Get New Free Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, History & Culture

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/593063 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham Author: Lucy Hughes-Hallett Narrator: Lucy Hughes-Hallett Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 25 hours 42 minutes Release date: October 10, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. 'Lord Buckingham rockets off the page of this gloriously epic, seductively detailed biography' OLIVIA LAING ‘This is the page-turner that Buckingham’s short, racy life deserves’DAILY TELEGRAPH ‘Vivid, erudite and sympathetic … The Scapegoat shows that [Hughes-Hallett’s] eye for the seamy realities of an extraordinary life is as sharp as ever’ THE TIMES As King James I’s favourite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, right-hand man and lover. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was similarly enthralled and made Buckingham his best friend and mentor. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skilful player of the political game, Buckingham rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. He became one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life. With a novelist’s touch, Lucy Hughes-Hallett transports us into a courtly world of masques and dancing, exquisite clothes, the art of Rubens and Van Dyck, gender-fluidity, same-sex desire and appallingly rudimentary medicine. Witch hunts coexisted with Francis Bacon’s empiricism and public opinion was becoming a political force. Falling from grace spectacularly, Buckingham came to represent everything that was wrong with the country. From kidnappings and murder plots to men weeping in Parliament over civil liberties, The Scapegoat navigates love, war-fever and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change. In this immersive and authoritative account, Hughes-Hallett summons an era that still resonates today. - 'The Scapegoat brilliantly dramatises the complex and glittering Duke of Buckingham and the political and sexual intrigue of the court of James I. Hughes-Hallett combines the instincts and talents of a novelist with a historian's vivid sense of period and social change’ COLM TÓIBÍN ‘This is an absorbing, even thrilling journey through the dark and tangled networks of Stuart England … outstanding’ DIANE PURKISS ‘A flamboyant character, an epic rise and tragic fall, brought to life with intelligence, tenderness and profound scholarship’ ADAM ZAMOYSKI ‘Buckingham’s rise and fall is as old as Tiberius’ love for Sejanus and as contemporary as a celeb crash-and-burn. Hughes-Hallett is a matchless historian with an unfailing eye for the revealing detail’ SUE PRIDEAUX ‘A true Jacobean drama, except bloodier and sexier. Lucy Hughes-Hallett writes with gusto and insight’ PAUL THEROUX ‘Compulsively readable and elegantly written … [Lucy Hughes-Hallett] has brought Buckingham gloriously alive’ FINANCIAL TIMES ‘Crisp and vivid … The story is a tragic one, no less so for being told here with verve, erudition and empathy’ NEW STATESMAN ‘Richly multilayered … Hughes-Hallett proves herself alive to the nuances of gender and sexuality in the early seventeenth century…refreshingly light and contemporary, while at the same time suited to the seventeenth century’ TLS ‘A captivating study of the psychodrama of power’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/592411 to listen full audiobooks. Title: To Be a Problem: A Black Woman's Survival in the Racist Disability Rights Movement Author: Dara Baldwin Narrator: Ja'air Bush Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 54 minutes Release date: July 9, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A searing critique of the disability rights movement from within, and a call for collective liberation that is pro-Black and centers disabled people of color For over twenty years, Dara Baldwin has often been the only person of color in the room when significant disability policy decisions are made. Disenfranchisement of people of color and multi-marginalized communities within the disability rights community is not new and has left many inside the community feeling frustrated and erased. In To Be a Problem, Baldwin candidly shares her journey to becoming a disability activist and policymaker in DC while critiquing the disability rights community. She reveals the reality of erasure for many Black people and people of color in the disability movement and argues that, in turn, many white disabled people center themselves within the work without addressing their own white privilege. Disability rights groups have been centering white, straight, cisgender people while racial justice groups often fail to center disabled people, leading many Black and Brown disabled people to start their own Disability Justice organizations. Drawing from her unique vantage point, Baldwin calls readers to understand the shortcomings of the disability rights movement while inspiring us to push all movements towards a more inclusive and authentic liberation.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/589910 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Waiting for the Monsoon Author: Rod Nordland Narrator: Peter Ganim Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 30 minutes Release date: March 5, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A legendary New York Times war correspondent delivers his unforgettable final dispatch: a deeply moving meditation on life inspired by his sudden battle with terminal brain cancer. For thirty years, Rod Nordland shadowed death. As one of his generation's preeminent war correspondents, he reported in over 150 countries, many of which were in violent upheaval, and was no stranger to witnessing tragedy. But in summer 2019, during the height of India’s erratic monsoon season, Nordland was suddenly faced with a tragedy of his own: he collapsed in the middle of a morning jog, was rushed to the hospital, and diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor. After decades chasing conflicts across the globe, Nordland, now confined to a hospital bed, found the strength to face more personal conflicts. He reconnected with his estranged children and became closer with them than he ever thought possible. He repaired a friendship with a best friend that had been broken for twenty years. The arrogance and certitude that dominated his every action was replaced by a lucid sense of humility and generosity that persisted even after he left the hospital. Norland’s tragedy became, in his own words, “a gift that has enriched my life.”   