Get New Free Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, History & Culture

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/274378 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Turner: The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J. M. W. Turner Author: Franny Moyle Narrator: John Sackville Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 17 hours 46 minutes Release date: October 25, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2 of Total 3 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: The life of one of Western art's most admired and misunderstood painters   J.M.W. Turner is one of the most important figures in Western art, and his visionary work paved the way for a revolution in landscape painting. Over the course of his lifetime, Turner strove to liberate painting from an antiquated system of patronage. Bringing a new level of expression and color to his canvases, he paved the way for the modern artist.   Turner was very much a man of his changing era. In his lifetime, he saw Britain ravaged by Napoleonic wars, revived by the Industrial Revolution, and embarked upon a new moment of Imperial glory with the ascendancy of Queen Victoria. His own life embodied astonishing transformation. Born the son of a barber in Covent Garden, he was buried amid pomp and ceremony in St. Paul's Cathedral.   Turner was accepted into the prestigious Royal Academy at the height of the French Revolution when a climate of fear dominated Britain. Unable to travel abroad he explored at home, reimagining the landscape to create some of the most iconic scenes of his country. But his work always had a profound human element. When a moment of peace allowed travel into Europe, Turner was one of the first artists to capture the beauty of the Alps, to revive Venice as a subject, and to follow in Byron’s footsteps through the Rhine country.   While he was commercially successful for most of his career, Turner's personal life remained fraught. His mother suffered from mental illness and was committed to Bedlam.  Turner never married but had several long-term mistresses and illegitimate daughters. His erotic drawings were numerous but were covered up by prurient Victorians after his death.   Turner's late, impressionistic work was held up by his Victorian detractors as example of a creeping madness. Affection for the artist’s work soured. John Ruskin, the greatest of all 19th century art critics, did what he could to rescue Turner’s reputation, but Turner’s very last works confounded even his greatest defender.   TURNER humanizes this surprising genius while placing him in his fascinating historical context. Franny Moyle brilliantly tells the story of the man to give us an astonishing portrait of the artist and a vivid evocation of Britain and Europe in flux.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/274369 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life Author: Peter Ackroyd Narrator: Gildart Jackson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 33 minutes Release date: October 25, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.33 of Total 3 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A gripping short biography of the extraordinary Alfred Hitchock, the master of suspense. Alfred Hitchcock was a strange child. Fat, lonely, burning with fear and ambition, his childhood was an isolated one, scented with fish from his father's shop. Afraid to leave his bedroom, he would plan great voyages, using railway timetables to plot an exact imaginary route across Europe. So how did this fearful figure become the one of the most respected film directors of the twentieth century?      As an adult, Hitch rigorously controlled the press's portrait of him, drawing certain carefully selected childhood anecdotes into full focus and blurring all others out. In this quick-witted portrait, Ackroyd reveals something more: a lugubriously jolly man fond of practical jokes, who smashes a once-used tea cup every morning to remind himself of the frailty of life. Iconic film stars make cameo appearances, just as Hitch did in his own films: Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, and James Stewart despair of his detached directing style and, perhaps most famously of all, Tippi Hedren endures cuts and bruises from a real-life fearsome flock of birds.      Alfred Hitchcock wrests the director's chair back from the master of control and discovers what lurks just out of sight, in the corner of the shot.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/273813 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors Author: Stephen E. Ambrose Narrator: Richard Ferrone Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 20 hours 34 minutes Release date: October 18, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.17 of Total 18 Ratings of Narrator: 3 of Total 4 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: The full story of what led Crazy Horse and Custer to that fateful day at the Little Bighorn, from bestselling historian Stephen E. Ambrose.   On the sparkling morning of June 25, 1876, 611  U.S. Army soldiers rode toward the banks of the Little Bighorn in the Montana Territory, where 3,000 Indians stood waiting for battle.  The lives of two great warriors would soon be forever linked throughout history: Crazy Horse, leader of the Oglala Sioux, and General George Armstrong Custer of the Seventh Cavalry. Both were men of aggression and supreme courage. Both had become leaders in their societies at very early ages; both had been stripped of power, and in disgrace had worked to earn back the respect of their people. And to both of them, the unspoiled grandeur of the Great Plains of North America was an irresistible challenge. Their parallel lives would pave the way, in a manner unknown to either, for an inevitable clash between two nations fighting for possession of the open prairie.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/273846 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto Author: Tilar J. Mazzeo Narrator: Amanda Carlin Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 31 minutes Release date: September 27, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.55 of Total 29 Ratings of Narrator: 3 of Total 2 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot comes an extraordinary and gripping account of Irena Sendler—the “female Oskar Schindler”—who took staggering risks to save 2,500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. In 1942, one young social worker, Irena Sendler, was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a public health specialist. While she was there, she began to understand the fate that awaited the Jewish families who were unable to leave. Soon she reached out to the trapped families, going from door to door and asking them to trust her with their young children. Driven to extreme measures and with the help of a network of local tradesmen, ghetto residents, and her star-crossed lover in the Jewish resistance, Irena ultimately smuggled thousands of children past the Nazis. She made dangerous trips through the city’s sewers, hid children in coffins, snuck them under overcoats at checkpoints, and slipped them through secret passages in abandoned buildings. But Irena did something even more astonishing at immense personal risk: she kept a secret list buried in bottles under an old apple tree in a friend’s back garden. On it were the names and true identities of these Jewish children, recorded so their families could find them after the war. She could not know that more than ninety percent of their families would perish. Irena’s Children, “a fascinating narrative of…the extraordinary moral and physical courage of those who chose to fight inhumanity with compassion” (Chaya Deitsch author of Here and There: Leaving Hasidism, Keeping My Family), is a truly heroic tale of survival, resilience, and redemption.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/275136 to listen full audiobooks. Title: South! The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition 1914-1917 Author: Ernest Shackleton Narrator: LibriVox Volunteers Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 15 hours 34 minutes Release date: September 22, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.12 of Total 50 Ratings of Narrator: 3.82 of Total 11 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Shackleton's most famous expedition was planned to be an attempt to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea south of the Atlantic, to the Ross Sea south of the Pacific, by way of the Pole. It set out from London on 1 August 1914, and reached the Weddell Sea on January 10, 1915, where the pack ice closed in on the Endurance. The ship was broken by the ice on 27 October 1915. The 28 crew members managed to flee to Elephant Island, bringing three small boats with them. Shackleton and five other men managed to reach the southern coast of South Georgia in one of the small boats (in a real epic journey). Shackleton managed to rescue all of the stranded crew from Elephant Island without loss in the Chilean's navy seagoing steam tug Yelcho, on August 30, 1916, in the middle of the Antarctic winter. (Summary from Wikipedia) As the last section of this project we include a short original recording by Ernest Shackleton about the expedition.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/275137 to listen full audiobooks. Title: A on of the Middle Border Author: Hamlin Garland Narrator: LibriVox Volunteers Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 15 hours 33 minutes Release date: September 22, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.95 of Total 19 Ratings of Narrator: 3.14 of Total 7 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: In all the region of autobiography, so far as I know it, I do not know quite the like of Mr. Garland's story of his life, and I should rank it with the very greatest of that kind in literature. . . . It is the poet who sees the vast scale of human struggle with nature or the things she will withhold unless they are forced from her by man's tireless toil and mighty mechanism, and in the vision he knows a battle-joy as distinctive of this Son of the Middle Border as his fidelity to the sordid and squalid details of the campaign, or his exultation of the beauty of the West which he has so passionately hated and finally so passionately loves. As you read the story of his life you realize it the memorial of a generation, of a whole order of American experience; as you review it you perceive it an epic of such mood and make as has not been imagined before.(Introduction by William Dean Howells, New York Times review, August 26, 1917)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/272971 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Rasputin File Author: Edvard Radzinsky Narrator: Edoardo Ballerini Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 22 hours 27 minutes Release date: September 13, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2.75 of Total 4 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: From the bestselling author of Stalin and The Last Tsar comes The Rasputin File, a remarkable biography of the mystical monk and bizarre philanderer whose role in the demise of the Romanovs and the start of the revolution can only now be fully known. For almost a century, historians could only speculate about the role Grigory Rasputin played in the downfall of tsarist Russia. But in 1995 a lost file from the State Archives turned up, a file that contained the complete interrogations of Rasputin’s inner circle. With this extensive and explicit amplification of the historical record, Edvard Radzinsky has written a definitive biography, reconstructing in full the fascinating life of an improbable holy man who changed the course of Russian history. Translated from the Russian by Judson Rosengrant.