved ones in the conflict, survivors maimed in bomb attacks and victims of sectarianism, both Catholic and Protestant, entrust him with their stories. Doyle marries his local knowledge with a literary sensibility and skilfully shows how the once dominant local linen industry serves as a metaphor for both communal division but also the solidarity that transcended the sectarian divide. To those who might ask why you would want to reopen old wounds, the answer might be that some wounds have never been allowed to heal. It is by sharing our stories that we build a ridge of common ground from which good things can grow.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/702566 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Lies My Mirror Told Me Author: Wendy Harmer Narrator: Wendy Harmer Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 2 minutes Release date: November 1, 2023 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: I just had this incredible epiphany. It was like, 'hang on a minute: you mean, I get a microphone, the lights come on me, people listen to what I have to say and I get paid!' There was no going back. Wendy Harmer has had an extraordinary life. From being born with a severe facial deformity, to performing as a stand-up comedian, a national television host and then going on to be the highest paid woman in the cut-throat world of Sydney FM radio ... her tale of overcoming adversity is told with her trademark frankness and celebrated wit. Starting life in rural Victoria, with a teacher father and teenage mother, Wendy describes her time in remote one-teacher, one-room country schools. A way of life which has all but disappeared. As her father moved around the state to take up new postings as headmaster, Wendy, as the 'funny looking' kid often in the wrong colour school uniform, developed strategies to find new friends and fit in. Her young mother found life particularly difficult and left the family home at the age of 26 when Wendy was ten, the oldest of four children, leaving her father to raise them on his own. It wasn't until Wendy was well into her teens that she had the final reconstructive facial surgery that had long promised to transform her from a 'witch' into a 'princess', but fell agonisingly short. Somehow, despite her initial setbacks and emotional turmoil, Wendy showed the strength of character to carve her own way in the world. Today her face and her name are recognised by millions of Australians. Wendy began her working life as a journalist on the Geelong Advertiser and then worked for the Melbourne Sun, where, on assignment, she stumbled across the alternative comedy and cabaret scene in the early '80s and her life took an improbable turn. From her first tentative steps on Melbourne's tiny stages in comedy revue, she struck out as a solo performer. As our first woman stand-up comedian, she would make her mark in London and at the Edinburgh Festival before coming home to entertain us for the past four decades on stage, in print, television and broadcasting. Wendy's career includes many 'firsts'. Notably as the host of The Big Gig on ABC TV and as a headliner in FM radio. She is also known as a prolific magazine, newspaper columnist and best-selling author. In Lies My Mirror Told Me Wendy reflects on her life... how she became fearless, funny and, finally, found true love, is one of the most unlikely success stories you will ever read.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/703629 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife Author: Shannon Harris Narrator: Shannon Harris Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 43 minutes Release date: October 31, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.67 of Total 3 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: As a twenty-three-year-old singer and the soon-to-be wife of youth pastor Joshua Harris, nothing in Shannon Harris's secular upbringing prepared her to enter the world of conservative Christianity. Soon Joshua's bestselling book I Kissed Dating Goodbye helped inspire a national purity movement, and Shannon's identity became 'pastor's wife.' The Woman They Wanted recounts Shannon's remarkable experience inside Big Church—where she was asked to live within a narrow definition of womanhood for almost two decades—and her subsequent journey out of that world and into a more authentic version of herself. Entering conservative American Christianity was like being drawn out to sea, she writes, inexorable and all consuming. Slowly, her worldview was narrowed, her motivations questioned, her behavior examined, until she had been whittled down to an idealized version of femininity envisioned as an extension of her husband and the church. However, when Sovereign Grace Ministries fell apart due to leadership conflicts and Shannon found herself outside church circles for the first time in years, she heard her intuition calling to her again. As she began to shake off the fog of depression and confusion, that voice grew louder. In honoring it, she awakened to the realities in which she had been trapped and found her truest self.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/710700 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Restoring Eden: Unearthing the Agribusiness Secret That Poisoned My Farming Community Author: Elizabeth D. Hilborn Narrator: Marnye Young Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 19 minutes Release date: October 31, 2023 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: All spring, Dr. Elizabeth Hilborn watched as her family fruit farm of many years became increasingly diminished, suffering from a lack of bees. The plentiful wildlife, so abundant just weeks before, was gone. Everything was still, silent. As an environmental scientist trained to investigate disease outbreaks, she rose to the challenge. Despite facing headwinds from skeptical neighbors, environmental experts, and agricultural consultants, she'd assembled information. The chemicals found in her water samples showed beyond any doubt that not only her farm, but her greater farming community, was at risk from toxic chemicals that traveled with rain water over the land and deep within the soil. Even as a scientist, she'd been unaware of the risks to life from some common agricultural chemicals. Her goal was to protect her farm and the animals who lived there. But first she had to convince her rural neighbors of the risk to their way of life, too. A lyrical celebration of nature by a passionate citizen scientist who felt called to advocate for the land, earth, and creatures who don't have a voice, Restoring Eden ultimately offers hope that citizens can create change, that reform is possible.