High-Quality Free Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, History & Culture

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/630748 to listen full audiobooks. Title: You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here: A Psychiatrist’s Life Author: Benji Waterhouse Narrator: Benji Waterhouse Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 30 minutes Release date: May 16, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. A woman with bipolar flies from America in a wedding dress to marry Harry Styles. A lorry driver with schizophrenia believes he’s got a cure for coronavirus. A depressed psychiatrist hides his profession from his GP due to stigma. Most of the characters in this book are his patients. Some of them are his family. One of them is him. Unlocking the doors to the psych ward, NHS psychiatrist Dr Benji Waterhouse provides a fly-on-the-padded-wall account of medicine’s most mysterious and controversial speciality. Why would anyone in their right mind choose to be a psychiatrist? Are the solutions to people’s messy lives really within medical school textbooks? And how can vulnerable patients receive the care they need when psychiatry lacks staff, hospital beds and any actual cures? Humane, hilarious and heart-breaking, You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here is an enlightening and darkly comic medical memoir - from both sides of the doctor’s desk. This is the perfect read for fans of This Is Going to Hurt, Unnatural Causes and The Prison Doctor. A humane, hilarious and heart-breaking window into the world of psychiatry from ‘the Adam Kay of mental healthcare’ (THE TIMES) 'Very funny and deeply sympathetic. Really excellent' HENRY MARSH 'This is honestly my dream book. Both fascinating and bleakly funny' FERN BRADY ‘Honest, funny, saddening and uplifting all rolled into one’ JO BRAND ©2024 Benji Waterhouse (P) 2024 Penguin Audio

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/630742 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Scandal of the Century Author: Lisa Hilton Narrator: Emma Gregory Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 59 minutes Release date: May 9, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. A CLANDESTINE AFFAIR. AN OUTRAGEOUS ELOPEMENT. STOLEN LETTERS. SCHEMING SERVANTS. SEX. SENSATION. CELEBRITY. THIS IS THE SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY. There are few labels not attached to Aphra Behn - playwright, poet, a spy, a scarlet woman condemned for loose morals. And yet, for all her notoriety Aphra Behn is an enigma. Born in around 1640, her early life isn't well recorded and facts about her are continually disputed. Her birth name may have been Eaffrey Johnson and she could have been the daughter of a Canterbury barber, although neither fact is certain. And, just after the Restoration she probably briefly lived in the English colony of Surinam in South America, where she was perhaps embroiled in political espionage. Whatever the truth, Behn was in London by 1664 and six years later was writing for the stage. For a decade, Behn's work dominated the London stage. Then, suddenly in 1682, she was charged with libel. Her plays could not be produced and by the time of the trial of the century Behn was broke. She decided that writing would be her way out and began to write a novel based on the most notorious adultress of a notoriously adulterous age - Lady Henrietta Berkeley. ©2024 Lisa Hilton (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/619055 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Birding to Change the World: A Memoir Author: Trish O'kane Narrator: Cheryl Smith Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 54 minutes Release date: February 27, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: In this uplifting memoir, a professor and activist shares what birds can teach us about life, social change, and protecting the environment. Trish O’Kane is an accidental ornithologist. In her nearly two decades writing about justice as an investigative journalist, she'd never paid attention to nature. But then Hurricane Katrina destroyed her New Orleans home, sending her into an emotional tailspin. Enter a scrappy cast of feathered characters—first a cardinal, urban parrots, and sparrows, then a catbird, owls, a bittern, and a woodcock—that cheered her up and showed her a new path. Inspired, O'Kane moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to pursue an environmental studies PhD. There she became a full-on bird obsessive—logging hours in a stunningly biodiverse urban park, filling field notebooks with bird doings and dramas, and teaching ornithology to college students and middle-school kids. When Warner Park—her daily birdwatching haven—was threatened with development, O’Kane and her neighbors mustered a mighty murmuration of nature lovers, young and old, to save the birds' homes. Through their efforts, she learned that once you get outside and look around, you're likely to fall in love with a furred or feathered creature—and find a flock of your own. In Birding to Change the World, O'Kane details the astonishing science of bird life, from migration and parenting to the territorial defense strategies that influenced her own activism. A warm and compelling weave of science and social engagement, this is the story of an improbably band of bird lovers who saved their park. And it is a blueprint for muscular citizenship, powered by joy.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/631077 to listen full audiobooks. Title: How to Say Babylon: A Memoir Author: Safiya Sinclair Narrator: Safiya Sinclair Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 16 hours 46 minutes Release date: October 3, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.86 of Total 14 Ratings of Narrator: 4.67 of Total 9 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: National Book Critics Circle Award Winner A New York Times Notable Book Best Book of the Year for The Washington Post* The New Yorker * Time * The Atlantic * Los Angeles Times * NPR * Harper’s Bazaar * Vulture * Town & Country * San Francisco Chronicle * Christian Science Monitor * Mother Jones * Barack Obama A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick “Impossible to put down...Each lyrical line sings and soars, freeing the reader as it did the writer.” —People With echoes of Educated and The Glass Castle, How to Say Babylon is a “lushly observed and keenly reflective chronicle” (The Washington Post), brilliantly recounting the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid religious upbringing and navigate the world on her own terms. Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and a militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, was obsessed with the ever-present threat of the corrupting evils of the Western world outside their home, and worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure. For him, a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience. Safiya’s extraordinary mother, though loyal to her father, gave her the one gift she knew would take Safiya beyond the stretch of beach and mountains in Jamaica their family called home: a world of books, knowledge, and education she conjured almost out of thin air. When she introduced Safiya to poetry, Safiya’s voice awakened. As she watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under relentless domesticity, Safiya’s rebellion against her father’s rules set her on an inevitable collision course with him. Her education became the sharp tool to hone her own poetic voice and carve her path to liberation. Rich in emotion and page-turning drama, How to Say Babylon is “a melodious wave of memories” of a woman finding her own power (NPR).