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/273899 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Lives of the Queens of England Volume 4 Author: Agnes Strickland Narrator: Ann Boulais Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 16 hours 25 minutes Release date: September 7, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.06 of Total 16 Ratings of Narrator: 2 of Total 4 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: The Lives of the Queens of England is a multi-volumed work attributed to Agnes Strickland, though it was mostly researched and written by her sister Elizabeth. These volumes give biographies of the queens of England from the Norman Conquest in 1066. Although by today's standards, it is not seen as a very scholarly work, the Stricklands used many sources that had not been used before. Volume 4 includes the biographies of Elizabeth of York, Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymore, Anne of Cleves, and Katherine Howard. (Summary by Ann Boulais)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/273922 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Idiot (Part 01 and 02) Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky Narrator: Martin Geeson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 15 hours 44 minutes Release date: September 7, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.9 of Total 104 Ratings of Narrator: 3.97 of Total 37 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Russia to claim his inheritance and to find a place in healthy human society. The teeming St Petersburg community he enters is far from receptive to an innocent like himself, despite some early successes and relentless pursuit by grotesque fortune-hunters. His naive gaucheries give rise to extreme reactions among his new acquaintance, ranging from anguished protectiveness to mockery and contempt. But even before reaching the city, during the memorable train journey that opens the novel, he has encountered the demonic Rogozhin, the son of a wealthy merchant who is in thrall to the equally doomed Natasha Filippovna: beautiful, capricious and destructively neurotic, she joins with the two weirdly contrasted men in a spiralling dance of death... (Summary by Martin Geeson)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/273932 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Shakespeare Identified Author: J. Thomas Looney Narrator: LibriVox Volunteers Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 16 hours 57 minutes Release date: September 7, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: That one who is not a recognized authority or an expert in literature should attempt the solution of a problem which has so far baffled specialists must doubtless appear to many as a glaring act of over- boldness; whilst to pretend to have actually solved this most momentous of literary puzzles will seem to some like sheer hallucination. What I have to propose, however, is not an accidental discovery, but one resulting from a systematic search. And it is to the nature of the method, combined with a happy inspiration and a fortunate chance, that the results here described were reached. These convinced me that the opponents of the orthodox view had made good their case to this extent, that there was no sufficient evidence that the man William Shakspere had written the works with which he was credited, whilst there was a very strong prima facie presumption that he had not. Everything seemed to point to his being but a mask, behind which some great genius, for inscrutable reasons, had elected to work out his own destiny. (Summary by ToddHW, from Introduction)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/273941 to listen full audiobooks. Title: A Sportsman's Sketches Author: Ivan Turgenev Narrator: Tovarisch Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 16 hours 36 minutes Release date: September 7, 2016 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A Sportsman's Sketches (Russian: ??????? ????????; also known as The Hunting Sketches and Sketches from a Hunter's Album) was an 1852 collection of short stories by Ivan Turgenev. It was the first major writing that gained him recognition. He wrote this collection of short stories based on his own observations while hunting at his mother's estate at Spasskoye, where he learned of the abuse of the peasants and the injustices of the Russian system that constrained them. The frequent abuse of Turgenev by his mother certainly had an effect on this work. The stories were first published in The Contemporary with each story separate before appearing in 1852 in book form. He was about to give up writing when the first story, "Khor and Kalinich," was well received. This work is part of the Russian realist tradition in that the narrator is usually an uncommitted observer of the people he meets. - Summary by Wikipedia

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/272709 to listen full audiobooks. Title: True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy Author: Kati Marton Narrator: Amanda Carlin Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 58 minutes Release date: September 6, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 2 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: “Kati Marton’s True Believer is a true story of intrigue, treachery, murder, torture, fascism, and an unshakable faith in the ideals of Communism….A fresh take on espionage activities from a critical period of history” (Washington Independent Review of Books). True Believer reveals the life of Noel Field, once a well-meaning and privileged American who spied for Stalin during the 1930s and forties. Later, a pawn in Stalin’s sinister master strategy, Field was kidnapped and tortured by the KGB and forced to testify against his own Communist comrades. How does an Ivy League-educated, US State Department employee, deeply rooted in American culture and history, become a hardcore Stalinist? The 1930s, when Noel Field joined the secret underground of the International Communist Movement, were a time of national collapse. Communism promised the righting of social and political wrongs and many in Field’s generation were seduced by its siren song. Few, however, went as far as Noel Field in betraying their own country. With a reporter’s eye for detail, and a historian’s grasp of the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, Kati Marton, in a “relevant…fascinating…vividly reconstructed” (The New York Times Book Review) account, captures Field’s riveting quest for a life of meaning that went horribly wrong. True Believer is supported by unprecedented access to Field family correspondence, Soviet Secret Police records, and reporting on key players from Alger Hiss, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and World War II spy master, “Wild Bill” Donovan—to the most sinister of all: Josef Stalin. “Relevant today as a tale of fanaticism and the lengths it can take one to” (Publishers Weekly), True Believer is “riveting reading” (USA TODAY), an astonishing real-life spy thriller, filled with danger, misplaced loyalties, betrayal, treachery, and pure evil, with a plot twist worthy of John le Carré.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/270034 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion Author: Anne Somerset Narrator: Hannah Curtis Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 28 hours 26 minutes Release date: September 6, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.67 of Total 3 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: She ascended the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1702, at age thirty-seven, Britain’s last Stuart monarch, and five years later united two of her realms, England and Scotland, as a sovereign state, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. She had a history of personal misfortune, overcoming ill health (she suffered from crippling arthritis; by the time she became Queen she was a virtual invalid) and living through seventeen miscarriages, stillbirths, and premature births in seventeen years. By the end of her comparatively short twelve-year reign, Britain had emerged as a great power; the succession of outstanding victories won by her general, John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, had humbled France and laid the foundations for Britain’s future naval and colonial supremacy. While the Queen’s military was performing dazzling exploits on the continent, her own attention—indeed her realm—rested on a more intimate conflict: the female friendship on which her happiness had for decades depended and which became for her a source of utter torment. At the core of Anne Somerset’s riveting new biography, published to great acclaim in England (“Definitive”—London Evening Standard; “Wonderfully pacy and absorbing”—Daily Mail), is a portrait of this deeply emotional, complex bond between two very different women: Queen Anne—reserved, stolid, shrewd; and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, wife of the Queen’s great general—beautiful, willful, outspoken, whose acerbic wit was equally matched by her fearsome temper.             Against a fraught background—the revolution that deposed Anne’s father, James II, and brought her to power . . . religious differences (she was born Protestant—her parents’ conversion to Catholicism had grave implications—and she grew up so suspicious of the Roman church that she considered its doctrines “wicked and dangerous”) . . . violently partisan politics (Whigs versus Tories) . . . a war with France that lasted for almost her entire reign . . . the constant threat of foreign invasion and civil war—the  much-admired historian, author of Elizabeth I (“Exhilarating”—The Spectator; “Ample, stylish, eloquent”—The Washington Post Book World), tells the extraordinary story of how Sarah goaded and provoked the Queen beyond endurance, and, after the withdrawal of Anne’s favor, how her replacement, Sarah’s cousin, the feline Abigail Masham, became the ubiquitous royal confidante and, so Sarah whispered to growing scandal, the object of the Queen's sexual infatuation. To write this remarkably rich and passionate biography, Somerset, winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, has made use of royal archives, parliamentary records, personal correspondence and previously unpublished material. Queen Anne is history on a large scale—a revelation of a centuries-overlooked monarch.