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

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/628707 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Vol. 3: Defender of the Realm, 1940–1965 Author: Paul Reid, William Manchester Narrator: Clive Chafer Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 53 hours 23 minutes Release date: November 6, 2012 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Spanning the years 1940 to 1965, Defender of the Realm, the third volume of William Manchester’s The Last Lion, picks up shortly after Winston Churchill became prime minister—when his tiny island nation stood alone against the overwhelming might of Nazi Germany. The Churchill portrayed by Manchester and Reid is a man of indomitable courage, lightning-fast intellect, and an irresistible will to action. This volume brilliantly recounts how Churchill organized his nation’s military response and defense, compelled President Roosevelt to support America’s beleaguered cousins, and personified the “never surrender” ethos that helped the Allies win the war, while at the same time adapting himself and his country to the inevitable shift of world power from the British Empire to the United States. More than twenty years in the making, The Last Lion presents a revelatory and unparalleled portrait of this brilliant, flawed, and dynamic leader. This is popular history at its most stirring.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/628752 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Island Practice: Cobblestone Rash, Underground Tom, and Other Adventures of a Nantucket Doctor Author: Pam Belluck Narrator: Joe Barrett Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 17 minutes Release date: October 25, 2012 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: If you need an appendectomy, he can do it with a stone scalpel he fashioned himself. If you have a condition nobody can diagnose—'creeping eruption' perhaps—he can identify what it is and treat it. A baby with hair tourniquet syndrome, a human leg that's washed ashore, a horse with Lyme disease, a narcoleptic falling face-first in the street, a hermit living underground—hardly anything is off-limits for Dr. Timothy J. Lepore. This is the spirited, true story of a colorful, contrarian doctor on the world-famous island of Nantucket. Thirty miles out to sea, in a strikingly offbeat place known for wealthy summer people but also home to independent-minded, idiosyncratic year-rounders, Lepore holds the life of the island, often quite literally, in his hands. He's surgeon, medical examiner, football team doctor, tick expert, unofficial psychologist, accidental homicide detective, and occasional veterinarian. When crisis strikes, he's deeply involved. Lepore has treated Jimmy Buffett, Chris Matthews, and various Kennedys, but he makes house calls for anyone and lets people pay him nothing—or anything: oatmeal-raisin cookies, a weather-beaten .44 Magnum, a picture of a Nepalese shaman. Lepore can be controversial and contradictory, espousing conservative views while performing abortions and giving patients marijuana cookies. He has unusual hobbies: he's a gun fanatic, roadkill collector, and concocter of pastimes like knitting dog-hair sweaters. Ultimately, Island Practice is about a doctor utterly essential to a community at a time when medicine is increasingly money driven and impersonal. Can he remain a maverick even as a health-care chain subsumes his hospital? Every community has—or, some would say, needs—a Doctor Lepore, and his island's drive to retain individuality in a cookie-cutter world is echoed across the country.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/628246 to listen full audiobooks. Title: An Honest President: The Life and Presidencies of Grover Cleveland Author: H. Paul Jeffers Narrator: Raymond Todd Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 9 minutes Release date: October 1, 2012 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Today, Grover Cleveland is chiefly known as the only president to have been elected to two nonconsecutive terms. But in his day, Cleveland was a renowned reformer: an enemy of political machines who joined forces with Theodore Roosevelt to fight powerful party bosses, a moralist who vetoed bills he considered blatant raids on the Treasury, and a vigorous defender of the Monroe Doctrine who resisted American imperialism. Cleveland's career in office was plagued by scandal and a gossip-mongering press. During his first presidential bid, he was persecuted for fathering a child out of wedlock, a charge to which Cleveland readily admitted. At the age of forty-nine, he married his twenty-one-year-old ward, and after the nation's initial surprise, she became the most popular first lady of her day. On his deathbed, Cleveland would sum up his career simply: 'I have tried so hard to do right.' In graceful and enduring prose, H. Paul Jeffers gives us the first full look at a president whose moral timber and courageous administrations have more to say to today's politicians than perhaps that of any other leader in American history.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/628706 to listen full audiobooks. Title: John Quincy Adams Author: Harlow Giles Unger Narrator: Johnny Heller Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 42 minutes Release date: September 4, 2012 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: He fought for Washington, served with Lincoln, witnessed Bunker Hill, and sounded the clarion against slavery on the eve of the Civil War. He negotiated an end to the War of 1812, engineered the annexation of Florida, and won the Supreme Court decision that freed the African captives of La Amistad. He served his nation as minister to six countries, secretary of state, senator, congressman, and president. John Quincy Adams was all of these things and more. In this masterful biography, award-winning author Harlow Giles Unger reveals Adams as a towering figure in the nation's formative years and one of the most courageous figures in American history—which is why he ranked first in John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize–winning Profiles in Courage. For this magisterial biography, Unger makes use of a little-known national treasure: John Quincy Adams' diary, started at age ten, giving us an eye-witness account of sixty-five years of critical American history.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/628679 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa Author: Mark Mathabane Narrator: Mark Mathabane Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 18 hours 33 minutes Release date: June 28, 2012 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: The classic story of life in apartheid South Africa Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa’s most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university. This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation, for Mark Mathabane did what no physically and psychologically battered “Kaffir” from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do—he escaped to tell about it.