Listen to Latest Full Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Women

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/653783 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Hungry Season: A Journey of War, Love, and Survival

Author: Lisa M. Hamilton

Narrator: Lisa M. Hamilton

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 17 minutes

Release date: November 14, 2023

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice | A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year In the tradition of Katherine Boo and Tracy Kidder, The Hungry Season is a “lyrical” narrative with "real suspense" (New York Times): a nonfiction drama that “reads like the best of fiction” (Mark Arax), tracing one woman’s journey from the mist-covered mountains of Laos to the sunbaked flatlands of Fresno, California as she struggles to overcome the wounds inflicted by war and family alike​. As combat rages across the highlands of Vietnam and Laos, a child is born. Ia Moua enters the world at the bottom of the social order, both because she is part of the Hmong minority and because she is a daughter, not a son. When, at thirteen, she is promised in marriage to a man three times her age, it appears that Ia’s future has been decided for her. But after brutal communist rule upends her life, this intrepid girl resolves to chart her own defiant path.   With ceaseless ambition and an indestructible spirit, Ia builds a new existence for herself and, before long, for her children, first in the refugee camps of Thailand and then in the industrial heartland of California’s San Joaquin Valley. At the root of her success is a simple act: growing Hmong rice, just as her ancestors did, and selling it to those who hunger for the Laos of their memories. While the booming business brings her newfound power, it also forces her to face her own past. In order to endure the present, Ia must confront all that she left behind, and somehow find a place in her heart for those who chose to leave her.   Meticulously reported over seven years and written with the intimacy of a novel, The Hungry Season is the story of one radiant woman’s quest for survival—and for the nourishment that matters most.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/690772 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Bernardine's Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China

Author: Susan Blumberg-Kason

Narrator: Nancy Wu

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 55 minutes

Release date: November 7, 2023

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

Bernardine Szold Fritz arrived in Shanghai in 1929 to marry her fourth husband. Only thirty-three years old, she found herself in a time and place like no other. Political intrigue and scandal lurked on every street corner. Art Deco cinemas showed the latest Hollywood flicks, while dancehall owners and jazz musicians turned Shanghai into Asia's top nightlife destination. Yet from the night of their wedding, Bernardine's new husband did not live up to his promises. Instead of feeling sorry for herself or leaving Shanghai, Bernardine decided to make a place for herself. Like other Jewish women before her, she started a salon in her home, drawing famous names from the world of politics, the arts, and the intelligentsia. And when Hollywood stars Anna May Wong, Charlie Chaplin, and Claudette Colbert passed through Shanghai, Bernardine organized gatherings to introduce them to their Shanghai contemporaries. When Bernardine's salon could not accommodate all who wanted to attend, she founded the International Arts Theater to produce avant-garde plays, ballets, lectures, and visual arts exhibits, often pushing audiences beyond their comfort zones. As civil war brewed and World War II soon followed, Bernardine's devotion to the arts and the people of Shanghai brought joy to the city just before it would change forever.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/672544 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Candace Pert: Genius, Greed, and Madness in the World of Science

Author: Pamela Ryckman

Narrator: Pamela Ryckman, Jess Nahikian

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 42 minutes

Release date: November 7, 2023

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

The story of maverick scientist Candace Pert, whose groundbreaking research introduced the world to the mind-body connection, opioid receptors, and peptide T, and her fight for recognition in a toxic healthcare system. Candace Pert stood at the dawn of three revolutions: the women’s movement, integrative health, and psychopharmacology. A scientific prodigy, she was 30 years ahead of her time, preaching a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to healthcare and medicine long before yoga hit the mainstream and “wellness” took root in our vernacular. Her bestselling book Molecules of Emotion made her the mother of the Mind/Body Revolution, launching a paradigm shift in medicine. Deepak Chopra credits her with creating his career, and he said as much in his eulogy at her funeral.    Candace began her career as an unbridled maverick. In 1972, as a 26-year-old graduate student at Johns Hopkins, she discovered the opiate receptor, revolutionizing her field and enabling pharmacologists to design new classifications of drugs from Prozac to Viagra to Percocet and OxyContin. The tragic irony of her breakthrough, touted as the first step to end heroin addiction, is that it helped spawn a virulent epidemic of drug dependence. Facing the largest public health crisis of the 21st century, Candace was incensed that the Hippocratic oath—“first, do no harm”—would succumb to greed, and as witness to this abuse of power, she was one of few scientists courageous enough to protest.   Later, as Chief of Brain Biochemistry at the National Institutes of Health, Candace created Peptide T, the non-toxic treatment for HIV featured in Dallas BuyersClub. As the AIDS pandemic raged, triggering panic across Reagan-era America, the U.S. government poured massive amounts of money into finding a cure, sparking a battle among scientists for funding and power. Bested by rivals with competing drugs yet desperate to help, Candace went rogue, becoming a lynchpin in the black market for Peptide T.   After a scandalous departure from her tenured position at the NIH, Candace launched a series of private companies with Michael Ruff, her second husband and collaborator. Naïve to the world of business, she was manipulated by investors keen to wrest control of her discoveries. But Candace too became tainted, believing that her noble ends would justify devious means. Like a mythic hero, she succumbed to a fatal flaw, and her greatest strengths—singularity of purpose and blind faith in her own virtuosity—would prove to be her undoing.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/667014 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Class: A Memoir

