Listen to Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Memoirs

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/201129 to listen full audiobooks. Title: A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York Author: Anjelica Huston Narrator: Anjelica Huston Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 29 minutes Release date: November 19, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.2 of Total 5 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 3 Genres: Arts & Entertainment Publisher's Summary: Anjelica Huston’s “gorgeously written” (O, The Oprah Magazine) memoir is “an elegant, funny, and frequently haunting reminiscence of the first two decades of her life…A classic” (Vanity Fair). In her first, dazzling memoir, Anjelica Huston shares the story of her deeply unconventional early life—her enchanted childhood in Ireland, living with her glamorous and artistic mother, educated by tutors and nuns, intrepid on a horse. Huston was raised on an Irish estate to which—between movies—her father, director John Huston, brought his array of extraordinary friends, from Carson McCullers and John Steinbeck to Peter O’Toole and Marlon Brando. In London, where she lived with her mother and brother in the early sixties when her parents separated, Huston encountered the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac. She understudied Marianne Faithfull in Hamlet. Seventeen, striking, precocious, but still young and vulnerable, she was devastated when her mother died in a car crash. Months later she moved to New York, fell in love with the much older, brilliant but disturbed photographer, Bob Richardson, and became a model. Living in the Chelsea Hotel, working with Richard Avedon and other photographers, she navigated a volatile relationship and the dynamic cultural epicenter of New York in the seventies. A Story Lately Told is an “evocative” (The New York Times), “magically beautiful” (The Boston Globe) memoir. Huston’s second memoir, Watch Me, will be published in November 2014.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/200346 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Granny is My Wingman Author: Kayli Stollak Narrator: Kayli Stollak Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 35 minutes Release date: November 12, 2013 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: At twenty-three, Kayli Stollak, like most starry-eyed twentysomethings, assumed that she and her boyfriend, Charlie, would be together forever. Besides a rockin’ sex life, they shared a passion for motorcycle adventures, hedonistic European music festivals, and wearing matching glittery spandex to the disco. What more could a gal ask for? She envisioned their love burning well into their sixties. And then he dumped her. Heartbroken, Kayli turned to her seventy-five-year-old granny for support. And this ain’t no ordinary granny. Granny Gail is a ball-busting, sh*t-talking, gossipy yenta with an anecdote or piece of unsolicited advice for every situation. Granny didn’t sugarcoat the truth or let Kayli dwell on her failed relationship. No, Granny told her to cut the crap and snap out of it. Why didn’t Kayli give “one of those dating websites” a shot? With her ego on the line, Kayli threw the dare right back at her—if it was so wonderful, why didn’t single Granny join her in the world of cyber romance? Granny Is My Wingman chronicles Kayli’s and Granny’s misadventures in online dating. What ensues is a hilarious tour through the obstacles of modern love: drunken hookups, late-night Facebook stalking, breathy phone calls with geriatric suitors, and the occasional rude dude. While Kayli powers through a marathon of OkCupid dates—the corporate drone married to his BlackBerry, the nail-biting thirty-three-year-old who still lives at home with his mom, the serial online dater—we learn about Granny’s romantic past and the bittersweet affair she carried on, even while married, for more than thirty years. The two women cheer each other on and become even closer as they share their dating exploits, learning that the hunt for happiness is the same whether you’re twenty-five or seventy-five. Fresh, funny, and honest, Granny Is My Wingman is a book for anyone who has ever found love, lost it, and been crazy enough to do it all over again.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/200464 to listen full audiobooks. Title: What If . . .: A Lifetime of Questions, Speculations, Reasonable Guesses, and a Few Things I Know for Sure Author: Shirley MacLaine Narrator: Shirley MacLaine Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 31 minutes Release date: November 12, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.29 of Total 7 Ratings of Narrator: 4.33 of Total 3 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: From Academy Award–winning actress and bestselling author Shirley MacLaine, a collection of imaginative ruminations: “Fun and thoughtful by turns and told in MacLaine’s feisty, funny voice, this should appeal to fans and doubters alike” (Booklist). Beloved actress and bestselling author Shirley MacLaine contemplates everything from the everyday to the esoteric in this collection of ideas and observations, each of which begins with two simple, powerful words: What if? Taking this as her starting point, Shirley explores a wide range of matters—spiritual and secular, humorous and profound, earthbound and intergalactic, personal and universal. Along the way, she also reflects on joining the cast of Downton Abbey, receiving the prestigious American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award, and introducing a new puppy into her formerly one-dog home. From Shirley’s questions emerges a striking portrait of a constantly curious woman who thrills to new ideas and discoveries—all while enjoying one of the most extraordinary and enduring careers in Hollywood. What if . . . captures the one and only Shirley MacLaine at her witty, acerbic, imaginative, and irresistible best.