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/710687 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Worst Thing We've Ever Done: One Juror's Reckoning With Racial Injustice Author: Carol Menaker Narrator: Nan Mcnamara Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 45 minutes Release date: October 31, 2023 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: In May of 1976, twenty-four-year-old Carol Menaker was impaneled with eleven others on a jury in the trial of Freddy Burton, a young Black prison inmate charged with the grisly murders of two white wardens inside Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison. After being sequestered for twenty-one days, the jury voted to convict Mr. Burton, who was then sentenced to life in prison without parole. For more than forty years, Menaker did what she could to put the intensely emotional experience of the sequestration and trial behind her, rarely speaking of it to others and avoiding jury service when at all possible. But the arrival of a jury summons at her home in Northern California in 2017 set her on a path to unravel the painful experience of sequestration and finally ask the question: What ever happened to Freddy Burton—and is it possible that my youth and white privilege were what led me to convict him of murder? The Worst Thing We've Ever Done is Menaker's inspirational account of journeying back in time to uncover the personal bias that may have led her to judge someone whose shoes she never could have walked in.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/710750 to listen full audiobooks. Title: These Broken Roads: Scammed and Vindicated, One Woman's Story Author: Donna Marie Hayes Narrator: Donna Marie Hayes Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 15 minutes Release date: October 31, 2023 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Donna Hayes had fortitude and smarts. At the top of her game, thriving in New York City no less, her career was soaring on Wall Street, and she was starring in her own one woman show off Broadway. To be scammed by a man she had met on a dating app shocked and shamed her. In Jamaica as a child, death had come for Hayes three times. Each time she survived it. Every day she dreamed of going to America and joining her family. When she was fourteen, her mother sent for her. Donna's elation was soon offset by the challenges of her new life. From her mother's strict church to an early marriage, single motherhood, and a second disastrous and abusive marriage, when Donna escaped, she vowed to never again subject herself to relationships and people who harmed her. Then Hayes met the man of her dreams on a dating site. Before long, he proposed and tattooed her initials in large bold letters across his chest. But $177,000 later, it all fell apart. Hayes learned that she had been a target from the beginning. Suddenly, her financial independence was at risk. This is the story of how that woman rose yet again to find her power, making the scam the last run along the broken roads of her past.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/698510 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Beautiful Monster: A Becoming Author: Miles Borrero Narrator: Miles Borrero Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 45 minutes Release date: October 24, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A breathtaking, exquisitely crafted memoir about a trans person’s singular journey through breaching the boundaries of gender—across generations, cultures and borders—to become his truest, most authentic self.Nearing the age of forty, with an entire life already lived as a woman—half in Colombia, half in the US—Miles Borrero comes face to face with his father’s impending death. Suddenly realizing that he has been stalling his transition for fear of losing his family’s love, this moment catalyzes Miles’s determination to be fully known as his father’s son before it is too late.In Beautiful Monster, Miles chronicles his unusual childhood, by turns riveting and hilarious, in ’80s and ’90s Colombia during the Pablo Escobar years, as well as his move to Salt Lake City to pursue acting and the winding trajectory that eventually lands him in the New York City yoga scene. Within these very different cultures, the realities of being queer and trans echo poignantly through the triumphs, heartbreaks, family dynamics, spiritual pursuits, and relationships that propel Miles along his path.Sublimely nuanced and written in ravishing prose that is as unique and irresistible as its subject, Beautiful Monster is one person’s story of navigating the pressures to perform femininity while becoming a gender outlaw. Brimming with wonder, humor, and mythos, entertaining and enlightening in equal measure, this book offers a compelling case for embracing one’s true nature.Includes original music performed by the author

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/705025 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy Author: Charles Busch Narrator: Charles Busch Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 22 minutes Release date: October 24, 2023 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: The Tony Award-nominated writer of The Tale of the Allergist's Wife and the long-running hit Off-Broadway play Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, and a Sundance Festival award winner, Charles Busch has created a unique place in the entertainment world as a playwright, LGBT icon, drag actor, director, and cabaret performer, with his extraordinary gift for both connecting with and channeling the leading ladies of show business. Charles writes how ever since his mother's death when he was seven, he has sought out surrogate mothers in his life. In his teens, Charles moved to Manhattan to live with his Auntie Mame-like Aunt Lil, who encouraged Charles's talents and dreams, and eventually he discovered his gifts for writing plays and performing as a male actress. Busch also shares his colorful and sometimes outlandish interactions with film and theatrical luminaries, including Joan Rivers, Angela Lansbury, Rosie O’Donnell, Claudette Colbert, Valerie Harper, Kim Novak, and many others. Full of both humor and heart, Leading Lady is for fans of entertainment books as well as anyone who enjoys real-life stories of artists who break the mold, ditch the boundaries, and find their own unique way to sparkle.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/703584 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Book of Annie: Humor, Heart, and Chutzpah from an Accidental Influencer Author: Annie Korzen Narrator: Annie Korzen Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 56 minutes Release date: October 24, 2023 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Wildly funny musings from an eighty-three-year-old TikTok sensation.“Understated” and “tasteful” could never be applied to Annie, and that’s just fine with her. A colorful actress with a decades-long career in TV, film, and theater—including a recurring role on Seinfeld and a center-stage spot touring with The Moth—Annie offers her trademark unabashed takes on both everyday and typically taboo topics. Whether she’s sharing her thoughts on the miracle of childbirth (“It’s a miracle that anyone who’s been through it is willing to do it again”), religion (“William Shakespeare was not Jewish; no Jew could write a play called All’s Well That Ends Well”), motherhood, or any other topic, Annie will have you laughing out loud.Underlying the humor are poignant observations that feel particularly relevant today: the importance of kindness and consideration, how we’re all more alike than different, and the freedom to be found in self-acceptance. You’ll put down this book feeling not just lighter but inspired by Annie’s wisdom and insight, gathered over eight decades.Whether you’re seeking raw authenticity in an Insta-perfect world, advice from the grandmother you wish you had, or just a laugh to lighten the load of daily life, The Book of Annie is just the ticket.