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/270262 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult Author: Jerald Walker Narrator: C.S. Treadway Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 39 minutes Release date: September 6, 2016 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A lively memoir of growing up with blind African American parents in a segregated cult preaching the imminent end of the world—for fans of James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird. It’s 1970, and Jerry Walker is six years old. His consciousness revolves around being a member of a church whose beliefs he finds not only confusing but terrifying. Composed of a hodgepodge of requirements and restrictions—including a prohibition against doctors and hospitals—the underpinning tenet of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God was that its members were divinely chosen and all others would soon perish in rivers of flames. The substantial membership was ruled by fear, intimidation, and threats. Anyone who dared leave the church would endure hardship for the remainder of this life and eternal suffering in the next. The next life, according to Armstrong, would arrive in 1975, three years after the start of the Great Tribulation. Jerry would be eleven years old. Jerry’s parents were particularly vulnerable to the promise of relief from the world’s hardships. When they joined the church, in 1960, they were living in a two-room apartment in a dangerous Chicago housing project with the first four of their seven children, and, most significantly, they both were blind, having lost their sight to childhood accidents. They took comfort in the belief that they had been chosen for a special afterlife, even if it meant following a religion with a white supremacist ideology and dutifully sending tithes to Armstrong, whose church boasted more than 100,000 members and more than $80 million in annual revenues at its height. When the prophecy of the 1972 Great Tribulation does not materialize, Jerry is considerably less disappointed than relieved. When the 1975 end-time prophecy also fails, he finally begins to question his faith and imagine the possibility of choosing a destiny of his own.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/270023 to listen full audiobooks. Title: His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt Author: Joseph Lelyveld Narrator: Dan Woren Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 15 hours 11 minutes Release date: September 6, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A New York Times Notable Book • A prizewinning author and journalist untangles the narrative threads of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s final months, showing how he juggled the strategic, political, and personal choices he faced as the war, his presidency, and his life raced in tandem to their climax. 'A gripping, deeply human account... Moving, elegiac.' —The New York Times Book Review The story has been told piecemeal but never like this, with a close focus on Roosevelt himself and his hopes for a stable international order after the war, and how these led him into a prolonged courtship of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, involving secret, arduous journeys to Tehran and the Crimea. In between, as the war entered its final phase, came the thunderbolt of a dire medical diagnosis, raising urgent questions about the ability of the longest-serving president to stand for a fourth term at a time when he had little choice. Neither his family nor top figures in his administration were informed of his diagnosis, let alone the public or his closest ally, Winston Churchill. With D-Day looming, Roosevelt took a month off on a plantation in the south where he was examined daily by a navy cardiologist, then waited two more months before finally announcing, on the eve of his party’s convention, that he’d be a candidate. A political grand master still, he manipulated the selection of a new running mate, with an eye to a possible succession, displaying some of his old vigor and wit in a winning campaign. With precision and compassion, Joseph Lelyveld examines the choices Roosevelt faced, shining new light on his state of mind, preoccupations, and motives, both as leader of the wartime alliance and in his personal life. Confronting his own mortality, Roosevelt operated in the belief that he had a duty to see the war through to the end, telling himself he could always resign if he found he couldn’t carry on. Lelyveld delivers an incisive portrait of this deliberately inscrutable man, a consummate leader to the very last.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/273756 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939 Author: Volker Ullrich Narrator: Don Hagen Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 34 hours 45 minutes Release date: September 1, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.15 of Total 41 Ratings of Narrator: 4.86 of Total 7 Genres: Europe Publisher's Summary: A major new biography—an extraordinary, penetrating study of the man who has become the personification of evil. For all the literature about Adolf Hitler there have been just four seminal biographies; this is the fifth, a landmark work that sheds important new light on Hitler himself. Drawing on previously unseen papers and a wealth of recent scholarly research, Volker Ullrich reveals the man behind the public persona, from Hitler's childhood to his failures as a young man in Vienna to his experiences during the First World War to his rise as a far-right party leader. Ullrich deftly captures Hitler's intelligence, instinctive grasp of politics, and gift for oratory as well as his megalomania, deep insecurity, and repulsive worldview. Many previous biographies have focused on the larger social conditions that explain the rise of the Third Reich. Ullrich gives us a comprehensive portrait of a postwar Germany humiliated by defeat, wracked by political crisis, and starved by an economic depression, but his real gift is to show vividly how Hitler used his ruthlessness and political talent to shape the Nazi party and lead it to power. For decades the world has tried to grasp how Hitler was possible. By focusing on the man at the center of it all, on how he experienced his world, formed his political beliefs, and wielded power, this riveting biography brings us closer than ever to the answer. Translated from the German by Jefferson Chase.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/272637 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Bridge to Brilliance: How One Principal in a Tough Community Is Inspiring the World Author: Rebecca Paley, Nadia Lopez Narrator: Nadia Lopez, Adenrele Ojo Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 52 minutes Release date: August 30, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2 of Total 2 Ratings of Narrator: 1 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: “The story of Mott Hall Bridges Academy is the story of American education. Nadia Lopez . . . must be a principal, a mentor, and sometimes a mother. I hope that you’re as impressed by her dedication to these kids as I’ve been.'  —Brandon Stanton, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Humans of New York  The inspirational account of the creation of a pathbreaking inner-city middle school in Brooklyn, New York, by the magnetic young principal who rocketed to national fame via Humans of New York   When thirteen-year-old Vidal Chastanet told photographer Brandon Stanton that his principal ,“Ms. Lopez,” was the person who most influenced his life, it was the pebble that started a whirlwind for Nadia Lopez and her small, new public school in one of Brooklyn’s most wretched communities. The posting on Stanton’s wildly popular site Humans of New York (HONY) went mega-viral. Lopez—not long before on the verge of quitting—found herself in the national spotlight and headed for a meeting with Obama, as well as the beneficiary of a million-dollar IndieGoGo campaign for the school. Here is her first-person account of what it took to get to that moment. Mott Hall Bridges Academy isn’t just a hallway inside a typically underserved public school in one of New York City’s most underprivileged communities—it is a school that glows with energy and excitement. Lopez tells the kids every day that they’re extraordinary and that she loves them. When trouble stirs, she asks: “Would I have been proud to see what happened in that classroom? No? Then why did it happen?” She tells her teachers: “Don’t tell me our scholars can’t learn; because if you can’t teach them, then I’ll come teach your class for a couple of weeks.” Everything was an uphill battle—to get the school launched, to recruit faculty and students, to solve a million new problems every day, from violent crime to vanishing supplies, but Lopez illustrates how leadership often means just picking the right people to support you. In middle school, one year lost with an unengaged teacher is a year that can send a kid down a terrible path. And then, of course, there is the educational system itself, how “teaching to the test” is an enormous problem, particularly in schools with kids who are already disadvantaged and underprepared. The Bridge to Brilliance is an audiobook filled with common sense and caring that will carry her message to classrooms far from Brooklyn. As she says, modestly, “There are hundreds of Ms. Lopezes around this country doing good work for kids. This honors all of them.” With an Introduction read by the Author

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/271085 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant Author: Ulysses S. Grant Narrator: Jim Clevenger Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 35 hours 31 minutes Release date: August 10, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.28 of Total 46 Ratings of Narrator: 4.31 of Total 13 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: In preparing these volumes for the public, I have entered upon the task with the sincere desire to avoid doing injustice to any one, whether on the National or Confederate side, other than the unavoidable injustice of not making mention often where special mention is due. There must be many errors of omission in this work, because the subject is too large to be treated of in two volumes in such way as to do justice to all the officers and men engaged. There were thousands of instances, during the rebellion, of individual, company, regimental and brigade deeds of heroism which deserve special mention and are not here alluded to. The troops engaged in them will have to look to the detailed reports of their individual commanders for the full history of those deeds. (Summary by U. S. Grant)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/269314 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets Author: Luke Dittrich Narrator: George Newbern Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 14 hours 34 minutes Release date: August 9, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: “Oliver Sacks meets Stephen King”* in this propulsive, haunting journey into the life of the most studied human research subject of all time, the amnesic known as Patient H.M. For readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks comes a story that has much to teach us about our relentless pursuit of knowledge. Winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award • Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • New York Post • NPR • The