Author: Stephanie Land

Narrator: Stephanie Land

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 31 minutes

Release date: November 7, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 8

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A Good Morning America Book Club Pick A New York Times Most Anticipated Books of Fall From the New York Times bestselling author who inspired the hit Netflix series about a struggling mother barely making ends meet as a housecleaner, a “raw and inspiring” (People) memoir about college, motherhood, poverty, and life after Maid. When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come. Handpicked by President Barack Obama as one of the best books of 2019, he called it an “unflinching look at America’s class divide…and a reminder of the dignity of all work.” Later, it was adapted into the hit Netflix series Maid, which was viewed by sixty-seven million households and was Netflix’s fourth most-watched show in 2021, garnering three Primetime Emmy Award nominations. Stephanie’s escape out of poverty and abuse in search of a better life inspired millions. Maid was a story about a housecleaner, but it was also a story about a woman with a dream. In Class, Land takes us with her as she finishes college and pursues her writing career. Facing barriers at every turn including a byzantine loan system, food insecurity, the judgments of professors and fellow students who didn’t understand the demands of attending college while under the poverty line—Land finds a way to survive once again, finally graduating in her mid-thirties. Class paints an intimate and heartbreaking portrait of motherhood as it converges and often conflicts with personal desire and professional ambition. Who has the right to create art? Who has the right to go to college? And what kind of work is valued in our culture? In clear, candid, and moving prose, Class grapples with these questions, offering a searing indictment of America’s educational system and an inspiring testimony of a mother’s triumph against all odds.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/692616 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Unsung: A Compendium of Creativity

Author: Kate Ceberano

Narrator: Kate Ceberano

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 2 hours 16 minutes

Release date: October 31, 2023

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

An intimate memoir from beloved Australian musician Kate Ceberano, featuring her inspirational song lyrics and stories, to celebrate four decades of songwriting and recording on the release of her 30th album.    Kate Ceberano is used to a hush descending as she draws breath to release that magnificent voice but when the whole world quietened in 2020, she found the silence disorientating. Without an audience or long hours of travel with her tribe of musicians, there was time to think. But what does an artist do when they can’t make art? They find a way.   With characteristic passion, abundance and joy, Kate liberated her unsung songs. They flowed through her paintbrush as she embellished guitars, her needle as she stitched quilts to envelop her beloveds and her pen as she unfurled stories, poems and songs.   In Unsung Kate muses on the people and experiences that have inspired her, on what has humbled her, what hurts and what sustains. This is the story of a powerful woman in her prime, but also of a reflective, romantic and vulnerable artist making sense of the universe. It’s proof of a lifetime lived in music. It’s a tribute to songs, wherever they come from and wherever they go.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/655141 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement

Author: Tanisha Ford

Narrator: Allyson Johnson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 21 minutes