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/200900 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Dr. J: The Autobiography Author: Julius Erving, Karl Taro Greenfeld Narrator: Julius Erving Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 15 minutes Release date: November 5, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: World Publisher's Summary: “A terrific memoir by a man worthy of one.” — Sports Illustrated An honest, unflinching self-portrait of the basketball legend whose classy public image as a superstar and a gentleman masked his personal failings and painful losses, which he describes here—from his own point of view—for the very first time. For most of his life, Julius Erving has been two men in one. There is Julius, the bright, inquisitive son of a Long Island domestic worker who has always wanted to be respected for more than just his athletic ability, and there is Dr. J, the cool, acrobatic showman whose flamboyant dunks sent him to the Hall of Fame and turned the act of jamming a basketball through a hoop into an art form. In many ways, Erving’s life has been about the push and pull of Julius and The Doctor. It is Dr. J who has stories to tell of the wild days and nights of the ABA in the 1970s, and of being the seminal figure who transformed basketball from an earthbound and rigid game into the creative, free-flowing aerial display it is today. He has a long list of signature plays - he’s famous for winning the first dunk contest in 1976 with a jam on which he lifted off from the foul line, and he made a miraculous layup against the Lakers on which he soared behind the backboard before reaching back in to flip the ball in on the other side, with one hand. He inspired a generation of dunkers, including Michael Jordan, to express their improvisational talents. But Julius wasn’t always as graceful and in control as Dr. J. Erving had a pristine image throughout his career and early retirement, but he was far from a perfect man. Here he gives detailed accounts of some of the personal problems he faced -- or created -- behind the scenes, including the adulterous affair with sports writer Samantha Stephenson, which led to the birth of his daughter, professional tennis player Alexandra Stephenson. Though his marriage survived that infidelity, the death of Erving’s 20-year-old son Cory in 2000 in a tragic accident proved too much for the union to bear. Erving paints a raw, heartbreaking picture of the dissolution of his marriage, as his wife Turquoise began to blame him for his refusal to be paralyzed by grief for as long as she was. Their intense arguments came to a head when Erving stepped out of the shower one day to find his wife holding a lamp in one hand and a vase in the other, ready for a physical confrontation. “I knew somebody was going to get hurt, and it wasn’t going to be me,” he says. He packed a suitcase and he and Turquoise never lived under the same roof again. Erving’s story is a tale of the nearly perfect player and the imperfect man, and how he has come to terms with both of them. It will appeal to readers on a sports level and on a human one.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/200790 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. Author: Rob Delaney Narrator: Rob Delaney Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 8 minutes Release date: November 5, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 2 Genres: Arts & Entertainment Publisher's Summary: From a Deadpool 2 fan favorite comes a “hilarious, raw” (Rolling Stone) memoir about love, sex, parenthood, work, substance abuse, and everything else that makes life wonderful and/or horrible. Rob Delaney is a comedy superstar. But if you’re ever watched him steal scenes as Peter in Deadpool 2, binged his streaming series Catastrophe, encountered his raunchy and mischievous Twitter presence, or witnessed the hilarious and painful sharing he does in his stand-up, you already know that. In his first book, he traces his journey from middle-class theater geek to public menace to devoted family man and passionately engaged model citizen—from his youthful obsession (and pen pal relationship) with heavy metal band Danzig and an episode of drunken bungee jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, to his court-ordered stint in rehab and the miracle of his son’s birth. All together, these essays make clear why it is he is so darn lovable—and so f#!%ing funny. Praise for Rob Delaney “Unlike some books by comics, Delaney’s volume offers a rich, deeply considered (and yes, funny) look at his life. . . . A great read by any standard, but even more so for including stories about needing (and failing) to find a bathroom while jogging.”—E! Online “One of the most hilarious bundles of words we have ever read.”—Vice “A book as funny, sincere, weird, wet, and wonderful as Rob Delaney himself.”—Jimmy Kimmel “Heart-wrenchingly true tales exuding self-effacing whimsy and smart-guy charm.”—Splitsider “Delaney has a knack for pinpointing what’s hilarious and sad about adolescent bed-wetting and his own abundant body hair, but somehow the darkest chapters [in this book] make you laugh hardest.”—Entertainment Weekly “Rob Delaney has done it again! Actually, this is his first book, so he has not ‘done it again.’ Actually, this book is so good, I doubt he will be able to do it again. He’s peaked.”—Judd Apatow “Rob’s transition from tweets to book is like a gold medal sprinter winning the marathon the next day. I am jealous and angry.”—Seth Meyers “WARNING: This book may cause involuntary seepage. Some funny, funny, funny, funny s*** from the most dangerous man on Twitter. The fact that he’s just as funny in long form makes me want to vomit with envy.”—Anthony Bourdain

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/200898 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood Author: Roger Rosenblatt Narrator: Robert Fass Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 16 minutes Release date: November 5, 2013 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: The Washington Post hailed Roger Rosenblatt's Making Toast as "a textbook on what constitutes perfect writing," and People lauded Kayak Morning as "intimate, expansive and profoundly moving." Classic tales of love and grief, the New York Times bestselling memoirs are also original literary works that carve out new territory at the intersection of poetry and prose. Now comes The Boy Detective, a story of the author's childhood in New York City, suffused with the same mixture of acute observation and bracing humor, lyricism and wit. Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone, out into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases. Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth: The writing class he teaches has just wrapped up, releasing him into the winter night and the very neighborhood in which he grew up. A grown man now, he investigates his own life and the life of the city as he walks, exploring the New York of the 1950s; the lives of the writers who walked these streets before him, such as Poe and Melville; the great detectives of fiction and the essence of detective work; and the monuments of his childhood, such as the New York Public Library, once the site of an immense reservoir that nourished the city with water before it nourished it with books, and the Empire State Building, which, in Rosenblatt's imagination, vibrates sympathetically with the oversize loneliness of King Kong: "If you must fall, fall from me." As he walks, he is returned to himself, the boy detective on the case. Just as Rosenblatt invented a world for himself as a child, he creates one on this night—the writer a detective still, the chief suspect in the case of his own life, a case that discloses the shared mysteries of all our lives. A masterly evocation of the city and a meditation on memory as an act of faith, The Boy Detective treads the line between a novel and a poem, displaying a world at once dangerous and beautiful.