Economist • New York • Wired • Kirkus Reviews • BookPage In 1953, a twenty-seven-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison—who suffered from severe epilepsy—received a radical new version of the then-common lobotomy, targeting the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry’s seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry was left profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. Over the next sixty years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today. Patient H.M. is, at times, a deeply personal journey. Dittrich’s grandfather was the brilliant, morally complex surgeon who operated on Molaison—and thousands of other patients. The author’s investigation into the dark roots of modern memory science ultimately forces him to confront unsettling secrets in his own family history, and to reveal the tragedy that fueled his grandfather’s relentless experimentation—experimentation that would revolutionize our understanding of ourselves. Dittrich uses the case of Patient H.M. as a starting point for a kaleidoscopic journey, one that moves from the first recorded brain surgeries in ancient Egypt to the cutting-edge laboratories of MIT. He takes readers inside the old asylums and operating theaters where psychosurgeons, as they called themselves, conducted their human experiments, and behind the scenes of a bitter custody battle over the ownership of the most important brain in the world. Patient H.M. combines the best of biography, memoir, and science journalism to create a haunting, endlessly fascinating story, one that reveals the wondrous and devastating things that can happen when hubris, ambition, and human imperfection collide. “An exciting, artful blend of family and medical history.”—The New York Times *Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/270366 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Executing the Rosenbergs: Death and Diplomacy in a Cold War World Author: PhD Lori Clune Narrator: Kathleen Mary Carthy Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 42 minutes Release date: July 28, 2016 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: "In 1950, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested for allegedly passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, an affair FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover labeled the ""crime of the century."" Their case became an international sensation, inspiring petitions, letters of support, newspaper editorials, and protests in countries around the world. Nevertheless, the Rosenbergs were executed after years of appeals, making them the only civilians ever put to death for conspiracy-related activities. Yet even after their executions, protests continued. The Rosenberg case quickly transformed into legend, while the media spotlight shifted to their two orphaned sons. In Executing the Rosenbergs, Lori Clune demonstrates that the Rosenberg case played a pivotal role in the world's perception of the United States. Based on newly discovered documents from the State Department, Clune narrates the widespread dissent against the Rosenberg decision in 80 cities and 48 countries. Even as the Truman and Eisenhower administrations attempted to turn the case into pro-democracy propaganda, U.S. allies and potential allies questioned whether the United States had the moral authority to win the Cold War. Meanwhile, the death of Stalin in 1953 also raised the stakes of the executions; without a clear hero and villain, the struggle between democracy and communism shifted into morally ambiguous terrain. Transcending questions of guilt or innocence, Clune weaves the case -and its aftermath -into the fabric of the Cold War, revealing its far-reaching global effects. An original approach to one of the most fascinating episodes in Cold War history, Executing the Rosenbergs broadens a quintessentially American story into a global one."

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/269271 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Out Of Auschwitz Author: Stanley Goleniewski Narrator: Stanley Goleniewski Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 24 minutes Release date: July 9, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.17 of Total 6 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: The purpose of my book is to share with you and the word the tragic events which I witnessed and lived through. My experience constitutes and an unusual testimony which should not be forgotten but studied by future generations, to learn the ultimate truth about Auschwitz. I write this book to tell about my experience and what I witnessed. However, I still remember vividly, the smoke coming from the chimneys of the crematoria, the stench of burning human bodies, the hard work in rain and snow, hunger and horrendous fatigue, diseases, lice, fleas, bugs and bloody dysentery. I am the Holocaust survivor who remembers vividly the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/265981 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Catullus' Bedspread: The Life of Rome's Most Erotic Poet Author: Daisy Dunn Narrator: Mike Grady Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 49 minutes Release date: July 5, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A vivid narrative that recreates the life of Gaius Valerius Catullus, Rome’s first modern” poet, and follows a young man’s journey through a world filled with all the indulgences and sexual excesses of the time, from doomed love affairs to shrewd political maneuvering and backstabbing—an accessible, appealing look at one of history’s greatest poets. Born to one of Verona’s leading families, Catullus spent most of his young adulthood in Rome, mingling with the likes of Caesar and Cicero and chronicling his life through his poetry. Famed for his lyrical and subversive voice, his poems about his friends were jocular, often obscenely funny, while those who crossed him found themselves skewered in raunchy verse, sudden objects of hilarity and ridicule. These bawdy poems were disseminated widely throughout Rome. Many of his poems recall his secret longstanding affair with the seductive older Clodia. While Catullus and Clodia made love in the shadows, the whole of Italy was quaking as Caesar, Pompey and Crassus forged a doomed alliance for power. During these tumultuous years, Catullus increasingly turned to darker subject matter, and he finally composed his greatest work of all—a poem about the decoration on a bedspread—which forms the heart of this biography, a work of beauty that will achieve immortality and make Catullus a legend.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/268549 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North Author: Blair Braverman Narrator: Blair Braverman Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 9 minutes Release date: July 5, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A rich and revelatory memoir of a young woman confronting her fears and finding home in the North. Blair Braverman fell in love with the North at an early age: By the time she was nineteen, she had left her home in California, moved to Norway to learn how to drive sled dogs, and worked as a tour guide on a glacier in Alaska. By turns funny and sobering, bold and tender, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube charts Blair’s endeavor to become a “tough girl”—someone who courts danger in an attempt to become fearless. As she ventures into a ruthless arctic landscape, Blair faces down physical exhaustion—being buried alive in an ice cave, and driving a dogsled across the tundra through a whiteout blizzard in order to avoid corrupt police—and grapples with both love and violence as she negotiates the complex demands of being a young woman in a man’s land. Brilliantly original and bracingly honest, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube captures the triumphs and the perils of the journey to self-discovery and independence in a landscape that is as beautiful as it is unforgiving.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/265982 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Kick: The True Story of JFK's Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth Author: Paula Byrne Narrator: Antonia Beamish Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 40 minutes Release date: July 5, 2016 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: “Paula Byrne brings J.F.K.’s adored little sister, Kick, back to life.” —Vanity Fair From celebrated biographer Paula Byrne, the remarkable life of the vivacious, unconventional—and nearly forgotten—young Kennedy sister who charmed American society and the English aristocracy, and would break with her family for love. Encouraged to be “winners” from a young age, Rose and Joe Kennedy’s children were the embodiment of ambitious, wholesome Americanism. Yet even within this ebullient group of overachievers, the fourth Kennedy child, the irrepressible Kathleen, stood out. Lively, charismatic, extremely clever, and blessed with graceful athleticism and a sunny disposition, the alluring socialite fondly known as Kick was a firecracker who effortlessly made friends and stole hearts. Moving across the Atlantic when her father was appointed as the ambassador to Great Britain in 1938, Kick—the “nicest Kennedy”—quickly became the family’s star. Despite making little effort to fit into British high society, she charmed everyone from the beau monde to Fleet Street with her unconventional attitude and easygoing humor. Growing increasingly independent, Kick would also shock and alienate her devout family by falling in love and marrying the scion of a virulently anti-Catholic family— William Cavendish, the heir apparent of the Duke of Devonshire and Chatsworth. But the marriage would last only a few months; Billy was killed in combat in 1944, just four years before Kick’s own unexpected death in an airplane crash at twenty-eight. Byrne recounts this remarkable young woman’s life in detail as never before, from her work at the Washington Times-Herald and volunteerism for the Red Cross in wartime England; to her love of politics and astute, opinionated observations; to her decision to renounce her faith for the man she loved. Sympathetic and compelling, Kick shines a spotlight on this feisty and unique Kennedy long relegated to the shadows of her legendary family’s history.