Waiting for the Monsoon is the exemplary story of confronting death with both eyes open, and of the human capacity to persevere even in the most difficult of times. With tremendous clarity, grace, and courage, Nordland has delivered a powerful final assignment, revealing how facing the unknown can transform experience and change our relationship to the world around us.  Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/601867 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Up Home: One Girl's Journey Author: Ruth J. Simmons Narrator: Ruth J. Simmons Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 51 minutes Release date: September 5, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.5 of Total 2 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Simmons’s evocative account of her remarkable trajectory from Jim Crow Texas, where she was the youngest of twelve children in a sharecropping family, to the presidencies of Smith College and Brown University shines with tenderness and dignity.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) “A riveting work of literature, destined to take its place in the canon of great African American autobiographies.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Bloomberg, BET I was born at a crossroads: a crossroads in history, a crossroads in culture, and a geographical crossroad in North Houston County in East Texas. Born in 1945, Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Her first home had no running water, no electricity, no books to read. Yet despite this—or, in her words, because of it—Simmons would become the first Black president of an Ivy League university. The former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M, Texas’s oldest HBCU, Simmons has inspired generations of students as she herself made history. In Up Home, Simmons takes us back to Grapeland to show how the people who love us when we are young shape who we become. We meet her caring, tireless mother who managed to feed her large family with an often empty pantry; her father, who refused to let racial and economic injustice crush his youngest daughter’s dreams; the doting brothers and sisters; and the attentive teachers who welcomed Ruth into the classroom, guiding her to a future she could hardly imagine as a child. From the farmland of East Texas to Houston’s Fifth Ward to New Orleans at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Simmons depicts an era long gone but whose legacies of inequality we still live with today. Written in clear and timeless prose, Up Home is both an origin story set in the segregated South and the uplifting chronicle of a girl whose intellect, grace, and curiosity guide her as she creates a place for herself in the world.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/603444 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Princess Alexandra Series: Part of Royal House of Windsor Author: Helen Cathcart Narrator: Lorna Bennett Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 57 minutes Release date: September 5, 2023 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Born on Christmas Day, 1936, Princess Alexandra's birth was almost overshadowed by the abdication of her uncle, King Edward VIII. Yet public affection for this new addition to the Royal Family has only grown during a lifetime of dedicated royal service. In this biography, Helen Cathcart chronicles the first thirty years of Princess Alexandra's life, from the tragic death of her father when she was just five years old to her wartime childhood at Badminton living with her grandmother Queen Mary, through to schooldays at Heathfield, bridesmaid duties for her first cousin Queen Elizabeth II, and early career working as a nurse. Admired for her style and devotion to royal duty, we accompany Princess Alexandra as she overcomes her youthful self-consciousness to carry out a wide range of royal and official engagements, including her first solo overseas tour to Australia at the age of twenty-two in 1959. We also witness the burgeoning romance between the princess and Angus Ogilvy, and their resplendent wedding at Westminster Abbey in 1963. Princess Alexandra is an exceptionally detailed biography of a loving daughter, wife, and mother, as well as a popular member of the Royal Family.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/603435 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Duchess of Kent Series: Part of Royal House of Windsor Author: Helen Cathcart Narrator: Lorna Bennett Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 34 minutes Release date: July 25, 2023 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: In this detailed biographical study of Katharine, Duchess of Kent, Helen Cathcart tells an enchanting story of a Yorkshire soldier squire's daughter who grew up to become an admired and popular member of the Royal Family. In this intimate and illuminating account, Cathcart charts the first forty years of the Duchess's life, from her birth during a snowstorm at the family home, Hovingham Hall, and wartime childhood through to schooldays at Castle Howard and early career working in a children's home. We also learn of her first meeting with Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent, and of the affectionate friendship that matured into a royal romance. In The Duchess of Kent we follow the Duchess from Hovingham Hall and Coppins to Hong Kong and Germany as an Army officer's wife. We discover the deep veins of community service in her family, and the author reveals the source of the Duchess of Kent's wide popularity.