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/628675 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed Author: Leslie Maitland Narrator: Leslie Maitland Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 18 hours 48 minutes Release date: April 17, 2012 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Leslie Maitland is an award-winning former New York Times investigative reporter whose mother and grandparents fled Germany in 1938 for France, where, as Jews, they spent four years as refugees—the last two under risk of Nazi deportation. In 1942 they made it onto the last boat to escape France before the Germans sealed the harbors. Then, barred from entering the United States, they lived in Cuba for almost two years before immigrating to New York. This sweeping account of one family’s escape from the turmoil of war-torn Europe hangs upon the intimate and deeply personal story of the passionate romance between Maitland’s mother and a Catholic Frenchman. Separated by war and her family’s disapproval, the young lovers—Janine and Roland—lose each other for fifty years. It is a testimony to both Maitland’s investigative skills and her devotion to her mother that she successfully traced the lost Roland and was able to reunite him with Janine. Unlike so many stories of love during wartime, theirs has a happy ending.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/624174 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Confessions Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau Narrator: Frederick Davidson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 30 hours 0 minutes Release date: April 10, 2012 Ratings: Ratings of Narrator: 3 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Dr. Johnson may have been correct in saying that 'Rousseau was a very bad man,' but none can argue that his ideas are among the most influential in all of world history. It was Rousseau, the father of the romantic movement, who was responsible for introducing at least two modern day thoughts that pervade academia: (1) free expression of the creative spirit is more important than strict adhesion to formal rules and traditional procedures, and (2) man is innately good but is corrupted by society and civilization. The Confessionsis Rousseau's landmark autobiography. Both brilliant and flawed, it is nonetheless beautifully written and remains one of the most moving human documents in all of literature. In this work, Rousseau 'frankly and sincerely' settles accounts with himself in an effort to project his 'true' image to the world. In so doing he reveals the details of a man who paid little regard to accepted morality and social conventions.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/628662 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England Author: Thomas Penn Narrator: Simon Vance Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 14 hours 34 minutes Release date: March 6, 2012 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A fresh look at the endlessly fascinating Tudors—the dramatic and overlooked story of Henry VII and his founding of the Tudor Dynasty—filled with spies, plots, counter-plots, and an uneasy royal succession to Henry VIII Near the turn of the sixteenth century, England had been ravaged for decades by conspiracy and civil war. Henry Tudor clambered to the top of the heap, a fugitive with a flimsy claim to England’s crown who managed to win the throne and stay on it for twenty-four years. Although he built palaces, hosted magnificent jousts, and sent ambassadors across Europe, for many Henry VII remained a false king. But he had a crucial asset: his family—the queen and their children, the living embodiment of his hoped-for dynasty. Now, in what would be the crowning glory of his reign, his elder son would marry a great Spanish princess. Thomas Penn re-creates an England that is both familiar and very strange—a country medieval yet modern, in which honor and chivalry mingle with espionage, realpolitik, high finance, and corruption. It is the story of the transformation of a young, vulnerable boy, Prince Henry, into the aggressive teenager who would become Henry VIII, and of Catherine of Aragon, his future queen, as well as of Henry VII—controlling, avaricious, paranoid, with Machiavellian charm and will to power. Rich with incident and drama, filled with wonderfully drawn characters, Winter King is an unforgettable account of pageantry, intrigue, the thirst for glory, and the fraught, unstable birth of Tudor England.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/628154 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday Author: Donald Clarke Narrator: Anna Fields Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 17 hours 45 minutes Release date: January 16, 2012 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: No singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than jazz legend Billie Holiday, who helped to create much of the mystique herself with her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. This authentic biography sets the record straight. Donald Clarke was given unrivaled access to a treasure trove of interviews from the 1970s with those who knew Lady Day in all stages of her short, tragic life—from her childhood in the streets and good-time houses of Baltimore, through the early days of success in New York and the years of fame, to her tragic decline and death at the age of forty-four. This biography separates fact from fiction to reveal the true Billie Holiday.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/622173 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Dab of Dickens, The Touch of Twain, and The Shade of Shakespeare: Selections from A Dab of Dickens & a Touch of Twain, Literary Lives from Shakespeare’s Old England to Frost’s New England Author: Elliot Engel Narrator: Joe Barrett, Scott Brick, Geoffrey Howard, David Birney, Grover Gardner Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 32 minutes Release date: December 21, 2011 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: They are icons of the literary world whose soaring works have been discussed and analyzed in countless classrooms, homes, and pubs. Yet for most readers, the living, breathing human beings behind the classics have remained unknown—until now. In this utterly captivating book, Dr. Elliot Engel, a leading authority on the lives of great authors, illuminates the fascinating and flawed members of literature’s elite. In lieu of stuffy biographical sketches, Engel provides fascinating anecdotes. You’ll never look at these literary giants the same way again.