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/200903 to listen full audiobooks. Title: This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage Author: Ann Patchett Narrator: Ann Patchett Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 35 minutes Release date: November 5, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.06 of Total 32 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 8 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick “I had been so engaged by Ann Patchett’s multifaceted story, so lured in by her confiding voice, that I forgot I was on the job. […] As the best personal essays often do, Patchett’s is a two-way mirror, reflecting both the author and her readers.” — New York Times Book Review Blending literature and memoir, New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder, Run, and Bel Canto, examines her deepest commitments—to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband—creating a resonant portrait of a life in This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage takes us into the very real world of Ann Patchett's life. Stretching from her childhood to the present day, from a disastrous early marriage to a later happy one, it covers a multitude of topics, including relationships with family and friends, and charts the hard work and joy of writing, and the unexpected thrill of opening a bookstore. As she shares stories of the people, places, ideals, and art to which she has remained indelibly committed, Ann Patchett brings into focus the large experiences and small moments that have shaped her as a daughter, wife, and writer.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/200670 to listen full audiobooks. Title: When Will the Heaven Begin?: This Is Ben Breedlove's Story Author: Ally Breedlove, Ken Abraham Narrator: Ellen Archer Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 57 minutes Release date: October 29, 2013 Genres: Counseling & Inspirational Publisher's Summary: AN INSPIRATIONAL AND HEARTRENDING MEMOIR ABOUT BEN BREEDLOVE, WHO SHARED HIS NEAR-DEATHEXPERIENCES AND VISIONS OF HEAVEN IN HIS VIRAL VIDEOS—WRITTEN BY HIS SISTER, ALLY BREEDLOVE. On Christmas Day 2011, Ben Breedlove’s soul went to heaven. But it wasn’t his first time there. Ben suffered from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a heart condition that posed a constant risk of sudden death. His condition, a thickening of the heart muscle, worsened over time, leaving him weak and fatigued. It also led Ben to some close calls medically, in particular cardiac arrest on four separate occasions, during which he felt the presence of angels and experienced the perfect peace of heaven. Precocious and warm, Ben was close with his family and two siblings, and forged deep relationships with his friends. He loved to wakeboard and wake surf, and he had dreams of visiting foreign countries around the world. He created the YouTube channels TotalRandomness512 and BreedloveTV, and co-created the channel OurAdvice4You, where he posted videos about everything from dating advice for girls to more serious topics like his spirituality and heart condition. Unbeknownst to his parents and family, Ben created a two-part video called 'This Is My Story,' in which he used flashcards to tell the world about his near-death experiences and his beckoning toward heaven. When he died a short while later, at the tender age of eighteen, his family and the rest of the world stumbled upon these videos. The world responded with overwhelming acceptance of the message Ben shared. Sharing his vision of heaven was Ben’s gift to his family, and to the world. And now this is the Breedlove family’s gift to us – an in-depth look at the life and near-deaths of Ben, the strength and faith of a family, and ultimately, the hope of heaven. Do you believe in Angels or God? I Do. – Ben Breedlove

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/198610 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son Author: Pat Conroy Narrator: Dick Hill Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 15 hours 12 minutes Release date: October 29, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.36 of Total 11 Ratings of Narrator: 4.25 of Total 4 Genres: Military Publisher's Summary: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A painful, lyrical, addictive read” (People) by the cherished author of The Great Santini that brings his extraordinary career full circle   Pat Conroy’s great success as a writer has always been intimately linked with the exploration of his family history. As the oldest of seven children who were dragged from military base to military base across the South, Pat bore witness to the often cruel and violent behavior of his father, Marine Corps fighter pilot Donald Patrick Conroy. While the publication of The Great Santini brought Pat much acclaim, the rift it caused brought even more attention, fracturing an already battered family. But as Pat tenderly chronicles here, even the oldest of wounds can heal. In the final years of Don Conroy’s life, the Santini unexpectedly refocused his ire to defend his son’s honor.   The Death of Santini is a heart-wrenching act of reckoning whose ultimate conclusion is that love can soften even the meanest of men, lending significance to the oft-quoted line from Pat’s novel The Prince of Tides: “In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.”   Praise for The Death of Santini   “A painful, lyrical, addictive read that [Pat Conroy’s] fans won’t want to miss.”—People   “Conroy’s conviction pulls you fleetly through the book, as does the potency of his bond with his family, no matter their sins.”—The New York Times Book Review   “Vital, large-hearted and often raucously funny.”—The Washington Post   “Conroy writes athletically and beautifully, slicing through painful memories like a point guard splitting the defense.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune   “A brilliant storyteller, a master of sarcasm, and a hallucinatory stylist whose obsession with the impress of the past on the present binds him to Southern literary tradition.”—The Boston Globe