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/625282 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Palace: From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of History at Hampton Court Author: Gareth Russell Narrator: John Telfer Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 14 hours 14 minutes Release date: August 17, 2023 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: 'If a house could gossip, this is the book that Hampton Court would whisper. An enjoyable and readable stroll through 500 years of Hampton Court history: royal residents, common visitors, thieves, invaders and ghosts’ PHILIPPA GREGORY For centuries, Hampton Court has been a place of power, scandal and intrigue: a stage for events that shaped the nation. The Palace raises the curtain on 500 years of British history with royals, politicians, criminals, and geniuses all playing their parts. Hampton Court has been an arc of monarchy, revolution, religious fundamentalism, sexual scandals, and military coups. In this rich and vivid history, Gareth Russell moves through the rooms and the decades, each time focusing on a different person who called Hampton Court their home. Beginning with the Tudors, Russell takes the reader from the kitchens of Henry VII and the dreams of Anne Boleyn to Elizabeth I’s brush with death and the staging of Shakespeare’s plays. To the commissioning of the King James Bible, the republican victories of Oliver Cromwell, the many mistresses of Charles II and their laxative-laced attempts to embarrass one another. The gossip and feuds of Georgian aristocrats lead into the era of the Windsors when Hampton Court becomes the place to host Elizabeth II’s coronation ball and hide the last Tsar’s sister. Fascinating and engaging, The Palace is as atmospheric as it is gossipy and through the many sovereigns and servants that lived and worked in its halls reveals the personal tragedy and political importance of this extraordinary place.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/629221 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Twentieth-Century Man: The Wild Life of Peter Beard Author: Christopher Wallace Narrator: Will Damron Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 48 minutes Release date: July 4, 2023 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: An exuberant biography of the life of the iconic photographer and naturalist Peter Beard, whose life and work captured the cultural imagination  Peter Beard lived an astonishing life. The artist, wildlife photographer, and bon vivant enthralled and inspired both because of his work and his legendary lifestyle. A scion of American industry turned explorer of Africa and environmental advocate, Beard embodied the extremes of his time: grand adventurer and sexually voracious partier, friend of everyone from the Rolling Stones to Jackie Onassis to Andy Warhol to Karen Blixen. And Beard had a passion—probably more like an obsession—with the faults of the entire human experiment, with the ways in which our consumption of the world’s resources have come to consume us all. Beard’s outsize life and character—his death-defying documentation of both the endangered wildlife of Africa, and, closer to home, some of the world’s most beautiful women for a range of fashion magazines—animate this lively but authoritative biography. The journalist Christopher Wallace, long fascinated by Beard’s artistic legacy, adventurous spirit, and hard-partying persona, came to know him well later in Beard’s life. Capturing the varied social and cultural scenes that Beard moved through with glamorous ease over five decades, Wallace also makes a powerful case for the lasting impact of his work. In Twentieth-Century Man, Wallace has rendered this towering figure in all of his contradictions and complexities—a deeply romantic and idiosyncratic personality, beloved by so many, whose sensibilities nonetheless remained firmly rooted in an era characterized by racist and colonialist attitudes. Stirring and visceral, Twentieth-Century Man is the definitive portrait of Peter Beard.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/633595 to listen full audiobooks. Title: President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier Author: Cw Goodyear Narrator: Fred Sanders Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 17 hours 54 minutes Release date: July 4, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 3 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: An “ambitious, thorough, supremely researched” (The Washington Post) biography of the extraordinary, tragic life of America’s twentieth president—James Garfield. In “the most comprehensive Garfield biography in almost fifty years” (The Wall Street Journal), C.W. Goodyear charts the life and times of one of the most remarkable Americans ever to win the Presidency. Progressive firebrand and conservative compromiser; Union war hero and founder of the first Department of Education; Supreme Court attorney and abolitionist preacher; mathematician and canalman; crooked election-fixed and clean-government champion; Congressional chieftain and gentleman-farmer; the last president to be born in a log cabin; the second to be assassinated. James Abram Garfield was all these things and more. Over nearly two decades in Congress during a polarized era—Reconstruction and the Gilded Age—Garfield served as a peacemaker in a Republican Party and America defined by divisions. He was elected to overcome them. He was killed while trying to do so. President Garfield is American history at its finest. It is about an impoverished boy working his way from the frontier to the Presidency; a progressive statesman, trying to raise a more righteous, peaceful Republic out of the ashes of civil war; the tragically imperfect course of that reformation, and the man himself; a martyr-President, whose death succeeded in nudging the country back to cleaner, calmer politics.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/625930 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Wonder Drug: The Secret History of Thalidomide in America and Its Hidden Victims Author: Jennifer Vanderbes Narrator: Jennifer Vanderbes Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 10 minutes Release date: June 27, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: “A shocking saga of pharmaceutical malpractice . . . Wonder Drug is both a first-rate medical thriller and the searing account of a forgotten American tragedy.