the Best Audio Stories in Biography & Memoir, History & Culture

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/821500 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The British Royalty Collection Author: Liam Dale Narrator: Liam Dale Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 9 minutes Release date: December 31, 1969 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Visitors to London during the height of summer quickly realize that the city attracts tourists from every corner of the globe, and Buckingham Palace is often at the top of their must-see list, followed by the Tower of London and, since the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, Kensington Palace—her former residence. Despite claims that monarchies, British or otherwise, are outdated institutions, millions still flock to these royal sites, eager to walk in the footsteps of both ancient and modern royalty and witness the places where history was made. When it comes to the great Kings and Queens of the past, some figures like Richard the Lionheart, Henry VIII, and George III are well-known for very different reasons, while queens such as Mary I (of England and Scotland), Elizabeth I, and Queen Victoria remain just as captivating today as they were during their reigns. However, many lesser-known figures are equally worthy of exploration. Whether you're looking for a who's who of British royalty for your next pub quiz or you're curious about how we've gone from ancient feuding tribes to the modern monarchy, this royal romp through history will ensure you never confuse your Henrys, Georges, Edwards, Richards, Marys, and Williams again.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/795912 to listen full audiobooks. Title: An Unruled Body: A Poet's Memoir Author: Ani Gjika Narrator: Ani Gjika Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 43 minutes Release date: November 5, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: In a searching and powerful debut memoir, award-winning poet and literary translator Ani Gjika tells a different kind of origin story by writing about the ways a woman listens to her own body, intuition, and desire. Ani Gjika was born in Albania and came of age just after the fall of Communism, a time when everyone had a secret to keep and young women were afraid to walk down the street alone. When her family immigrates to America, Gjika finds herself far from the grandmother who helped raise her, grappling with a new language, and isolated from aging parents who are trying in their own ways to survive. When she meets a young man whose mind leans toward writing, as hers does, Ani falls in love—at least, she thinks it's love. Set across Albania, Thailand, India, and the US, An Unruled Body is a young woman's journey to selfhood through the lenses of language, sexuality, and identity, and how she learns to find freedom of expression on her own terms.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/777410 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Stronger Together Author: Andy Reti, Ibolya Grossman Narrator: Helen Kas, Andy Reti, Naomi Azrieli, Marlene Kadar Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 46 minutes Release date: November 5, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: "Don't cry darling. We need this baby. You will see." With these words from her husband, Zoltán, Ibolya Rechnitzer's fear of being pregnant during the uncertainty of wartime is somewhat eased. But in November 1942, four months after their baby, Andy, is born, Zoltán is drafted into the forced labour service of the Hungarian army and Ibolya must cope, alone, as a single mother and a Jew facing persecution in Budapest. Her son gives her a reason to fight, and Ibolya protects him fiercely during the war and after, when she must make a crucial decision that will forever alter their lives. As Andy grows up in the shadow of the Holocaust and his mother's memories, he finds the remarkable courage to tell his own story and carry on his mother's legacy. Two memoirs in one, Stronger Together gives voice to both mother and son as they each reflect on their past, their losses and, above all, their optimism.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/812609 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Hemingway's Passions: His Women, His Wars, and His Writing Author: Nancy W. Sindelar Narrator: Callie Beaulieu Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 19 minutes Release date: November 5, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Ernest Hemingway's passion was writing, and he was inspired by a lifetime of daring adventures and encouraged by the many women in his life. His masculine, adventurous spirit appealed to women of all ages, including four wives and a long list of legendary actresses, and he frequently transformed the women in his life into memorable fictional characters. In 1950, Hemingway told Marlene Dietrich that he truly loved only five women. Who were these women and why did he love them? Some of them may have included his wives, but there were others too, among them Agnes von Kurowsky. Through quotations from his works and personal letters, Hemingway scholar Nancy W. Sindelar captures Hemingway's life and romantic adventures, revealing his own feelings about his romantic relationships and the ways his experiences with women appear in his literary works. Much has been written about Hemingway, but to date no book has linked the women he loved to his written work. The stories of Hemingway's romantic relationships reveal not only the influence these women had on his writing but also his personal ambition, heartbreak, and literary triumphs and trials. Sindelar's provocative analyses of Hemingway's literature give fresh insight into the life of a legendary author, outdoorsman, adventurer, and lover.