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/198469 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Pure Joy: The Dogs We Love Author: Danielle Steel Narrator: Renée Raudman Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 3 hours 26 minutes Release date: October 29, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.39 of Total 18 Ratings of Narrator: 4.8 of Total 5 Genres: Unique Non-Fiction Publisher's Summary: Here from #1 New York Times bestselling author Danielle Steel is a charming love letter to the pet dogs that have enriched her life. In this funny, lovely, moving memoir, Danielle Steel tells the story of how she met a dog the size of a mouse with a personality that could light up an entire room. From Minnie's arrival at home in San Francisco to clothes-shopping jaunts in Paris, her adventures provide the perfect backdrop for a heartfelt look at the magic that dogs bring to our lives and how they become part of the family. We meet Steel's childhood pug, James; and Elmer, the basset hound who was steadfastly at her side in her struggling days as a young writer. We also meet Sweet Pea—unveiled in a Tiffany box for a dog-loving husband—and all those lucky dogs who shared a household of nine children, other canines, and one potbellied pig. As Steel reflects on the beloved pets who have brought joy—and sometimes chaos—to her home through the years, she also shares her thoughts on the trials and tribulations of bringing a new dog into a household, the challenges of housebreaking and compatibility, and the losses we feel forever. Filled with colorful characters (human and otherwise), delightful photographs, practical wisdom drawn from long experience, and brimming with warmth and insight on every page, Pure Joy is a love letter to this special relationship—and one of the most charming books yet from the incomparable Danielle Steel.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/198431 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Ties That Bind: Stories of Love and Gratitude from the First Ten Years of StoryCorps Author: David Isay Narrator: Various Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 0 hours 57 minutes Release date: October 22, 2013 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: In celebration of StoryCorps’ ten year anniversary, Ties That Bind goes to the heart of the project’s great mission, sharing stories that are a testament to family and to the diversity of American experience. From the story of one couple separated temporarily by divorce and then permanently by the tragedy of 9/11, to the amazing power of forgiveness shown by a mother toward her son’s repentant killer, these are moving, uplifting, real-life stories from everyday Americans, gathered by StoryCorps and heard on NPR’s Morning Edition. This highlight edition features exclusive audio contents, including StoryCorps founder Dave Isay in conversation with NPR’s Scott Simon, as well as oral historian Studs Terkel’s memorable dedication of the StoryCorps booth in Grand Central Terminal. These moving, humanity-drenched, first-person accounts epitomize the strength of the ties that bind us to each other, against the pull of powerful forces.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/198769 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Smokin’ Joe: The Autobiography of a Heavyweight Champion of the World, Smokin’ Joe Frazier Author: Phil Berger, Joe Frazier Narrator: William Andrew Quinn Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 41 minutes Release date: October 10, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Sports Publisher's Summary: When boxing was bold, bright, and glamorous and the fights were the hottest sporting events of the year, Joe Frazier was king as the Heavyweight Champion of the World. From 1970 to 1973 he reigned. With a career record of 32-4-1 with twenty-seven knockouts and an Olympic gold medal, Frazier leaves little question that he was one of the greatest fighters of all time. Well-known, loved, and revered as a gentleman and a fierce competitor in the ring, Joe Frazier speaks his mind in Smokin' Joe—about growing up poor and fighting in the first $2.5 million bout; about the early days of his friendship with Muhammad Ali and how their relationship changed; and about the often corrupt world of boxing and what really went on inside and outside the ring. Personable, good-natured, and funny, Frazier's story is a real delight.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/198095 to listen full audiobooks. Title: I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban Author: Malala Yousafzai Narrator: Archie Panjabi Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 0 minutes Release date: October 8, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.18 of Total 220 Ratings of Narrator: 4.53 of Total 36 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: A MEMOIR BY THE YOUNGEST RECIPIENT OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE As seen on Netflix with David Letterman 'I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday.' When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education. On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive. Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she became a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize. I AM MALALA is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons. I AM MALALA will make you believe in the power of one person's voice to inspire change in the world.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/198746 to listen full audiobooks. Title: My Story Author: Elizabeth Smart, Chris Stewart Narrator: Elizabeth Smart Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 14 minutes Release date: October 7, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.27 of Total 90 Ratings of Narrator: 4.38 of Total 29 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: The harrowing true story of abduction and survival from the courageous young woman who lived it—now the subject of a Lifetime original movie, I Am Elizabeth Smart. In this memoir, Elizabeth Smart reveals how she survived and the secret to forging a new life in the wake of a brutal crime. On June 5, 2002, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart, the daughter of a close-knit Mormon family, was taken from her home in the middle of the night by religious fanatic Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee. Elizabeth was kept chained, dressed in disguise, repeatedly raped, and told she and her family would be killed if she tried to escape. After her rescue on March 12, 2003, she rejoined her family and worked to pick up the pieces of her life. With My Story, Elizabeth tells of the constant fear she endured every hour, her courageous determination to maintain hope, and how she devised a plan to manipulate her captors and convinced them to return to Utah, where she was rescued minutes after arriving. Smart explains how her faith helped her stay sane in the midst of a nightmare and how she found the strength to confront her captors at their trial and see that justice was served. In the years after her rescue, Smart transformed from victim to advocate, traveling the country and working to educate, inspire and foster change. She has created a foundation to help prevent crimes against children and is a frequent public speaker. She and her husband, Matthew Gilmour, now have two children.