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/267118 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Pulitzer Prize Winner) Author: Joseph J. Ellis Narrator: Bob Walter Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 32 minutes Release date: July 5, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.74 of Total 35 Ratings of Narrator: 4.67 of Total 3 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: An illuminating study of the intertwined lives of the founders of the American republic--John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. During the 1790s, which Ellis calls the most decisive decade in our nation's history, the greatest statesmen of their generation--and perhaps any--came together to define the new republic and direct its course for the coming centuries. Ellis focuses on six discrete moments that exemplify the most crucial issues facing the fragile new nation: Burr and Hamilton's deadly duel, and what may have really happened; Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison's secret dinner, during which the seat of the permanent capital was determined in exchange for passage of Hamilton's financial plan; Franklin's petition to end the "peculiar institution" of slavery--his last public act--and Madison's efforts to quash it; Washington's precedent-setting Farewell Address, announcing his retirement from public office and offering his country some final advice; Adams's difficult term as Washington's successor and his alleged scheme to pass the presidency on to his son; and finally, Adams and Jefferson's renewed correspondence at the end of their lives, in which they compared their different views of the Revolution and its legacy. In a lively and engaging narrative, Ellis recounts the sometimes collaborative, sometimes archly antagonistic interactions between these men, and shows us the private characters behind the public personas: Adams, the ever-combative iconoclast, whose closest political collaborator was his wife, Abigail; Burr, crafty, smooth, and one of the most despised public figures of his time; Hamilton, whose audacious manner and deep economic savvy masked his humble origins; Jefferson, renowned for his eloquence, but so reclusive and taciturn that he rarely spoke more than a few sentences in public; Madison, small, sickly, and paralyzingly shy, yet one of the most effective debaters of his generation; and the stiffly formal Washington, the ultimate realist, larger-than-life, and America's only truly indispensable figure. Ellis argues that the checks and balances that permitted the infant American republic to endure were not primarily legal, constitutional, or institutional, but intensely personal, rooted in the dynamic interaction of leaders with quite different visions and values. Revisiting the old-fashioned idea that character matters, Founding Brothers informs our understanding of American politics--then and now--and gives us a new perspective on the unpredictable forces that shape history.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/266848 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Photographs of My Father Author: Paul Spike Narrator: Paul Spike, MacLeod Andrews Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 48 minutes Release date: June 21, 2016 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: At the National Council of Churches, Robert Spike had organized American churches to support the passage of both the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, to march in Selma and to organize in Mississippi. An important white leader in the black civil rights struggle, he helped the LBJ White House pass legislation and write crucial civil rights speeches. In the midst of what he described as “the dirtiest fight of my life” struggling to save a federal Mississippi education program, he was viciously murdered in Columbus, Ohio. The murder was never solved. Very little effort went into finding the murderer. The Columbus police and the FBI hinted the unsolved murder was connected to Spike’s undisclosed gay life. During his father's rise in the civil rights movement, Paul Spike lived a life typical of a young man in the 1960s, finding his way through a labyrinth of booze, drugs, and girls. At Columbia University, he was active in the 1968 student rebellion and friends with many SDS radicals. That rootless life ended with his father's murder.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/265823 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power, and Intrigue in an English Stately Home Author: Natalie Livingstone Narrator: Elizabeth Knowelden Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 17 hours 8 minutes Release date: June 14, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 3 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: For fans of Downton Abbey comes an immersive historical epic about a lavish English manor and a dynasty of rich and powerful women who ruled the estate over three centuries of misbehavior, scandal, intrigue, and passion. Five miles from Windsor Castle, home of the royal family, sits the Cliveden estate. Overlooking the Thames, the mansion is flanked by two wings and surrounded by lavish gardens. Throughout its storied history, Cliveden has been a setting for misbehavior, intrigue, and passion—from its salacious, deadly beginnings in the seventeenth century to the 1960s Profumo Affair, the sex scandal that toppled the British government. Now, in this immersive chronicle, the manor’s current mistress, Natalie Livingstone, opens the doors to this prominent house and lets the walls do the talking. Built during the reign of Charles II by the Duke of Buckingham, Cliveden attracted notoriety as a luxurious retreat in which the duke could conduct his scandalous affair with the ambitious courtesan Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury. In 1668, Anna Maria’s cuckolded husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury, challenged Buckingham to a duel. Buckingham killed Shrewsbury and claimed Anna Maria as his prize, making her the first mistress of Cliveden. Through the centuries, other enigmatic and indomitable women would assume stewardship over the estate, including Elizabeth, Countess of Orkney and illicit lover of William III, who became one of England’s wealthiest women; Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, the queen that Britain was promised and then denied; Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, confidante of Queen Victoria and a glittering society hostess turned political activist; and the American-born Nancy Astor, the first female member of Parliament, who described herself as an “ardent feminist” and welcomed controversy. Though their privileges were extraordinary, in Livingstone’s hands, their struggles and sacrifices are universal. Cliveden weathered renovation and restoration, world conflicts and cold wars, societal shifts and technological advances. Rich in historical and architectural detail, The Mistresses of Cliveden is a tale of sex and power, and of the exceptional women who evaded, exploited, and confronted the expectations of their times. Praise for The Mistresses of Cliveden “Theatrical festivities, political jockeying and court intrigues are deftly described with a verve and attention to domestic comforts that show the author at her best. . . . [Livingstone’s] portraits of strenuous and assertive women who resisted subjection, sometimes deploying their sexual allure to succeed, on other occasions drawing on their husband’s wealth, are astute, spirited, and empathetic.”—The Wall Street Journal “Missing Downton Abbey already? This tome promises ‘three centuries of scandal, power, and intrigue’ and Natalie Livingstone definitely delivers.”—Good Housekeeping “Lively . . . The current chatelaine—the author herself—deserves no small credit for keeping the house’s legend alive. . . . Any of her action-filled chapters would merit a mini-series.”—The New York Times Book Review “Though the personal tales and tidbits are fascinating, and the sensational details of these women’s lives will intrigue Downton Abbey devotees, the real star of the story is Cliveden.”—Booklist “Lovers of modern English history and the scandals that infiltrated upper-crust society will find much to enjoy in this work.”—Library Journal

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/263466 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Double Cup Love: On the Trail of Family, Food, and Broken Hearts in China Author: Eddie Huang Narrator: Eddie Huang Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 49 minutes Release date: May 31, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.8 of Total 5 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 3 Genres: Arts & Entertainment Publisher's Summary: From the author of Fresh Off the Boat, now a hit ABC sitcom, comes a hilarious and fiercely original story of culture, family, love, and red-cooked pork Eddie Huang was finally happy. Sort of. He’d written a bestselling book and was the star of a TV show that took him to far-flung places around the globe. His New York City restaurant was humming, his OKCupid hand was strong, and he’d even hung fresh Ralph Lauren curtains to create the illusion of a bedroom in the tiny apartment he shared with his younger brother Evan, who ran their restaurant business. Then he fell in love—and everything fell apart. The business was creating tension within the family; his life as a media star took him away from his first passion—food; and the woman he loved—an All-American white girl—made him wonder: How Chinese am I? The only way to find out, he decided, was to reverse his parents’ migration and head back to the motherland. On a quest to heal his family, reconnect with his culture, and figure out whether he should marry his American girl, Eddie flew to China with his two brothers and a mission: to set up shop to see if his food stood up to Chinese palates—and to immerse himself in the culture to see if his life made sense in China. Naturally, nothing went according to plan. Double Cup Love takes readers from Williamsburg dive bars to the skies over Mongolia, from Michelin-starred restaurants in Shanghai to street-side soup peddlers in Chengdu. The book rockets off as a sharply observed, globe-trotting comic adventure that turns into an existential suspense story with high stakes. Eddie takes readers to the crossroads where he has to choose between his past and his future, between who he once was and who he might become. Double Cup Love is about how we search for love and meaning—in family and culture, in romance and marriage—but also how that search, with all its aching and overpowering complexity, can deliver us to our truest selves. Praise for Eddie Huang’s Double Cup Love “Double Cup Love invites the readers to journey through [Eddie Huang’s] love story, new friendships, brotherhood, a whole lot of eating and more. Huang’s honest recounting shouts and whispers on every page in all-caps dialogues and hilarious side-commentary. Huang pulls simple truths and humor out of his complex adventure to China. His forthright sharing of anecdotes is sincere and generates uncontrollable laughter. . . . His latest memoir affirms not only that the self-described “human panda” is an engaging storyteller but a great listener, especially in the language of food.”—Chicago Tribune “An elaborate story of love and self-discovery . . . Huang’s writing is wry and zippy; he regards the world with an understanding of its absurdities and injustices and with a willingness to be surprised.”—Jon Caramanica, The New York Times “Huang is determined to tease out the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which Asian-Americans give up parts of themselves in order to move forward. . . . Fortunately for us, he’s not afraid to speak up about it.”—The New Yorker “Huang connects in Chengdu the same way he assimilated in America—through food, hip-hop and a never-ending authenticity, which readers experience through his hilarious writing voice and style.”—New York Daily News