Release date: October 24, 2023

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

An engrossing social history and memoir of the unsinkable Mollie Moon, the stylish founder of the National Urban League Guild and fundraiser extraordinaire who reigned over the glittering ''Beaux Arts Ball,” the social event of New York and Harlem society for fifty years—a glamorous event rivalling today’s Met Gala, drawing America’s wealthy and cultured, both Black and white. Our Secret Society brilliantly illuminates a little known yet highly significant aspect of the civil rights movement that has been long overlooked—the powerhouse fundraising effort that supported the movement—the luncheons, galas, cabarets, and traveling exhibitions attended by middle-class and working-class Black families, the Negro press, and titans of industry, including Winthrop Rockefeller. No one knew this world better or ruled over it with more authority than Mollie Moon. With her husband Henry Lee Moon, the longtime publicist for the NAACP, Mollie became half of one of the most influential couples of the period. Vivacious and intellectually curious, Mollie frequently hosted political salons attended by guests ranging from Langston Hughes to Lorraine Hansberry. As the president of the National Urban League Guild, the fundraising arm of the National Urban League; Mollie raised millions to fund grassroots activists battling for economic justice and racial equality. She was a force behind the mutual aid network that connected Black churches, domestic and blue-collar laborers, social clubs, and sororities and fraternities across the country. Historian and cultural critic Tanisha C. Ford brings Mollie into focus as never before, charting her rise from Jim Crow Mississippi to doyenne of Manhattan and Harlem, where she became one of the most influential philanthropists of her time—a woman feared, resented, yet widely respected. She chronicles Mollie’s larger-than-life antics through exhaustive research, never-before-revealed letters, and dozens of interviews, including with Mollie’s daughter and namesake. Our Secret Society ushers us into a world with its own rhythm and rules, led by its own Who’s Who of African Americans in politics, sports, business, and entertainment. It is both a searing portrait of a remarkable period in America, spanning from the early 1930s through the late 1960s, and a strategic economic blueprint today’s activists can emulate. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/696934 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Worthy

Author: Jada Pinkett Smith

Narrator: Jada Pinkett Smith

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 14 hours 57 minutes

Release date: October 17, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.7 of Total 56

Ratings of Narrator: 4.69 of Total 16

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

**The New York Times Bestseller** **Parade magazine must-read books by celebrities 2023** ''I went through so many emotions reading this book. Reconnecting to one's ancestors and truly feeling, not only hearing, their stories are fertile ground for true ecstatic embodiment of the self. We have to know where we've been to see where we're going.'' -Willow Smith ''[Smith] is candid and honest... For the first time she reveals the truth behind [the] happy images. An incredible read.'' -Hoda Kotb, The Today Show A gripping, at times painfully honest, and ultimately inspirational memoir from global superstar and creator of the Red Table Talk series Jada Pinkett Smith.  Jada Pinkett Smith was living what many would view as a fairy-tale of Hollywood success. But appearances can be deceiving, and as she felt more and more separated from her sense of self, emotional turmoil took hold. Sparing no detail, Worthy chronicles her life—from a rebellious youth running the Baltimore streets as an observer and participant in the drug trade, to the deep bond she shared with Tupac Shakur from the moment they met, to her move to Los Angeles and the successful career she built on her own terms, to becoming the wife of superstar Will Smith and mother to Jaden, Willow and bonus-mom to Trey . A rollercoaster from the depths of suicidal depression to the heights of self-acceptance and spiritual healing, Worthy is a woman’s journey to finding herself again.  In a media driven landscape that crafts narratives for our celebrities, Smith shares herself in an intimate conversation with readers. She answers questions about her difficult childhood, her marriage, her parenting style, her career choices, and the intense scrutiny that followed “the slap.” An impactful and rare memoir that engages and educates, Worthy shows why adhering to the status quo has never been the plan for Jada Pinkett Smith and why labels and stories crafted by others strip women of their authenticity. Worthy teaches us who Jada is, and how to embrace our most lovable qualities. Complete with thought-provoking writing prompts and meditations on how to discover who we really are and nourish our self-worth.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/689662 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Hemingway's Widow: The Life and Legacy of Mary Welsh Hemingway