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/196846 to listen full audiobooks. Title: In My Shoes: A Memoir Author: Tamara Mellon, William Patrick Narrator: Polly Lee Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 32 minutes Release date: October 1, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.75 of Total 4 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A candid business narrative and memoir from the founder of Jimmy Choo   Tamara Mellon made a fortune building Jimmy Choo into a billion-dollar fashion brand. She became the prime minister's trade envoy and was honored by the Queen with the Order of the British Empire—yet it's her personal glamour that keeps her an object of global media fascination. Vogue photographed her wedding; Vanity Fair covered her divorce and the criminal trial that followed. Harper's Bazaar toured her London town house and her New York mansion, right down to the closets. And the Wall Street Journal hinted at the real red meat: the three private equity deals, the relentless battle between 'the suits' and 'the creatives,' and Mellon's triumph against a brutally hostile takeover attempt.   In this candid memoir she shares the whole larger-than-life story, with genuinely shocking insider detail that has never been presented anywhere. From her troubled childhood to her time as a young editor at Vogue to her partnership with cobbler Jimmy Choo to her very public relationships, Mellon offers a gripping account of the episodes that have made her who she is today.   The result is a must read for entrepreneurs, fashionistas, and anyone who loves a juicy true story about sex, drugs, money, power, high heels, and overcoming adversity.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/198208 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Bruchko Author: Bruce Olson Narrator: Gary Dikeos Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 7 minutes Release date: September 30, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 8 Ratings of Narrator: 3.8 of Total 5 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: What happens when a nineteen-year-old boy leaves home and heads into the jungles to evangelize a murderous tribe of South American Indians? For Bruce Olson, it meant capture, disease, terror, loneliness, and torture. But what he discovered through trial and error has revolutionized the world of missions. Bruchko, which has sold more than 300,000 copies worldwide, has been called 'more fantastic and harrowing than anything Hollywood could concoct.' Having lived with the Motilone Indians since 1961, Olson has won the friendship of four presidents of Colombia and made appearances before the United Nations because of his efforts. Bruchko includes the story of Olson's 1988 kidnapping by communist guerrillas and the nine months of captivity that followed. This revised version of his story is an amazing reminder that simple faith in Christ can make anything possible.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/196946 to listen full audiobooks. Title: An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist Author: Richard Dawkins Narrator: Lalla Ward, Richard Dawkins Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 57 minutes Release date: September 24, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2 of Total 2 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: New York Timesbestselling author and renowned atheist and evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins delivers an intimate look into his own childhood and intellectual development, illuminating his path to becoming one of the foremost thinkers in modern science today    “A memoir that is funny and modest, absorbing and playful. Dawkins has written a marvelous love letter to science . . . and for this, the book will touch scientists and science-loving persons . . . Enchanting.” —NPR

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/198344 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Girl: A Life Lived in the Shadow of Roman Polanski Author: Samantha Geimer Narrator: Samantha Geimer Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 25 minutes Release date: September 17, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 2 Ratings of Narrator: 3 of Total 1 Genres: Arts & Entertainment Publisher's Summary: In this memoir that “might be the most important and valuable book of the century so far” (The Guardian), Samantha Geimer reveals for the first time her side of one of the most notorious and complex legal cases in American history. March 1977, Southern California. Roman Polanski drives a rented Mercedes along Mulholland Drive to Jack Nicholson’s house. Sitting next to him is an aspiring model named Samantha Geimer. She is thirteen years old. The undisputed facts of what happened in the hours that followed appear in the court record: Roman and Samantha spent hours taking pictures—on a kitchen counter, topless in a Jacuzzi. Wine and Quaaludes were consumed, balance and innocence were lost, and a young girl’s life was altered forever—eternally cast as a background player in her own story. For months on end, the Polanski case dominated the media both in the United States and abroad. But even with the extensive coverage, there is much about that day—and the girl at the center of it all—that has remained a mystery. The few times Samantha Geimer has spoken publically, it has been largely in reaction to Polanski—his latest film, his arrests, his releases. Virtually the entire narrative of Samantha’s life, and even the details of the rape itself, have all been left untold. Taking us far beyond the known headlines, this is the story of a girl who was simultaneously wise beyond her years and yet terribly vulnerable and even naive. Says New York Times bestselling author Sheila Weller, “Witty, snarky—but also precise and thoughtfully observant…Samantha Geimer is a reflective guide as she humanely tells of a complex violation that hurt but didn’t defeat her.”