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain   A “fascinating and compassionate” (People) account of the most notorious drug of the twentieth century and the never-before-told story of its American survivors. Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal In 1959, a Cincinnati pharmaceutical firm, the William S. Merrell Company, quietly began distributing samples of an exciting new wonder drug already popular around the world. Touted as a sedative without risks, thalidomide was handed out freely, under the guise of clinical trials, by doctors who believed approval by the Food and Drug Administration was imminent.  But in 1960, when the application for thalidomide landed on the desk of FDA medical reviewer Frances Kelsey, she quickly grew suspicious. When she learned that the drug was causing severe birth abnormalities abroad, she and a team of dedicated doctors, parents, and journalists fought tirelessly to block its authorization in the United States and stop its sale around the world. Jennifer Vanderbes set out to write about this FDA success story only to discover a sinister truth that had been buried for decades: For more than five years, several American pharmaceutical firms had distributed unmarked thalidomide samples in shoddy clinical trials, reaching tens of thousands of unwitting patients, including hundreds of pregnant women.  As Vanderbes examined government and corporate archives, probed court records, and interviewed hundreds of key players, she unearthed an even more stunning find: Scores of Americans had likely been harmed by the drug. Deceived by the pharmaceutical firms, betrayed by doctors, and ignored by the government, most of these Americans had spent their lives unaware that thalidomide had caused their birth defects.    Now, for the first time, this shocking episode in American history is brought to light. Wonder Drug gives voice to the unrecognized victims of this epic scandal and exposes the deceptive practices of Big Pharma that continue to endanger lives today.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/629581 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny Author: Con Coughlin Narrator: Charles Armstrong Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 6 minutes Release date: June 22, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: 'Important, compelling, and detailed . . . a superb analysis of the West’s policy missteps and the tragic consequences of them.' - General David Petraeus In Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny, Con Coughlin, veteran commentator on war in the Middle East and author of Saddam: The Secret Life, examines how a mild-mannered ophthalmic surgeon has transformed himself into the tyrannical ruler of a once flourishing country. Until the Arab Spring of 2011, the world’s view of Bashar al-Assad was largely benign. He and his wife, a former British banker, were viewed as philanthropic individuals doing their best to keep their country at peace. So much so that a profile of Mrs Assad in American Vogue was headlined ‘The Rose in the Desert’. Shortly after it appeared, Syria descended into the horrific civil war that has seen its cities reduced to rubble and thousands murdered and displaced, a civil war that is still raging over a decade later. In this vivid and authoritative account Con Coughlin draws together all the strands of Assad's remarkable story, revealing precisely how a young doctor ensured not only that he inherited the presidency from his father, but has held on to power by whatever means necessary, continuing to preside over one of the most brutal regimes of modern times.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/629621 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America Author: Audrey Clare Farley Narrator: Kate Udall Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 7 minutes Release date: June 13, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: For readers of Hidden Valley Road and Patient H.M., an “intimate and compassionate portrait” (Grace M. Cho) of the Genain quadruplets, the harrowing violence they experienced, and its psychological and political consequences.​ In 1954, researchers at the newly formed National Institute of Mental Health set out to study the genetics of schizophrenia. When they got word that four 24-year-old identical quadruplets in Lansing, Michigan, had all been diagnosed with the mental illness, they could hardly believe their ears. Here was incontrovertible proof of hereditary transmission and, thus, a chance to bring international fame to their fledgling institution.   The case of the pseudonymous Genain quadruplets, they soon found, was hardly so straightforward. Contrary to fawning media portrayals of a picture-perfect Christian family, the sisters had endured the stuff of nightmares. Behind closed doors, their parents had taken shocking measures to preserve their innocence while sowing fears of sex and the outside world. In public, the quadruplets were treated as communal property, as townsfolk and members of the press had long ago projected their own paranoid fantasies about the rapidly diversifying American landscape onto the fair-skinned, ribbon-wearing quartet who danced and sang about Christopher Columbus. Even as the sisters’ erratic behaviors became impossible to ignore and the NIMH whisked the women off for study, their sterling image did not falter. Girls and Their Monsters chronicles the extraordinary lives of the quadruplets and the lead psychologist who studied them, asking questions that speak directly to our times: How do delusions come to take root, both in individuals and in nations? Why does society profess to be “saving the children” when it readily exploits them? What are the authoritarian ends of innocence myths? And how do people, particularly those with serious mental illness, go on after enduring the unspeakable? Can the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood help the deeply wounded heal?