Author: Tim Christian

Narrator: Tim Christian

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 18 hours 14 minutes

Release date: October 10, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

Mary Welsh, a celebrated wartime journalist during the London Blitz and the liberation of Paris, meets Ernest Hemingway in May 1944. He becomes so infatuated with Mary that he asks her to marry him the third time they meet—although they are married to other people. Eventually, she succumbs to Ernest's campaign, and in the last days of the war joined him at his estate in Cuba. Through Mary's eyes, we see Ernest Hemingway in a fresh light. Their turbulent marriage survives his cruelty and abuse, perhaps because of their sexual compatibility and her essential contribution to his writing. She reads and types his work each day—and makes plot suggestions. She becomes crucial to his work and he depends upon her critical reading of his work to know if he has it right. We watch as they travel to the ski country of the Dolomites, commute to Harry's Bar in Venice; and attend bullfights in Pamplona and Madrid. We see Ernest fall in love with a teenaged Italian countess and wonder at Mary's tolerance of the affair. We witness Ernest's sad decline and Mary's efforts to avoid the stigma of suicide by claiming his death was an accident. Her story is one of an opinionated woman who smokes Camels, drinks gin, swears like a man, sings like Edith Piaf, loves passionately, and experiments with gender fluidity in her extraordinary life with Ernest.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/679343 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton

Author: Victoria Houseman

Narrator: Elisabeth Rodgers

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 14 hours 39 minutes

Release date: October 10, 2023

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

A biography of the remarkable woman whose bestselling Mythology has introduced millions of readers to the classical worldEdith Hamilton (1867–1963) didn’t publish her first book until she was sixty-two. But over the next three decades, this former headmistress would become the twentieth century’s most famous interpreter of the classical world. Today, Hamilton’s Mythology (1942) remains the standard version of ancient tales and sells tens of thousands of copies a year. During the Cold War, her influence even extended to politics, as she argued that postwar America could learn from the fate of Athens after its victory in the Persian Wars. In American Classicist, Victoria Houseman tells the fascinating life story of a remarkable classicist whose ideas were shaped by—and aspired to shape—her times.Hamilton studied Latin and Greek from an early age, earned a BA and MA at Bryn Mawr College, and ran a girls’ prep school for twenty-six years. After retiring, she turned to writing and began a relationship with the pianist and stockbroker Doris Fielding Reid. The two women were partners for more than forty years and entertained journalists, diplomats, and politicians in their Washington, D.C., house. Hamilton traveled extensively around the world, formed friendships with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and was made an honorary citizen of Athens. While Hamilton believed that the ancient Greeks represented the peak of world civilization, Houseman shows that this suffragist, pacifist, and anti-imperialist wasfar from an apologist for Western triumphalism.An absorbing narrative of an eventful life, American Classicist reveals how Hamilton’s Greek and Roman worlds held up a mirror to midcentury America even as she strived to convey a timeless beauty that continues to enthrall readers.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/672846 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Down the Drain

Author: Julia Fox

Narrator: Julia Fox

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 3 minutes

Release date: October 10, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.75 of Total 57

Ratings of Narrator: 4.92 of Total 25

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The hotly anticipated book from “one of the all-time pop-culture greats” (New York magazine) that chronicles her shocking life and unyielding determination to not only survive but achieve her dreams. Julia Fox is famous for many things: her captivating acting, such as her breakout role in the film Uncut Gems; her trendsetting style, including bleached eyebrows, exaggerated eyeshadow, and cutout dresses; her mastery of social media, where she entertains and educates her millions of followers. But all these share the trait for which she is most famous: unabashedly and unapologetically being herself. This commitment to authenticity has never been more on display than in Down the Drain. With writing that is both eloquent and accessible, Fox recounts her turbulent path to cultural supremacy: her parents’ volatile relationship that divided her childhood between Italy and New York City and left her largely raising herself; a possessive and abusive drug-dealing boyfriend whose torment continued even from within Rikers Island; her own trips to jail as well as to a psychiatric hospital; her work as a dominatrix that led to a complicated entanglement with a sugar daddy; a heroin habit that led to New Orleans trap houses and that she would kick only after the fatal overdose of her best friend; her own near-lethal overdoses and the deaths of still more friends from drugs and suicide; an emotionally explosive, tabloid-dominating romance with a figure she dubs “The Artist”; a whirlwind, short-lived marriage and her trials as a single parent striving to support her young son. Yet as extraordinary as her story is, its universality is what makes it so powerful. Fox doesn’t just capture her improbable evolution from grade-school outcast to fashion-world icon, she captures her transition from girlhood to womanhood to motherhood. Family and friendship, sex and death, violence and love, money and power, innocence and experience—it’s all here, in raw, remarkable, and riveting detail. More than a year before the book’s publication, Fox’s description of it as “a masterpiece” in a red carpet interview went viral. As always, she was just being honest. Down the Drain is a true literary achievement, as one-of-a-kind as its author.