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/196773 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing Author: Anya Von Bremzen Narrator: Kathleen Gati Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 38 minutes Release date: September 17, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 5 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generations          Born in 1963, in an era of bread shortages, Anya grew up in a communal Moscow apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen. She sang odes to Lenin, black-marketeered Juicy Fruit gum at school, watched her father brew moonshine, and, like most Soviet citizens, longed for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, naively joyous, and melancholy—and ultimately intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother, Larisa. When Anya was ten, she and Larisa fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return.      Now Anya occupies two parallel food universes: one where she writes about four-star restaurants, the other where a taste of humble kolbasa transports her back to her scarlet-blazed socialist past. To bring that past to life, Anya and her mother decide to eat and cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience. Through these meals, and through the tales of three generations of her family, Anya tells the intimate yet epic story of life in the USSR. Wildly inventive and slyly witty, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses. Includes a bonus PDF of recipes from the book

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/196763 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Being a Rockefeller, Becoming Myself: A Memoir Author: Eileen Rockefeller Narrator: Eileen Rockefeller Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 35 minutes Release date: September 12, 2013 Genres: Arts & Entertainment Publisher's Summary: A pioneering philanthropist and daughter of American royalty reveals what it was like to grow up in one of the world’s most famous families.   The great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, Eileen Rockefeller learned in childhood that while wealth and fame could open any door, they could not buy a feeling of personal worth. The privileges of having servants and lavish summer homes were offset by her parents’ thoughtful yet firm lessons in social obligation, at times by her mother’s dark depressions and mercurial moods, and the competition for attention among her siblings. In adulthood, Rockefeller yearned to be seen not as an icon but as a woman and mother with a normal life, and like all of us, she had to learn to find her own way. Being a Rockefeller, Becoming Myself is an affirmation of how family shapes our identity and the ways we contribute to the larger family of life, regardless of our origins.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/196338 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death Author: Katy Butler Narrator: Katy Butler Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 28 minutes Release date: September 10, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 6 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 3 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: “A thoroughly researched and compelling mix of personal narrative and hard-nosed reporting that captures just how flawed care at the end of life has become” (Abraham Verghese, The New York Times Book Review). This bestselling memoir—hailed a “triumph” by The New York Times—ponders the “Good Death” and the forces within medicine that stand in its way. Award-winning journalist Katy Butler was living thousands of miles from her aging parents when the call came: her beloved seventy-nine-year-old father had suffered a crippling stroke. Katy and her mother joined the more than 28 million Americans who are shepherding loved ones through their final declines. Doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker, which kept his heart going while doing nothing to prevent a slide into dementia, near-blindness, and misery. When he said, “I’m living too long,” mother and daughter faced wrenching moral questions. Where is the line between saving a life and prolonging a dying? When do you say to a doctor, “Let my loved one go?” When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, condemning her father to a lingering death, Butler set out to understand why. Her quest had barely begun when her mother, faced with her own grave illness, rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and met death the old-fashioned way: head-on. Part memoir, part medical history, and part spiritual guide, Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a map through the labyrinth of a broken medical system. Technological medicine, obsessed with maximum longevity, is creating more suffering than it prevents. Butler chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine, a movement bent on reclaiming the “Good Deaths” our ancestors prized. In families, hospitals, and the public sphere, this visionary memoir is inspiring the difficult conversations we must have to light the path to a better way of death. “A lyrical meditation written with extraordinary beauty and sensitivity” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/196945 to listen full audiobooks. Title: After the Fire: A Memoir in Poetry and Prose Author: J. A. Jance Narrator: J. A. Jance Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 1 hour 50 minutes Release date: September 10, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: New York Times bestselling author J. A. Jance's heartrending collection of poetry and essays recounts a dark chapter of her own life, her first marriage to an alcoholic—a powerful look at the emotional cost of addiction and an inspiring story of courage and triumph in the wake of crushing defeat Before she found fame as a bestselling mystery author, Judith Jance wrestled with the anguish of being married to an alcoholic. For years she channeled her pain into words, composing the poems in this moving volume, first published in 1984, a year before her debut novel. In searing and direct language, After the Fire chronicles the collapse of Jance's first marriage under the weight of her husband's addiction—and her own unwitting denial and codependence while she struggled to find herself. "I will not be the price of your redemption," she wrote then. "I will not pay my life to ransom yours." An intimate, deeply personal look into a wrenching time in Jance's life, After the Fire is a portrait of addiction and its insidious effects on lives and love. It illuminates universal truths about unbearable loss and finding the courage to carry on, and offers inspiration and profound insight into the heart and work of a beloved bestselling author.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/194990 to listen full audiobooks. Title: A House in the Sky: A Memoir Author: Sara Corbett, Amanda Lindhout Narrator: Amanda Lindhout Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 17 minutes Release date: September 10, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.71 of Total 55 Ratings of Narrator: 4.69 of Total 26 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: The New York Times bestselling memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the world’s most remote places and then into fifteen months of captivity: “Exquisitely told…A young woman’s harrowing coming-of-age story and an extraordinary narrative of forgiveness and spiritual triumph” (The New York Times Book Review). As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself visiting its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia—“the most dangerous place on earth.” On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road. Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda survives on memory—every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity—and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark. Vivid and suspenseful, as artfully written as the finest novel, A House in the Sky is “a searingly unsentimental account. Ultimately it is compassion—for her naïve younger self, for her kidnappers—that becomes the key to Lindhout’s survival” (O, The Oprah Magazine).