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/265148 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years Author: John Guy Narrator: Alex Jennings Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 17 hours 16 minutes Release date: May 24, 2016 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: COSTA AWARD FINALIST  ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR  FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR  Film rights acquired by Gold Circle Films, the team behind My Big Fat Greek Wedding “A fresh, thrilling portrait… Guy’s Elizabeth is deliciously human.” –Stacy Schiff, The New York Times Book Review A groundbreaking reconsideration of our favorite Tudor queen, Elizabeth is an intimate and surprising biography that shows her at the height of her power. Elizabeth was crowned queen at twenty-five, but it was only when she reached fifty and all hopes of a royal marriage were behind her that she began to wield power in her own right. For twenty-five years she had struggled to assert her authority over advisers, who pressed her to marry and settle the succession; now, she was determined not only to reign but to rule. In this magisterial biography, John Guy introduces us to a woman who is refreshingly unfamiliar: at once powerful and vulnerable, willful and afraid. We see her confronting challenges at home and abroad: war against France and Spain, revolt in Ireland, an economic crisis that triggers riots in the streets of London, and a conspiracy to place her cousin Mary Queen of Scots on her throne. For a while she is smitten by a much younger man, but can she allow herself to act on that passion and still keep her throne?   For the better part of a decade John Guy mined long-overlooked archives, scouring handwritten letters and court documents to sweep away myths and rumors. This prodigious historical detective work has enabled him to reveal, for the first time, the woman behind the polished veneer: determined, prone to fits of jealous rage, wracked by insecurity, often too anxious to sleep alone. At last we hear her in her own voice expressing her own distinctive and surprisingly resonant concerns. Guy writes like a dream, and this combination of groundbreaking research and propulsive narrative puts him in a class of his own. 'Significant, forensic and myth-busting, John Guy inspires total confidence in a narrative which is at once pacey and rich in detail.'  -- Anna Whitelock, TLS   “Most historians focus on the early decades, with Elizabeth’s last years acting as a postscript to the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots and the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Guy argues that this period is crucial to understanding a more human side of the smart redhead.” – The Economist, Book of the Year

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/266026 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years Author: John Guy Narrator: Alex Jennings Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 17 hours 18 minutes Release date: May 19, 2016 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. An ageing queen, an heirless state, conspiracy all round: here is the court of Elizabeth I as never known before. History has pictured Elizabeth I as Gloriana, an icon of strength and power -- and has focused on the early years of her reign. But in 1583, when Elizabeth is fifty, there is relentless plotting among her courtiers -- and still to come is the Spanish Armada and the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. We have not, until now, had the full picture. This gripping and vivid portrait of her life and times -- often told in her own words (and including details such as her love of chess and marzipan) -- reveals a woman who was insecure, human ('You know I am no morning woman'), and unpopular even with the men who fought for her. This is the real Elizabeth, for the first time. © John Guy 2016 (P) Penguin Audio 2016

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/262949 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain's Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour Author: Richard Zacks Narrator: George Guidall Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 16 hours 38 minutes Release date: April 19, 2016 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: From Richard Zacks, bestselling author of Island of Vice and The Pirate Hunter, a rich and lively account of how Mark Twain’s late-life adventures abroad helped him recover from financial disaster and family tragedy—and revived his world-class sense of humor Mark Twain, the highest-paid writer in America in 1894, was also one of the nation’s worst investors. “There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate,” he wrote. “When he can’t afford it and when he can.” The publishing company Twain owned was failing; his investment in a typesetting device was bleeding red ink. After losing hundreds of thousands of dollars back when a beer cost a nickel, he found himself neck-deep in debt. His heiress wife, Livy, took the setback hard. “I have a perfect horror and heart-sickness over it,” she wrote. “I cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace.”      But Twain vowed to Livy he would pay back every penny. And so, just when the fifty-nine-year-old, bushy-browed icon imagined that he would be settling into literary lionhood, telling jokes at gilded dinners, he forced himself to mount the “platform” again, embarking on a round-the-world stand-up comedy tour. No author had ever done that. He cherry-picked his best stories—such as stealing his first watermelon and buying a bucking bronco—and spun them into a ninety-minute performance.      Twain trekked across the American West and onward by ship to the faraway lands of Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, India, Ceylon, and South Africa. He rode an elephant twice and visited the Taj Mahal. He saw Zulus dancing and helped sort diamonds at the Kimberley mines. (He failed to slip away with a sparkly souvenir.) He played shuffleboard on cruise ships and battled captains for the right to smoke in peace. He complained that his wife and daughter made him shave and change his shirt every day.      The great American writer fought off numerous illnesses and travel nuisances to circle the globe and earn a huge payday and a tidal wave of applause. Word of his success, however, traveled slowly enough that one American newspaper reported that he had died penniless in London. That’s when he famously quipped: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”      Throughout his quest, Twain was aided by cutthroat Standard Oil tycoon H.H. Rogers, with whom he had struck a deep friendship, and he was hindered by his own lawyer (and future secretary of state) Bainbridge Colby, whom he deemed “head idiot of this century.”      In Chasing the Last Laugh, author Richard Zacks, drawing extensively on unpublished material in notebooks and letters from Berkeley’s ongoing Mark Twain Project, chronicles a poignant chapter in the author’s life—one that began in foolishness and bad choices but culminated in humor, hard-won wisdom, and ultimate triumph.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/262081 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman Author: Brooke Hauser Narrator: Tavia Gilbert Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 30 minutes Release date: April 19, 2016 Genres: Arts & Entertainment Publisher's Summary: “Engaging…. Nimble-footed…. Amusing….Throughout, Hauser weaves in passages connecting Brown to her contemporaries and the cultural landscape of the 1960s…[to] situate her life in the context of its times.”— New York Times Book Review This female Mad Men-like story chronicles the legendary Cosmopolitan magazine editor’s rise to power as both a cultural icon and trailblazer who redefined what it means to be an American woman. In the mid-Sixties, Helen Gurley Brown, author of the groundbreaking Sex and the Single Girl, took over the ailing Cosmopolitan magazine and revamped it into one of the most successful brands in the world. At a time when magazines taught housewives how to make the perfect casserole, Helen reimagined Cosmo and womanhood itself, championing the independent, ambitious, man-loving single woman. Though she was married, to Hollywood producer David Brown, no one embodied the idea of the Cosmo Girl more than the Ozarks-born Helen, who willed, worked, and—yes—occasionally slept her way to the top, eventually becoming one of the most influential media players in the world. Drawing on new interviews with Helen’s friends and former colleagues as well as her personal letters, Enter Helen brings New York City vibrantly to life during the Sexual Revolution and the Women’s Movement and features a cast of characters including Hugh Hefner, Nora Ephron, and Gloria Steinem. It is the cinematic story of an icon who bucked convention, defined her own destiny, and became a controversial model for modern feminism, laying the groundwork for television shows like Sex and the City and Girls. “Bad Feminist” or not, Helen Gurley Brown got people talking—about sex, work, reproductive choices, and having it all—forever changing the conversation.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/262710 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Duchess Author: Amanda Foreman Narrator: Wanda McCaddon Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 15 hours 36 minutes Release date: April 12, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.71 of Total 7 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was nearly as famous in her day. In 1774 Georgiana achieved immediate celebrity by marrying William Cavendish, fifth duke of Devonshire, one of England’s richest and most influential aristocrats. She became the queen of fashionable society and founder of the most important political salon of her time. But Georgiana’s public success concealed an unhappy marriage, a gambling addiction, drinking, drug-taking, and rampant love affairs with the leading politicians of the day. With penetrating insight, Amanda Foreman reveals a fascinating woman whose struggle against her own weaknesses, whose great beauty and flamboyance, and whose determination to play a part in the affairs of the world make her a vibrant, astonishingly contemporary figure. Praise for The Duchess “Georgiana bursts from the pages of Amanda Foreman’s dazzling biography like the force of nature she undoubtedly was–passionate, political, addicted to gambling, and drunk on life. This is a stunning book about an astonishing woman.”–Simon Schama “Biography at its best . . . seamlessly merges a life and its times, capturing not just an individual but an age.”–The New York Times Book Review  “Riveting . . . marvelously diverting.”–The New Yorker