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/809187 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Gulp, Swallow: Essays on Change Author: Brooke Boland Narrator: Candice Moll Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 3 hours 30 minutes Release date: November 5, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Memoiric essays on who we were and how we have changed What happens when who you are is different to who you imagined you'd be? When her son was three, Brooke Boland was diagnosed with depression. She went back to find where it all started – the panic attacks, the dissociation – in the early days of motherhood. When she found it difficult to read or write. In this wide-ranging collection of essays Boland moves on from the person she was and writes to understand who she is now. She swims with sharks, falls in love with a rabbit, and watches her father fight for his life. She is a newcomer in a small regional town and a mother, but what else? She writes about family and friends, life and mortality, memory and forgetting, and along the way she finds her voice again. This book is for anyone who has felt unmoored. It is about the unremarkable in-between, the way we try to build a home from nothing, the dirty dishes and the loads of washing. The uncertainty and the love. But written in sparkling prose with a sly and wry tone that is illuminating about the everyday as it pitches for a rich and fulfilled life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/809056 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Adventures of a Country Vet: True stories from the horse's mouth Author: Rory Dean Narrator: Kenny Blyth Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 44 minutes Release date: October 30, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Funny and heartwarming stories from a Northland country vet In the rolling green hills of Kaipara, Scottish vet Rory Dean and his two fox terriers, Scrappy and Alfie, are on call day and night for whichever animal emergency awaits. In Adventures of a Country Vet, Rory shares stories of the livestock and pets he's cared for as a rural vet in New Zealand and southwest England. From calving in a blizzard to a dog wounded in a pig-hunt, a horse castration gone wrong and warming a baby alpaca in the footwell of his ute, life as a vet is all-go. It isn't all rosy: Rory's sworn at, called every name under the sun, even threatened to be shot; and, some days, bad news can make the toughest Kiwi bloke cry. Working with farmers who are at the mercy of extreme weather, Rory knows when to stop and listen over a strong cuppa. These are entertaining, heartwarming tales of animals in need and a picture of the communities who care for them.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/818690 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Explorers: A New History Author: Matthew Lockwood Narrator: Rick Adamson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 54 minutes Release date: October 29, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Unfurling a tapestry of surprising and historically overlooked figures spanning forty centuries and six continents, historian Matthew Lockwood narrates lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection, and exchange. Familiar icons of exploration like Pocahontas, Columbus, Sacagawea, and Captain Cook find new company in the untold stories of people usually denied the title 'explorers,' including immigrants, indigenous interpreters, local guides, and fugitive slaves. He highlights female voyagers like Gudrid Far-Traveler and Freydís Eiríksdóttir, Viking women who sailed to North America in 1000 AD, and Mary Wortley Montagu, whose pioneering travels to Constantinople would lead to the development of the world's first smallpox vaccine. Figures like Ghulam Rassul Galwan, a guide for European travelers in the Himalayas, reveal the hidden labor, expertise, and local enthusiasm behind many grand stories of discovery. Other characters, like David Dorr, a man born into slavery in New Orleans who embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe and Egypt, embody discovery and wonder as universal parts of the human condition. Adventurers from every corner of the globe search for the unknown and try to understand it, remaking the world and themselves in the process. Exploration is for everyone who sets off into the unknown. It is the inheritance of all.