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/195378 to listen full audiobooks. Title: My Brief History Author: Stephen Hawking Narrator: Matthew Brenher Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 2 hours 15 minutes Release date: September 10, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.25 of Total 4 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Stephen Hawking has dazzled readers worldwide with a string of bestsellers exploring the mysteries of the universe. Now, for the first time, perhaps the most brilliant cosmologist of our age turns his gaze inward for a revealing look at his own life and intellectual evolution.   My Brief History recounts Stephen Hawking’s improbable journey, from his postwar London boyhood to his years of international acclaim and celebrity. This concise, witty, and candid account introduces listeners to a Hawking rarely glimpsed in previous books: the inquisitive schoolboy whose classmates nicknamed him Einstein; the jokester who once placed a bet with a colleague over the existence of a particular black hole; and the young husband and father struggling to gain a foothold in the world of physics and cosmology.   Writing with characteristic humility and humor, Hawking opens up about the challenges that confronted him following his diagnosis of ALS at age twenty-one. Tracing his development as a thinker, he explains how the prospect of an early death urged him onward through numerous intellectual breakthroughs, and talks about the genesis of his masterpiece A Brief History of Time—one of the iconic books of the twentieth century.   Clear-eyed, intimate, and wise, My Brief History opens a window for the rest of us into Hawking’s personal cosmos.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/196808 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Weekends with Daisy Author: Sharron Kahn Luttrell Narrator: Jane Jacobs Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 8 minutes Release date: September 10, 2013 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: She was supposed to teach Daisy how to be a good dog…but Daisy taught her to be a better person. When Sharron Luttrell joins a weekend “Prison PUP” program for a service dog organization, she knew it was just what she needed to help her move on from the death of her own beloved dog. The position seemed ideal; pick up a puppy on Friday, return it on Sunday night, work with a new puppy each year, no strings attached. Well, it turns out there were strings—and they tugged at her every time she had to return “her dog” to its weekday caregiver. This memoir chronicles Sharron’s year co-parenting Daisy, a sweet Lab puppy, with Keith, the inmate who is Daisy’s other trainer. As Sharron and Keith develop a relationship she likens to “divorced parents handing over the kids,” she becomes curious about Keith’s life story. When Sharron uncovers the tragic event that set Keith on his path, she realizes she must take a lesson from Daisy and “think like a dog'—react to circumstances in the present, not the past. Sharron applies this way of thinking at home, too, using the lessons she learned from Daisy to mend her rocky relationship with her teenage daughter. Where once a dramatic eye roll from her daughter would have sparked a battle, Sharron has learned to employ the patience and understanding she practices with Daisy to become a better mom. As Sharron and Keith work tirelessly to ensure Daisy passes her service dog test, she is taught priceless lessons in empathy, compassion, and affection. In the end, Sharron’s weekends with Daisy have taught her more than she could ever have imagined.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/198192 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Little Black Sheep: A Memoir Author: Ashley Cleveland Narrator: Ashley Cleveland Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 32 minutes Release date: September 1, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Your deepest pain can be your greatest hope. This powerful memoir from Grammy Award–winner Ashley Cleveland reminds us that even in the lowest times of our lives, beauty can shine through. Ashley Cleveland grew up in a Southern family fractured by alcoholism, homosexuality, and the collapse of her parents’ marriage. She knew from the start that she was the “good-for-nothing” black sheep of her divided home, and she quickly learned to play the part. Yet in her destructive days of drugs, alcohol, and sex, she encountered a forgiving God who was relentlessly faithful. Change did not come quickly. The brokenness did not disappear. But Ashley allowed God to heal her, to transform her desires, to bring courage to others through her journey. Little by little she saw that it was her brokenness itself that God wanted to use. This beautifully told story will take you from the back rooms of Nashville to the churches of the San Francisco Bay area to a tender new life where one woman discovers that broken places often supply the best things we have to give away.