Stream Popular Free Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Memoirs

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/545938 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us Author: Colleen Kinder, Leslie Jamison Narrator: Ramon Del Campo, Charley Flyte, Mirai Booth-Ong, Imani Jade Powers, Kimberly Woods, Mirron Willis Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 53 minutes Release date: March 22, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: “Beautiful. The human condition is on full display in these glimpses of our essential connectedness. Perfect for our times.”  —Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance Sixty-five extraordinary writers grapple with this mystery: How can an ephemeral encounter with a stranger leave such an eternal mark? When Colleen Kinder put out a call for authors to write a letter to a stranger about an unforgettable encounter, she opened  the floodgates. The responses—intimate and addictive, all written in the second person—began pouring in. These short, insightful essays by a  remarkable cast of writers, including Elizabeth Kolbert, Pico Iyer, Lauren Groff, Gregory Pardlo, Faith Adiele, Maggie Shipstead, Lia Purpura, Kiki Petrosino, and Jamil Jan Kochai, are organized around such themes as Gratitude, Wonder, and Farewell and guide us both across the globe and through the mysteries of human connection. Addressed to a first responder after a storm, a gambler encountered on jury duty, a waiter in  Istanbul, a taxi driver in Paris, a roomful of travelers watching reality TV in La Paz, and dozens of others, the pieces are replete with observations about how to live and what we seek, and how a stranger’s loaded glance, shared smile, or question posed can alter the course of our lives.  Moving and unforgettable, Letter to a Stranger is an irresistible read for the literary traveler and the perfect gift for anyone who is haunted by a person they met once and will remember forever.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/533261 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative and Fate Author: Daniel Mendelsohn Narrator: Daniel Mendelsohn Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 3 hours 45 minutes Release date: March 17, 2022 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, France's best foreign book of the year. ‘Astounding’ Sebastian Barry ‘A masterpiece’ Ayad Akhtar ‘This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise’ Jonathan Lethem In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own-works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul. Francois Fenelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus – a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years – resulted in his banishment. And the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write two of his own books-a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father-that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/531100 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Other Side of Yet: Finding Light in the Midst of Darkness Author: Michelle D. Hord Narrator: Michelle D. Hord Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 50 minutes Release date: March 15, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 4 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Winner of the 2023 Memoir Prize for Books from Memoir Magazine and the Christopher Award A “contemplative, emotional, and spiritual” (Shondaland) memoir about how resilience, hope, and defiant faith can lead to powerful transformation even amid our darkest hours. Media executive Michelle D. Hord has suffered loss at almost every major phase in her life—the most devastating being the murder of her beloved daughter at the hands of her ex-husband. Yet through it all, there was a voice inside her insisting that she must let the light shine through the holes in her heart. A timeless and accessible book for anyone who has experienced grief or loss, “The Other Side of Yet will guide you to find the light” (Robin Roberts, Good Morning America). With evocative prose and spiritual insight, Hord offers “inspiration and a road map to help us get to the other side” (Barbara Corcoran, founder of The Corcoran Group and star of Shark Tank) of unimaginable pain. Finding strength in God and her faith, she shares how, while we can’t control the pain or trauma that alters life as we knew it before, we can always pivot to a yet and rebuild a new after. In this deeply vulnerable tribute to her daughter, Hord provides a guide for “the radical healing after loss that must occur as we seek to recover from unimaginable trials and tribulations” (Essence). The Other Side of Yet is about creating a life of purpose, passion, and possibility regardless of what is thrown at us and highlights how we can face our hardships, yet also choose to keep fighting.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/533227 to listen full audiobooks. Title: A Childhood: The Biography of a Place Author: Harry Crews Narrator: Matt Godfrey Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 43 minutes Release date: March 15, 2022 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: “One of the Finest Memoirs Ever Written” –The New Yorker   The highly acclaimed memoir of one of the most original American storytellers of the rural South A Penguin Classic Harry Crews grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Georgia at a time when “the rest of the country was just beginning to feel the real hurt of the Great Depression but it had been living in Bacon County for years.” Yet what he conveys in this moving, brutal autobiography of his first six years of life is an elegiac sense of community and roots from a rural South that had rarely been represented in this way. Interweaving his own memories including his bout with polio and a fascination with the Sears, Roebuck catalog, with the tales of relatives and friends, he re-creates a childhood of tenderness and violence, comedy and tragedy.