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/795933 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong Author: Linda Legarde Grover Narrator: Lanecia Edmonds Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 13 minutes Release date: October 29, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Long before there was a Duluth, Minnesota, the massive outcropping that divides the city emerged from the ridge of gabbro rock running along the westward shore of Lake Superior. A great westward migration carried the Ojibwe people to the Point of Rocks. Against this backdrop—Misaabekong, the place of the giants—the lives chronicled in Linda LeGarde Grover's book unfold, some in myth, some in long-ago times, some in an imagined present, and some in the author's family history, all with a deep bond to the land, one another, and the Ojibwe culture. Their fortunes and the family's future are inextricably entwined with tales of marriages to voyageurs, relocations to reservation lands, encounters with the spirits of the lake and wood creatures, the renewal of life—in myth and in art, the search for meaning in the transformations of our day is always vital. Finally, in one man's struggles, age-old tribulations, the intergenerational traumas of extended families and communities, and a uniquely Ojibwe appreciation for the natural and spiritual worlds converge, forging the Ojibwe worldview and will to survive as his legacy to his descendants. Blending the seen and unseen, the old and the new, the amusing and the tragic and the hauntingly familiar, this lyrical work encapsulates a way of life forever vibrant at the Point of Rocks.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/766294 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Perdurabo, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Life of Aleister Crowley Author: Richard Kaczynski Narrator: Alan Irving Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 30 hours 26 minutes Release date: October 29, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A rigorously researched biography of the founder of modern magick, as well as a study of the occult, sexuality, Eastern religion, and more   The name "Aleister Crowley" instantly conjures visions of diabolic ceremonies and orgiastic indulgences—and while the sardonic Crowley would perhaps be the last to challenge such a view, he was also much more than "the Beast," as this authoritative biography shows.  Perdurabo—entitled after the magical name Crowley chose when inducted into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—traces Crowley's remarkable journey from his birth as the only son of a wealthy lay preacher to his death in a boarding house as the world's foremost authority on magick. Along the way, he rebels against his conservative religious upbringing; befriends famous artists, writers, and philosophers (and becomes a poet himself); is attacked for his practice of "the black arts"; and teaches that science and magick can work together. While seeking to spread his infamous philosophy of, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," Crowley becomes one of the most notorious figures of his day.   Based on Richard Kaczynski's twenty years of research, and including previously unpublished biographical details, Perdurabo paints a memorable portrait of the man who inspired the counterculture and influenced generations of artists, punks, wiccans, and other denizens of the demimonde.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/790636 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Reconciling History: A Story of Canada Author: Roshan Danesh, Jody Wilson-Raybould Narrator: Adrian Shepherd-Gawinski, Kaitlyn Yott, Joshua Odjick, Marion Newman, Chris Mejaki, Asivak Koostachin, Glen Gould, Dillan Chiblow, Reneltta Arluk, Roshan Danesh, Sarah Kelley, Jody Wilson-Raybould, Tai Amy Grauman Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 55 minutes Release date: October 29, 2024 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: One of Indigo's Top 10 History Books of 2024 and Top 100 Books of 2024 • One of the Toronto Star's 25 books to read this season From the #1 national bestselling author of 'Indian' in the Cabinet and True Reconciliation, a truly unique history of our land—powerful, devastating, remarkable—as told through the voices of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. The totem pole forms the foundation for this unique and important oral history of Canada. Its goal is both toweringly ambitious and beautifully direct: To tell the story of this country in a way that prompts readers to look from different angles, to see its dimensions, its curves, and its cuts.  To see that history has an arc, just as the totem pole rises, but to realize that it is also in the details along the way that important meanings are to be found.  To recognize that the story of the past is always there to be retold and recast, and must be conveyed to generations to come. That in the act of re-telling, meaning is found, and strength is built. When it comes to telling the history of Canada, and in particular the history of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, we need to accept that the way in which our history has traditionally been told has not been a common or shared enterprise. In many ways, it has been an exclusive and siloed one. Among the countless peoples and groups that make up this vast country, the voices and experiences of a few have too often dominated those of many others. Reconciling History shares voices that have seldom been heard, and in this ground-breaking book they are telling and re-telling history from their perspectives. Born out of the oral history in True Reconciliation, and complemented throughout with stunning photography and art, Reconciling History takes this approach to telling our collective story to an entirely different level.