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/255724 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Boiling River Series: Part of Ted Books Author: Andrés Ruzo Narrator: Andrés Ruzo Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 2 hours 38 minutes Release date: February 16, 2016 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: In this exciting adventure mixed with amazing scientific study, a young, exuberant explorer and geoscientist journeys deep into the Amazon—where rivers boil and legends come to life. When Andrés Ruzo was just a small boy in Peru, his grandfather told him the story of a mysterious legend: There is a river, deep in the Amazon, which boils as if a fire burns below it. Twelve years later, Ruzo—now a geoscientist—hears his aunt mention that she herself had visited this strange river. Determined to discover if the boiling river is real, Ruzo sets out on a journey deep into the Amazon. What he finds astounds him: In this long, wide, and winding river, the waters run so hot that locals brew tea in them; small animals that fall in are instantly cooked. As he studies the river, Ruzo faces challenges more complex than he had ever imaged. The Boiling River follows this young explorer as he navigates a tangle of competing interests—local shamans, illegal cattle farmers and loggers, and oil companies. This true account reads like a modern-day adventure, complete with extraordinary characters, captivating plot twists, and jaw-dropping details—including stunning photographs and a never-before-published account about this incredible natural wonder. Ultimately, though, The Boiling River is about a man trying to understand the moral obligation that comes with scientific discovery —to protect a sacred site from misuse, neglect, and even from his own discovery.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/255400 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Heroines of Mercy Street Author: Pamela D. Toler Narrator: Suzanne Toren Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 30 minutes Release date: February 16, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 2 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A look at the lives of the real nurses depicted in the PBS show Mercy Street. Heroines of Mercy Street tells the true stories of the nurses at Mansion House, the Alexandria, Virginia, mansion turned war-time hospital and setting for the PBS drama Mercy Street. Among the Union soldiers, doctors, wounded men from both sides, freed slaves, politicians, speculators, and spies who passed through the hospital in the crossroads of the Civil War, were nurses who gave their time freely and willingly to save lives and aid the wounded. These women saw casualties on a scale Americans had never seen before, and medicine was at a turning point. Heroines of Mercy Street follows the lives of women like Dorothea Dix, Mary Phinney, Anne Reading, and more before, during, and after their epic struggle in Alexandria and reveals their personal contributions to this astounding period in the advancement of medicine.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/255592 to listen full audiobooks. Title: What Happened, Miss Simone?: A Biography Author: Alan Light Narrator: Adenrele Ojo Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 10 minutes Release date: February 9, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 2 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Inspired by the Academy Award-nominated Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?, an intimate and vivid look at the legendary life of Nina Simone, the classically trained pianist who evolved into a chart-topping chanteuse and committed civil rights activist.    From music journalist and former Spin and Vibe editor-in-chief Alan Light comes a biography of incandescent soul singer and Black Power icon Nina Simone, one of the most influential, provocative, and least understood artists of our time. Drawn from a trove of rare archival footage, audio recordings and interviews (including Simone's remarkable private diaries), this nuanced examination of Nina Simone’s life highlights her musical inventiveness and unwavering quest for equality, while laying bare the personal demons that plagued her from the time of her Jim Crow childhood in North Carolina to her self-imposed exile in Liberia and Paris later in life.   Harnessing the singular voice of Miss Simone herself and incorporating candid reflections from those who knew her best, including her only daughter, Light brings us face to face with a legend, examining the very public persona and very private struggles of one of our greatest artists.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/251898 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School Author: Ed Boland Narrator: Ed Boland Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 36 minutes Release date: February 9, 2016 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: In this insightfully honest and moving memoir about the realities of teaching in an inner-city school, Ed Boland 'smashes the dangerous myth of the hero-teacher [and] shows us how high the stakes are for our most vulnerable students' (Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black). In a fit of idealism, Ed Boland left a twenty-year career as a non-profit executive to teach in a tough New York City public high school. But his hopes quickly collided headlong with the appalling reality of his students' lives and a hobbled education system unable to help them. Freddy runs a drug ring for his incarcerated brother; Nee-cole is homeschooled on the subway by her brilliant homeless mother; Byron's Ivy League dream is dashed because he is undocumented. In the end, Boland isn't hoisted on his students' shoulders and no one passes AP anything. This is no urban fairy tale of at-risk kids saved by a Hollywood hero, but a searing indictment of schools that claim to be progressive but still fail their students. Told with compassion, humor, and a keen eye, Boland's story is sure to ignite debate about the future of American education and attempts to reform it.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/251790 to listen full audiobooks. Title: One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York Author: Arthur Browne Narrator: Dominic Hoffman Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 2 minutes Release date: February 2, 2016 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A history of African Americans in New York City from the 1910s to 1960, told through the life of Samuel Battle, the New York Police Department’s first black officer.   When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City’s first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth century, he had to fear his racist colleagues as much as criminals. He had to be three times better than his white peers, and many times more resilient. His life was threatened. He was displayed like a circus animal. Yet, fearlessly claiming his rights, he prevailed in a four-decade odyssey that is both the story of one man’s courageous dedication to racial progress and a harbinger of the divisions between police and the people they serve that plague twenty-first-century America. By dint of brains, brawn, and an outsized personality, Battle rode the forward wave of African American history in New York. He circulated among renowned turn-of-the-century entertainers and writers. He weathered threatening hostility as a founding citizen of black Harlem. He served as “godfather” to the regiment of black soldiers that won glory in World War I as the “Hellfighters of Harlem.” He befriended sports stars like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Sugar Ray Robinson, and he bonded with legendary tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Along the way, he mentored an equally smart, equally tough young man in a still more brutal fight to integrate the New York Fire Department. At the close of his career, Battle looked back proudly on the against-all-odd journey taken by a man who came of age as the son of former slaves in the South. He had navigated the corruption of Tammany Hall, the treachery of gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz, the anything-goes era of Prohibition, the devastation of the Depression, and the race riots that erupted in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. By then he was a trusted aide to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and a friend to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Realizing that his story was the story of race in New York across the first half of the century, Battle commissioned a biography to be written by none other than Langston Hughes, the preeminent voice of the Harlem Renaissance. But their eighty-thousand-word collaboration failed to find a publisher, and has remained unpublished since. Using Hughes’s manuscript, which is quoted liberally throughout this book, as well as his own archival research and interviews with survivors, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Arthur Browne has created an important and compelling social history of New York, revealed a fascinating episode in the life of Langston Hughes, and delivered the riveting life and times of a remarkable and unjustly forgotten man, setting Samuel Battle where he belongs in the pantheon of American civil rights pioneers.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/262203 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Coleshanger: A humorous recollection of English village life at the turn of the last century. Author: Thomas Corfield Narrator: Thomas Corfield Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 32 minutes Release date: January 25, 2016 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: “Coleshanger people are pretty bad,” said Uncle Edward. “They won’t cross water after sunset. And they have to be in bed by midnight, otherwise they think that they'll be turned into baboons and apes. They also worship the flea.” Written in 1952, Coleshanger is a humorous, whimsical and charming recount of English village life in the early part of the last century, a tale waiting seventy years to be heard, but still very much the story of us today.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/262592 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Our Auntie Rosa: The Family of Rosa Parks Remembers Her Life and Lessons Author: Sheila McCauley Keys, Eddie B. Allen Narrator: Robin Ray Eller Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 11 minutes Release date: January 10, 2016 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: In this most intimate portrait yet of a great American hero, 'the lady who wouldn't give up her seat on the bus,' the family of Rosa Parks describes the woman who was not only the mother of the civil rights movement, but a nurturing mother figure to them as well. Her brave act on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, was just one moment in a life lived with great humility and decency. In Our Auntie Rosa, Mrs. Parks's loved ones share their remembrances and reflections to create a previously unpainted picture of the real woman behind the legend. Rose Parks largely disappeared from the public when she and her husband, Raymond, relocated to Detroit in 1957, escaping violently racist south. It was in Detroit where Mrs. Parks reconnected with her only sibling, Sylvester McCauley, whom she affectionately called 'Brother,' and her thirteen nieces and nephews. Years later, after Raymond's and Sylvester's deaths, these children would become her only family, and the closest that she would ever experience to having biological sons and daughters. Mrs. Parks would go on to receive the 1996 Presidential Medal of Freedom and a spot on Time's list of the hundred most influential people of the twentieth century, as well as forty-three honorary doctorate degrees, and have dozens of city streets, community centers, and monuments named for her – to mention just a few tributes. Yet the woman her family knew as 'Auntie Rosa' was a soft-spoken person whom very few people actually knew. In this book, her family shares with readers what she shared with them about her experiences growing up in a racist South, her deep dedication to truth and justice, and the personal values she held closest to her heart.