Free Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Memoirs

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/698393 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Only Constant: A Guide to Embracing Change and Leading an Authentic Life Author: Najwa Zebian Narrator: Najwa Zebian Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 42 minutes Release date: March 5, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: You can become the change driver of your own life. The celebrated poet, educator, and author of Welcome Home shows you how in this practical, wise, and tender guide to all of life’s changes. “Change is hard—but Najwa shows you what’s on the other side, and she’s the one you want to lead you through it.”—Melissa Urban, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Boundaries   In The Only Constant, Najwa Zebian guides you through the changes we must make and those we must endure in life, offering support, stabilizing practices, and step-by-step guidance to make it through the uncertainty. With timeless wisdom, Najwa shares stories of change from her own life, including the bonds to the past she needed to break so that she could live more honestly, the loss of a loved one, and accepting the changes required to manage chronic illness.   She also guides you through changes like: • The end of a romantic relationship or friendship • Setting boundaries with a friend or family member • Changing your educational and career path • Grieving the death of a loved one • Breaking trauma bonds  • Venturing outside of your survival mode • Living an authentic life • Practicing radical acceptance  A highly practical guide to unfamiliar terrain, The Only Constant teaches that the purpose of change is to be true to yourself. Zebian simplifies change, teaches us to accept ourselves as we are now, and helps us focus on the necessity and unexpected beauty of those messy transitional times. And she guides you through it so that you can not only reach the better life that awaits you on the other side, but also so that you can take the wheel and become the driver of change in your own life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/697425 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Beautiful People: My Thirteen Truths About Disability Author: Melissa Blake Narrator: Melissa Blake Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 51 minutes Release date: March 5, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Well-known disability activist and social media influencer, Melissa Blake, offers a frank, illuminating memoir and a call to action for disabled people and allies. In the summer of 2019, journalist Melissa Blake penned an op-ed for CNN Opinion. A conservative pundit caught wind of it, mentioning Blake’s work in a YouTube video. What happened next is equal parts a searing view into society, how we collectively view and treat disabled people, and the making of an advocate. After a troll said that Blake should be banned from posting pictures of herself, she took to Twitter and defiantly posted three smiling selfies, all taken during a lovely vacation in the Big Apple: I wanted desperately to clap back at these vile trolls in a way that would make a statement, not only about how our society views disabilities, but also about the toxicity of our strict and unrealistic beauty standards. Of course I knew that posting those selfies wasn't going to erase the nasty names I'd been called and, the chances were, they would never even see my tweet, but that didn't matter. I wasn't doing it for them; I was doing it for me and every single disabled person who has been bullied before, online and in real life. When people mock how I look, they're not just insulting me. They're insulting all disabled people. We're constantly told that we're repulsive and ugly and not good enough to be seen. This was me pushing back against that toxic, ableist narrative. For the first time, I felt like I was doing something empowering, taking back my power and changing the story. Her tweet went viral, attracting worldwide media attention and interviews with the BBC, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, PEOPLE magazine, Good Morning America and E! News. Now, in her manifesto, Beautiful People, Blake shares her truths about disability, writing about (among other things): - the language we use to describe disabled people - ableism, microaggressions, and their pernicious effects - what it's like to live in a society that not only isn't designed for you, but actively operates to render you invisible - her struggles with self‑image and self‑acceptance - the absence of disabled people in popular culture - why disabled people aren't tragic heroes Blake also tells the stories of some of the heroes of the disability rights movement in America, in doing so rescuing their incredible achievements from near total obscurity. Highlighting other disabled activists and influencers, Blake’s work is the calling card of a powerful voice—one that has sparked new, different, better conversations about disability.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/699461 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Trading Game: A Confession Author: Gary Stevenson Narrator: Gary Stevenson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 41 minutes Release date: March 5, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER • A “vivid” (Financial Times) rags-to-riches memoir that takes readers inside the high-stakes drama and hubris of the trading floor, a “darkly funny” (Guardian) tale of Citibank’s one-time most profitable trader, and why he gave it all up “Darker than [Liar’s Poker], but if anything even more of a rollicking read . . . the clearest account I’ve ever read of how trading desks really work.”