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/527854 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Red of my Blood: A Death and Life Story Author: Clover Stroud Narrator: Clover Stroud Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 26 minutes Release date: March 10, 2022 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. 'Can death bring something good to my life?' A few weeks before Christmas, Clover's sister died of breast cancer, aged forty-six. Just days before, she had been given years to live. Her sudden death split Clover's life apart. The Red of My Blood charts Clover's fearless passage through the fi rst year after her sister's death. It is a book about what life feels like when death interrupts it, and about bearing the unbearable and describing an experience that seems beyond words. Lyrical, hopeful, it is also about the magical way in which death and life exist so vividly beside one another, and the wonder of being human. 'An absolute gutting masterpiece of a book.' LISA TADDEO 'Clover Stroud is a fearless explorer of the human heart, and a writer of incomparable grace and passion. She also understands more about loss, sorrow, grief, and resilience than most people will ever have to learn.' ELIZABETH GILBERT © Clover Stroud 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/525814 to listen full audiobooks. Title: In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss Author: Amy Bloom Narrator: Amy Bloom Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 49 minutes Release date: March 8, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.54 of Total 24 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 6 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful memoir of a love that leads two people to find a courageous way to part—and a woman’s struggle to go forward in the face of loss—that “enriches the reader’s life with urgency and gratitude” (The Washington Post) “A pleasure to read . . . Rarely has a memoir about death been so full of life. . . . Bloom has a talent for mixing the prosaic and profound, the slapstick and the serious.”—USA Today ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Publishers Weekly ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, USA Today, Real Simple, Prospect (UK), She Reads, Kirkus Reviews Amy Bloom began to notice changes in her husband, Brian: He retired early from a new job he loved; he withdrew from close friendships; he talked mostly about the past. Suddenly, it seemed there was a glass wall between them, and their long walks and talks stopped. Their world was altered forever when an MRI confirmed what they could no longer ignore: Brian had Alzheimer’s disease. Forced to confront the truth of the diagnosis and its impact on the future he had envisioned, Brian was determined to die on his feet, not live on his knees. Supporting each other in their last journey together, Brian and Amy made the unimaginably difficult and painful decision to go to Dignitas, an organization based in Switzerland that empowers a person to end their own life with dignity and peace. In this heartbreaking and surprising memoir, Bloom sheds light on a part of life we so often shy away from discussing—its ending. Written in Bloom’s captivating, insightful voice and with her trademark wit and candor, In Love is an unforgettable portrait of a beautiful marriage, and a boundary-defying love. Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/539694 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Special Characters: My Adventures with Tech’s Titans and Misfits Author: Laurie Segall Narrator: Laurie Segall Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 38 minutes Release date: March 8, 2022 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: ''CNN's former senior tech correspondent shares her front-row seat on the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and other new-media empires—and the geeks turned entrepreneurs who founded them.''—People An unflinching, era-defining story of self-discovery and breaking barriers by award-winning investigative reporter Laurie Segall.  In 2008, 23-year-old Laurie Segall was a newly minted assistant at CNN and was living in an East Village walk-up apartment. As Wall Street was crashing down, Segall began discovering a group of scrappy misfits who were rising from the ashes of the recession to change the world: the tech entrepreneurs. A misfit herself, Segall gained entrance to New York’s burgeoning tech scene, with its limitless cash flow and parties populated by geeks-turned-billionaires. Back at the news desk, she rose through the ranks at CNN, while these entrepreneurs went from minnows to sharks, building companies that would become our democracy and our social fabric: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Tinder. Over the course of a decade, Laurie Segall became one of the first reporters to give airtime to many of these founders—from Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) to Jack Dorsey (Twitter) to Kevin Systrom (Instagram) to Travis Kalanick (Uber)—while tracking their evolution and society’s cultural shift in the CNN startup beat she created. By the end of her tenure at CNN, she had become its on-air senior technology correspondent and had witnessed the rise of second-wave tech, from the boom to the “complicated years” to the backlash, as her misfits emerged as some of the world’s most influential leaders. A coming-of-age narrative chronicling an era transformed, Special Characters is, at its core, a young woman’s origin story—in love, in career, and in life—and an account of the humans behind the companies that have shaped our modern society. Filled with emotional heft and razor-sharp observations, Segall’s empowering memoir is a richly rendered backstage pass to the tech bubble that reimagined the ethos of our social, political, and cultural experience. “Fans of Brotopia or anyone who wants a backstage pass to Zuckerberg and some of the biggest co.’s of our time, you’ll devour this.” —The Skimm