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/257141 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Gallipoli Diary Author: John Graham Gillam Narrator: Sue Anderson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 27 minutes Release date: January 1, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.15 of Total 20 Ratings of Narrator: 4.67 of Total 6 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Major John Graham Gillam, British Supply Officer, wrote in his World War I Gallipoli Diary that when he sailed from England for the Dardanelles in March, 1915, he had visions of "trekking up the Gallipoli Peninsula with the Navy bombarding a way for us up the Straits and along the coast-line of the Sea of Marmora, until after a brief campaign we entered triumphantly Constantinople, there to meet the Russian Army, which would link up with ourselves to form part of a great chain encircling and throttling the Central Empires. . . We little appreciated the difficulties of the task," he continues, in potent understatement. Gillam's charge was shepherding supplies--food and munitions--from beach depots to the trenches for a brigade of 4000 men. Since it was his first experience with "real war," he decided to keep a diary, which he did from the day he landed at Gallipoli (April 25, 1915) until he was evacuated at the end of the campaign in January 1916. He aptly states in the preface to the published Version of his diary: "those who desire to survey the whole amazing Gallipoli campaign in perspective must look elsewhere than in these pages. Their sole object was to record the personal impressions, feeling, and doings from day to day of one supply officer to a Division whose gallantry in that campaign well earned for it the epithet "Immortal." As the campaign intensifies, Gillam's entries mature. Early on (May 30), a sample entry: "This afternoon I ride . . . to Morto Bay, and on the way have a delightful cross-country canter. I have difficulty, though, in making my mare jump trenches. She jumped hurdles at Warwick race-course like a bird." A month later, on June 30, "The smell of dead bodies is at times almost unbearable in the trenches, and chloride of lime is thrown over them. I know of no more sickly smell than chloride of lime with the smell of a dead body blended in." Another month, and respect for the Turks, and also for the rugged terrain of the peninsula is evident (August 29): "Behind me, purple Turkish hills, every point of which is held by the enemy. Then in between our line and the hills the scrubby low-lying country. . . I look at it hopelessly--for I know now, as we all do, that the conquest of the Peninsula is more than we can hope for. All that is left to us is to hang on day by day. . . Death in various forms walks with us always . . ." Today, the Turkish Government maintains a war memorial and cemeteries at the Gallipoli Peninsula Historical National Park. Memories are very much alive there. Preserved trenches and the sad graves of many, many soldiers from both sides of the conflict are made especially poignant by the beauty of the setting-- the sea and high hills beyond. (Summary by Sue Anderson)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/259146 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Story of My Childhood Author: Clara Barton Narrator: Veronica Jenkins Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 1 hour 38 minutes Release date: January 1, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.21 of Total 33 Ratings of Narrator: 4.1 of Total 10 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, recalls growing up in early 19th Century Massachusetts. (Introduction by Veronica Jenkins)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/257137 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Edison, His Life and Inventions Author: Frank Lewis Dyer Narrator: LibriVox Volunteers Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 29 hours 46 minutes Release date: January 1, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.49 of Total 41 Ratings of Narrator: 2.25 of Total 12 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A detailed biography of Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of such things as the telephone, the microphone, the electric motor, the storage battery, and the electric light. In the words of the authors, "It is designed in these pages to bring the reader face to face with Edison; to glance at an interesting childhood and a youthful period marked by a capacity for doing things, and by an insatiable thirst for knowledge; then to accompany him into the great creative stretch of forty years, during which he has done so much. This book shows him plunged deeply into work for which he has always had an incredible capacity, reveals the exercise of his unsurpassed inventive ability, his keen reasoning powers, his tenacious memory, his fertility of resource; follows him through a series of innumerable experiments, conducted methodically, reaching out like rays of search-light into all the regions of science and nature, and finally exhibits him emerging triumphantly from countless difficulties bearing with him in new arts the fruits of victorious struggle." (written by Justin Barrett, with authors' quote taken from the work itself)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/257894 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Current Superstitions Author: Fanny Dickerson Bergen Narrator: LibriVox Volunteers Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 36 minutes Release date: January 1, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.53 of Total 19 Ratings of Narrator: 3 of Total 5 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: No matter how enlightened, chances are you've been raised around superstitious lore of one kind or another. Fanny Dickerson Bergen was one of the original researchers of North American oral traditions relating to such key life events and experiences as babyhood and childhood, marriage, wishes and dreams, luck, warts and cures, death omens and mortuary customs, and "such truck," as Huck Finn would say.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/259040 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Makers of Canada: Champlain Author: Narcisse-Eutropee Dionne Narrator: Cate Barratt Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 39 minutes Release date: January 1, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.29 of Total 7 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A biography of Samuel de Champlain, French explorer, founder of Quebec, and father of New France. ( Summary by Cathy Barratt )

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/259034 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Life of Charlemagne Author: Notker The Stammerer Narrator: LibriVox Volunteers Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 2 hours 36 minutes Release date: January 1, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.7 of Total 23 Ratings of Narrator: 4.33 of Total 3 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Notker's work consists of anecdotes relating chiefly to the Emperor Charlemagne and his family. It was written for Charles the Fat, great-grandson of Charlemagne, who visited Saint Gall in 883. Traditionally, it has been scorned by traditional historians, who refer to the Monk as one who "took pleasure in amusing anecdotes and witty tales, but who was ill-informed about the true march of historical events". However, several of the Monk's tales, such as that of the nine rings of the Avar stronghold, have been used in modern biographies of Charlemagne. (Summary abstracted from Wikipedia by Karen Merline.)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/257638 to listen full audiobooks. Title: American Men of Action Author: Burton Egbert Stevenson Narrator: William Tomcho Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 43 minutes Release date: January 1, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Dating back to the 6th century BC, Aesop's Fables tell universal truths through the use of simple allegories that are easily understood. Though almost nothing is known of Aesop himself, and some scholars question whether he existed at all, these stories stand as timeless classics known in almost every culture in the world. This is volume 12 of 12. (Summary by Chip)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/259302 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Who Was Who: 5000 BC - 1914 Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be Author: Irwin Leslie Gordon Narrator: LibriVox Volunteers Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 3 hours 2 minutes Release date: January 1, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2.4 of Total 5 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A short, humorous biography of famous people from 5000 BC to 1914. -- S. McGaughey From the Introduction, "The editor begs leave to inform the public that only persons who can produce proper evidence of their demise will be admitted to Who Was Who. Press Agent notices or complimentary comments are absolutely excluded, and those offering to pay for the insertion of names will be prosecuted. As persons become eligible they will be included without solicitation, while the pages will be expurgated of others should good luck warrant." Each section is shared by three readers: Sean McGaughey (Sections 1-12), Jim Mowatt (Sections 1-4), Alan Davis Drake (Sections 1-2), Laurie Anne Walden (Sections 3-12), and Sibella Denton (Sections 5-12).

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/257083 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Chopin: the Man and His Music Author: James Huneker Narrator: LibriVox Volunteers Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 31 minutes Release date: January 1, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2.33 of Total 3 Ratings of Narrator: 1 of Total 2 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: A biography of the Polish composer and virtuoso pianist Frédéric Chopin and a critical analysis of his work by American music writer and critic James Huneker. (Summary by Julie VW)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/257639 to listen full audiobooks. Title: American Men of Mind Author: Burton Egbert Stevenson Narrator: William Tomcho Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 0 minutes Release date: January 1, 2016 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2 Genres: History & Culture Publisher's Summary: Dating back to the 6th century BC, Aesop's Fables tell universal truths through the use of simple allegories that are easily understood. Though almost nothing is known of Aesop himself, and some scholars question whether he existed at all, these stories stand as timeless classics known in almost every culture in the world. This is volume 12 of 12. (Summary by Chip)