—Felix Salmon, Axios   In development as a limited series • Longlisted for the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year If you were gonna rob a bank and you saw the vault door there, left open, what would you do? Would you wait around? Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken soccer balls on the run-down streets of East London, Gary Stevenson dreamed of something bigger. As luck would have it, he was good at numbers. At the London School of Economics, wearing tracksuits and sneakers, Stevenson shocked his posh classmates by winning a competition called “The Trading Game.” The prize?: a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader at Citibank. A place where you could make more money than you’d ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional geniuses and insecure bullies yet start to feel like family. Where against the odds you become the bank’s most profitable trader, closing deals worth nearly a trillion dollars. A day. Soon you are dreaming of numbers in your sleep—and then you stop sleeping at all. But what happens when winning starts to feel like losing? You’re making a killing betting on millions of people becoming poorer—like the very people you grew up with. The economy is slipping off a precipice, and your own sanity starts slipping with it. You want to stop, but you can’t. Because nobody ever leaves. Would you stick, or quit? Even if it meant risking everything? The Trading Game is an outrageous, unvarnished, white-knuckle journey to the dark heart of an intoxicating world—the trading floor—from someone who survived the game and then blew it all wide open.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/700719 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir Author: Rupaul Narrator: Rupaul Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 7 minutes Release date: March 5, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.77 of Total 26 Ratings of Narrator: 4.67 of Total 9 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: ***An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!*** From international drag superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul, comes his most revealing and personal work to date--a deeply intimate memoir of discovery, found family, and self-acceptance. The House of Hidden Meanings is a self-portrait of the legendary icon on the road to global fame and changing the way the world thinks about drag. Central to RuPaul’s success has been his chameleonic adaptability. From drag icon to powerhouse producer of one of the world’s largest television franchises, RuPaul’s ever-shifting nature has always been part of his brand as both supermodel and supermogul. Yet that adaptability has made him enigmatic to the public. In this memoir, his most intimate and detailed book yet, RuPaul makes himself truly known. In The House of Hidden Meanings, RuPaul strips away all artifice and recounts the story of his life with breathtaking clarity and tenderness, bringing his signature wisdom and wit to his own biography. From his early years growing up as a queer Black kid in San Diego navigating complex relationships with his absent father and temperamental mother, to forging an identity in the punk and drag scenes of Atlanta and New York, to finding enduring love with his husband Georges LeBar and self-acceptance in sobriety, RuPaul excavates his own biography life-story, uncovering new truths and insights in his personal history. Here in RuPaul’s singular and extraordinary story is a manual for living—a personal philosophy that testifies to the value of chosen family, the importance of harnessing what makes you different, and the transformational power of facing yourself fearlessly. A profound introspection of his life, relationships, and identity, The House of Hidden Meanings is a self-portrait of the legendary icon on the road to global fame and changing the way the world thinks about drag. “I've always loved to view the world with analytical eyes, examining what lies beneath the surface. Here, the focus is on my own life—as RuPaul Andre Charles,” says RuPaul. If we’re all born naked and the rest is drag, then this is RuPaul totally out of drag. This is RuPaul stripped bare.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/714920 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Cancer Finishing School Author: Peter Goldsworthy Narrator: TBD Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 53 minutes Release date: March 5, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: 'My first stray thought: cancer is a gift. I'm lucky to have it. What priceless material for a doctor-writer.' What lessons might cancer teach him before it finishes him off? Peter Goldsworthy asks, obliquely. A GP of forty years' practice, as well as one of Australia's most awarded and celebrated writers, Goldsworthy ('Doctor Pete' to his patients) brings his characteristic black humour and storytelling power to the tale of his own cancer journey. Accidentally diagnosed after a scan of his dicky knee, he was thrown into a world that he knew only too well from the other side: a world that soon shrank to hospital visits, sleepless and hyped-up nights on dexamethasone and life-saving chemotherapy. Never one to waste a story, Peter intersperses his own experience with odd and astonishing case stories of patients and literary friends who have trodden the same path: both cautionary tales and exemplary tales, sometimes laugh-out-loud, sometimes deeply moving, that intersect with, or refract, his own travels through denial, acceptance, treatment and survival. Darkly funny, and filled with growing love and wonder, The Cancer Finishing School offers lessons in how to live life in the shadow of an incurable illness.