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/529928 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness Author: Meghan O'Rourke Narrator: Meghan O'Rourke Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 2 minutes Release date: March 1, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 7 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A landmark exploration of one of the most consequential and mysterious issues of our time: the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune diseases A silent epidemic of chronic illnesses afflicts tens of millions of Americans: these are diseases that are poorly understood, frequently marginalized, and can go undiagnosed and unrecognized altogether. Renowned writer Meghan O’Rourke delivers a revelatory investigation into this elusive category of “invisible” illness that encompasses autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and now long COVID, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier.   Drawing on her own medical experiences as well as a decade of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, O’Rourke traces the history of Western definitions of illness, and reveals how inherited ideas of cause, diagnosis, and treatment have led us to ignore a host of hard-to-understand medical conditions, ones that resist easy description or simple cures. And as America faces this health crisis of extraordinary proportions, the populations most likely to be neglected by our institutions include women, the working class, and people of color.   Blending lyricism and erudition, candor and empathy, O’Rourke brings together her deep and disparate talents and roles as critic, journalist, poet, teacher, and patient, synthesizing the personal and universal into one monumental project arguing for a seismic shift in our approach to disease. The Invisible Kingdom offers hope for the sick, solace and insight for their loved ones, and a radical new understanding of our bodies and our health. THIS AUDIOBOOK MAY INCLUDE INFORMATION REGARDING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC. INFORMATION RELATED TO COVID-19 CONTINUES TO EVOLVE. AUDIOBOOKS.COM ENCOURAGES YOU TO SEEK UP-TO-DATE INFORMATION AND GUIDANCE FROM YOUR LOCAL PUBLIC HEALTH UNIT.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/531117 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found Author: Frank Bruni Narrator: Frank Bruni Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 46 minutes Release date: March 1, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 6 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: From New York Times columnist and bestselling author Frank Bruni comes “a book about vision loss that becomes testimony to human courage, a moving memoir that offers perspective, comfort, and hope” (Booklist, starred review). One morning in late 2017, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni woke up with strangely blurred vision. He wondered at first if some goo or gunk had worked its way into his right eye. But this was no fleeting annoyance, no fixable inconvenience. Overnight, a rare stroke had cut off blood to one of his optic nerves, rendering him functionally blind in that eye—forever. And he soon learned from doctors that the same disorder could ravage his left eye, too. He could lose his sight altogether. In this “moving and inspiring” (The Washington Post) memoir, Bruni beautifully recounts his adjustment to this daunting reality, a medical and spiritual odyssey that involved not only reappraising his own priorities but also reaching out to, and gathering wisdom from, longtime friends and new acquaintances who had navigated their own traumas and afflictions. The result is a poignant, probing, and ultimately “a positive message, a powerful reminder that with great vulnerability also comes great reward” (Oprah Winfrey). Bruni’s world blurred in one sense, as he experienced his first real inklings that the day isn’t forever and that light inexorably fades, but sharpened in another. Confronting unexpected hardship, he felt more blessed than ever before. The Beauty of Dusk is “a wonderful book. Honest. Poetic. Uplifting.” (Lesley Stahl).

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/531778 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison Author: Daniel Genis Narrator: Daniel Genis Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 36 minutes Release date: February 22, 2022 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A memoir of a decade in prison by a well-educated young addict known as the 'Apologetic Bandit' In 2003 Daniel Genis, the son of a famous Soviet émigré writer, broadcaster, and culture critic, was fresh out of NYU when he faced a serious heroin addiction that led him into debt and ultimately crime. After he was arrested for robbing people at knifepoint, he was nicknamed the “Apologetic Bandit” in the press, given his habit of expressing regret to his victims as he took their cash. He was sentenced to twelve years—ten with good behavior, a decade he survived by reading 1,046 books, taking up weightlifting, having philosophical discussions with his fellow inmates, working at a series of prison jobs, and in general observing an existence for which nothing in his life had prepared him.   Genis describes in unsparing and vivid detail the realities of daily life in the New York penal system. In his journey from Rikers Island and through a series of upstate institutions, he encounters violence on an almost daily basis, while learning about the social strata of gangs, the “court” system that sets geographic boundaries in prison yards, how sex was obtained, the workings of the black market in drugs and more practical goods, the inventiveness required for everyday tasks such as cooking, and how debilitating solitary confinement actually is—all while trying to preserve his relationship with his wife, whom he recently married.   Written with empathy and wit, Sentence is a strikingly powerful memoir of the brutalities of prison and how one man survived them, leaving its walls with this book inside him, “one made of pain and fear and laughter and lots of other books.”