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/603434 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Queen in her Circle Series: Part of Royal House of Windsor Author: Helen Cathcart Narrator: Lorna Bennett Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 7 minutes Release date: June 20, 2023 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Written in Her Majesty's Silver Jubilee year, here is the innermost story of Queen Elizabeth II amid her closest personal friends and working colleagues. Doyenne of royal writers, Helen Cathcart takes the listener on a unique journey from infancy up to the third decade of Her Majesty's reign, highlighting the Queen's influence upon her friends and Household, and their reciprocal influence upon the Sovereign. Along the way we meet the royal relatives, intimate acquaintances, and trusted officials who have supported and guided Her Majesty from early childhood through to heiress presumptive to the throne and ultimately as reigning monarch. With in-depth profiles of the men and women around the Queen, the author has achieved a book of compelling interest—a royal biography in terms of people and events but, above all, people.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/602875 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival Author: Daniel Finkelstein Narrator: Daniel Finkelstein Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 12 minutes Release date: June 8, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 3 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ‘Epic, moving and important’ ROBERT HARRIS 'I'm not sure I've ever come across quite such a revelatory account of the Holocaust and yet despite the horror and the sadness it's also a 'memoir of miraculous survival'. I can't recommend it enough' ANTHONY HOROWITZ 'A modern classic’ OBSERVER ‘An unforgettable epic of a book’ DAILY MAIL From longstanding political columnist and commentator Daniel Finkelstein, a powerful memoir exploring both his mother and his father’s devastating experiences of persecution, resistance and survival during the Second World War. Daniel’s mother Mirjam Wiener was the youngest of three daughters born in Germany to Alfred and Margarete Wiener. Alfred, a decorated hero from the Great War, is now widely acknowledged to have been the first person to recognise the existential danger Hitler posed to the Jews and began, in 1933, to catalogue in detail Nazi crimes. After moving his family to Amsterdam, he relocated his library to London and was preparing to bring over his wife and children when Germany invaded the Netherlands. Before long, the family was rounded up, robbed and sent to starve in Bergen-Belsen. Daniel’s father Ludwik was born in Lwów, the only child of a prosperous Jewish family. In 1939, after Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland, Ludwik’s father was arrested and sentenced to hard labour in the Gulag. Meanwhile, deported to Siberia and working as a slave labourer on a collective farm, Ludwik survived the freezing winters in a tiny house he built from cow dung. Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad is a deeply moving, personal and at times horrifying memoir about Finkelstein’s parents’ experiences at the hands of the two genocidal dictators of the twentieth century. It is a story of persecution; survival; and the consequences of totalitarianism told with the almost unimaginable bravery of two ordinary families shining through. ‘Danny Finkelstein has written an elegant, moving account of the history of one family, and in doing so shines light on the history of the 20th century. If you want to understand Hitler and Stalin, read this book about people whose lives were upended by both of them’ ANNE APPLEBAUM, author of Gulag: A History, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/603433 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Queen and the Turf Series: Part of Royal House of Windsor Author: Helen Cathcart Narrator: Lorna Bennett Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 49 minutes Release date: May 30, 2023 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Here is the first full story of the Queen's racing enthusiasms and the first authentic account of Her Majesty's personal experience as a racehorse owner and racegoer, told with the help of trainers, jockeys, and others. This exhilarating volume traces the early years of the Queen's racing story, from childhood horse-lover to ebullient racegoer and owner of one of the finest string of racehorses in the world. Helen Cathcart goes behind the scenes to present a vivid picture of royal racing success and failures, from the Queen's frail gift-horse to the spectacular triumphs of Aureole, Carrozza, Alexander, High Veldt, Almeria, Doutelle, Pall Mall, and many others. Winners of lustrous fame, they come thundering on in a cavalcade of high hopes and disappointments, superb victories, and bitter defeat. Here is a royal pageant of the Turf rich in some of the most colorful and interesting sporting stories from the younger Queen's reign.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/601004 to listen full audiobooks. Title: King: The Life of Martin Luther King Author: Jonathan Eig Narrator: Dion Graham Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 20 hours 2 minutes Release date: May 16, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *SELECTED AS ONE OF  BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2023* Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. – and the first to include recently declassified FBI files.   In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself.   He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death.   As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became its only modern-day founding father – as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr. In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.