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/714931 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir Author: Rupaul Narrator: Rupaul Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 6 minutes Release date: March 5, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER From international drag superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul, comes his most revealing to date—a brutally honest and deeply intimate memoir of growing up Black, poor, and queer in a broken home to discovering the power of performance and self-acceptance. A profound introspection of his life, relationships, and identity, The House of Hidden Meanings is a self-portrait of the legendary icon on the road to global fame and changing the way the world thinks about drag. Central to RuPaul’s success has been his chameleonic adaptability. From drag icon to powerhouse producer of one of the world’s largest television franchises, RuPaul’s ever-shifting nature has always been part of his brand as both supermodel and super mogul. Yet that adaptability has made him enigmatic to the public. In this memoir, his most intimate and detailed book yet, RuPaul makes himself truly known. Stripping away all artifice, RuPaul recounts the story of his life with breath taking clarity and tenderness, bringing his signature wisdom and wit to his own biography. From his early years growing up as a queer Black kid in San Diego navigating complex relationships with his absent father and temperamental mother, to forging an identity in the punk and drag scenes of Atlanta and New York, to finding enduring love with his husband Georges LeBar and self-acceptance in sobriety, RuPaul excavates his own biography, uncovering new truths and insights in his personal history. Here in RuPaul’s singular and extraordinary story is a manual for living—a personal philosophy that testifies to the value of chosen family, the importance of harnessing what makes you different, and the transformational power of facing yourself fearlessly. If we’re all born naked and the rest is drag, then this is RuPaul totally out of drag. This is RuPaul stripped bare.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/695269 to listen full audiobooks. Title: American Negra: A Memoir Author: Natasha S. Alford Narrator: Natasha S. Alford Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 38 minutes Release date: February 27, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Award-winning journalist Natasha S. Alford grew up between two worlds as the daughter of an African American father and Puerto Rican mother. In American Negra, a narrative that is part memoir, part cultural analysis, Alford reflects on growing up in a working-class family from the city of Syracuse, NY. In smart, vivid prose, Alford illustrates the complexity of being multiethnic in Upstate New York and society’s flawed teachings about matters of identity. When she travels to Puerto Rico for the first time, she is the darkest in her family, and navigates shame for not speaking Spanish fluently. She visits African-American hair salons where she’s told that she has “good” hair, while internalizing images that as a Latina she has ''bad” hair or pelo malo. When Alford goes from an underfunded public school system to Harvard University surrounded by privilege and pedigree, she wrestles with more than her own ethnic identity, as she is faced with imposter syndrome, a shocking medical diagnosis, and a struggle to define success on her own terms. A study abroad trip to the Dominican Republic changes her perspective on Afro-Latinidad and sets her on a path to better understand her own Latin roots. Alford then embarks on a whirlwind journey to find her authentic voice, taking her across the United States from a hedge fund boardroom to a classroom and ultimately a newsroom, as a journalist.   A coming-of-age story about what it's like to live at the intersections of race, culture, gender, and class, all while staying true to yourself, American Negra is a captivating look at one woman’s experience being Negra in the United States. As the movement to highlight Afro-Latin identity and overlooked histories of the African diaspora grows, American Negra illustrates the diversity of the Black experience in the larger fabric of American society.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/704649 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Burn Book: A Tech Love Story Author: Kara Swisher Narrator: Kara Swisher Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 40 minutes Release date: February 27, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.67 of Total 15 Ratings of Narrator: 4.8 of Total 5 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Instant New York Times Bestseller From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead. “Swisher, the bad-ass journalist and OG chronicler of Silicon Valley…takes no prisoners in this highly readable look at the evolution of the digital world…Bawdy, brash, and compulsively thought-provoking, just like its author, Burn Book sizzles” (Booklist, starred review). Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. From “the queen of all media” (Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal), this is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world. When tech titans crowed that they would “move fast and break things,” Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. While covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the facts about this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of “listening in the heating ducts” and prompted Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to once observe: “It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, ‘I hope Kara never sees this.’” While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post, where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in covering the nascent Internet. She went on to work for The Wall Street Journal, joining with Walt Mossberg to start the groundbreaking D: All Things Digital conference, as well as pioneering tech news sites. Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech over three decades, right when they presided over an explosion of world-changing innovation that has both helped and hurt our world. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few whom Swisher made sweat—figuratively and, in Zuckerberg’s case, literally. Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech’s potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/702120 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Cinderellas of West 53rd Street: Stories from the Legendary Rehearsal Club Author: Trc Charter Alums Narrator: Trc Union Professionals And Rising Stars Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 30 minutes Release date: February 20, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: In keeping with The Rehearsal Club mission to “preserve its legacy,” a national network of former residents came together to tell their stories while living at The Rehearsal Club. Spanning four decades, 1940s – 1970s, The Rehearsal Club “Cinderellas” (coined by TV Guide in the 1950s) captures New York City and Broadway history while charting the journey leading to The Rehearsal Club’s incorporation in 2019. Carol Burnett, Blythe Danner and others are recognizable, well-known RC Alums. Each talented Cinderella memoir shares their adventurous, determined, generous spirits. Similarly to those anonymous, back-up dancers who tipped their top hats during “Singular Sensation” (the finale to A Chorus Line), by the time the last page turns, you will know these women. Maybe recognize yourself? What we all do for love.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/696106 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood Author: Ed Zwick Narrator: Ed Zwick Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 24 minutes Release date: February 13, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.25 of Total 4 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER “This funny, insightful, and deliciously dishy memoir” (Town & Country) from the director of Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, Legends of the Fall, and Glory, creator of thirtysomething, and executive producer of My So-Called Life, “takes its place alongside Adventures in the Screen Trade and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as one of the indispensable behind-the-scenes books for fans of movies and television” (Aaron Sorkin). “I’ll be dropping a few names,” Ed Zwick confesses in the introduction to his book. “Over the years I have worked with self-proclaimed masters-of-the-universe, unheralded geniuses, hacks, sociopaths, savants, and saints.” He has encountered these Hollywood types during four decades of directing, producing, and writing projects that have collectively received eighteen Academy Award nominations (seven wins) and sixty-seven Emmy nominations (twenty-two wins). Though there are many factors behind such success, including luck and the contributions of his creative partner Marshall Herskovitz, he’s known to have a special talent for bringing out the best in the people he’s worked with, notably the actors. In those intense collaborations, he seeks to discover the small pieces of connective tissue, vulnerability, and fellowship that can help an actor realize their character in full. Talents whom he spotted early include Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Denzel Washington, Claire Danes, and Jared Leto. Established stars he worked closely with include Leonardo DiCaprio, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Daniel Craig, Jake Gyllenhaal, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, and Jennifer Connelly. He also sued Harvey Weinstein over the production of Shakespeare in Love—and won. He shares personal stories about all these people, and more. Written mostly with love, sometimes with rue, this memoir “is not just a wonderfully intimate memoir. It's also an indispensable guide to the shark-infested waters of artistic integrity” (Cameron Crowe). Destined to become a new Hollywood classic, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions is “a must-read for any film fan, and a sacred text for any aspiring filmmakers out there” (Forbes).