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/196867 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood Author: Julia Scully Narrator: Celeste Lawson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 19 minutes Release date: September 1, 2013 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: When Julia Scully was seven years old, her father committed suicide, and she and her sister were sent to an orphanage. Julia sought comfort in the rituals of the orphanage—learning to knit, roller-skating after dinner, listening to One Man's Family on the radio—and tried to adapt. But two years later, emotionally damaged by the isolation and brutality of the orphanage, the girls followed their mother to the near-wilderness of the gold-mining territory north of Nome, Alaska, where she had leased a roadhouse in the tiny settlement of Taylor. Julia had no idea what to expect when she arrived, but to her surprise she found a healing power in the stark beauty of the vast tundra—the summer wildflowers and berries, the reindeer, foxes, and wolves. Later she reveled in the boisterous, chaotic boomtown atmosphere that prevailed when thousands of American troops descended on Nome at the outbreak of World War II. A lyrical and affecting memoir of those years, Outside Passage is simultaneously an emotional account of a young girl's first steps into adulthood and a unique portrait of a vanished frontier life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/194101 to listen full audiobooks. Title: I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary Author: Marianne Szegedy-Maszak Narrator: Marianne Szegedy-Maszak Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 14 hours 2 minutes Release date: August 27, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A magnificent wartime love story about the forces that brought the author’s parents together and those that nearly drove them apart   Marianne Szegedy-Maszák’s parents, Hanna and Aladár, met and fell in love in Budapest in 1940. He was a rising star in the foreign ministry—a vocal anti-Fascist who was in talks with the Allies when he was arrested and sent to Dachau. She was the granddaughter of Manfred Weiss, the industrialist patriarch of an aristocratic Jewish family that owned factories, were patrons of intellectuals and artists, and entertained dignitaries at their baronial estates. Though many in the family had converted to Catholicism decades earlier, when the Germans invaded Hungary in March 1944, they were forced into hiding. In a secret and controversial deal brokered with Heinrich Himmler, the family turned over their vast holdings in exchange for their safe passage to Portugal.   Aladár survived Dachau, a fragile and anxious version of himself. After nearly two years without contact, he located Hanna and wrote her a letter that warned that he was not the man she’d last seen, but he was still in love with her. After months of waiting for visas and transit, she finally arrived in a devastated Budapest in December 1945, where at last they were wed.   Framed by a cache of letters written between 1940 and 1947, Szegedy-Maszák’s family memoir tells the story, at once intimate and epic, of the complicated relationship Hungary had with its Jewish population—the moments of glorious humanism that stood apart from its history of anti-Semitism—and with the rest of the world. She resurrects in riveting detail a lost world of splendor and carefully limns the moral struggles that history exacted—from a country and its individuals.   Praise for I Kiss Your Hands Many Times   “I Kiss Your Hand Many Times is the sweeping story of Marianne Szegedy-Maszák’s family in pre– and post–World War II Europe, capturing the many ways the struggles of that period shaped her family for years to come. But most of all it is a beautiful love story, charting her parents’ devotion in one of history’s darkest hours.”—Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief, the Huffington Post Media Group   “In this panoramic and gripping narrative of a vanished world of great wealth and power, Marianne Szegedy-Maszák restores an important missing chapter of European, Hungarian, and Holocaust history.”—Kati Marton, author of Paris: A Love Story and Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America “How many times can a heart be broken? Hungarians know, Marianne Szegedy-Maszák’s family more than most. History has broken theirs again and again. This is the story of that violence, told by the daughter of an extraordinary man and extraordinary woman who refused to surrender to it. Every perfectly chosen word is as it happened. So brace yourself. Truth can break hearts, too.”—Robert Sam Anson, author of War News: A Young Reporter in Indochina “This family memoir is everything you could wish for in the genre: the story of a fascinating family that illuminates the historical time it lived through. . . . Informative and fascinating in every way, [I Kiss Your Hands Many Times] is a great introduction to World War II Hungary and a moving tale of personal relationships in a time of great duress.”—Booklist (starred review)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/194011 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Homeless at Harvard: Finding Faith and Friendship on the Streets of Harvard Square Author: John Christopher Frame Narrator: Jd Cullum Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 53 minutes Release date: August 22, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2 of Total 1 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: Harvard Square is at the center of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the business district around Harvard University. It’s a place of history, culture, and some of the most momentous events of the nation. But it’s also a gathering place for some of the city’s homeless. What is life like for the homeless in Harvard Square? Do they have anything to tell people about life? And God? That’s what Harvard student John Frame discovered and shares in Homeless at Harvard. While taking his final course at Harvard, John Frame stepped outside the walls of academia and onto the streets, pursuing a different kind of education with his homeless friends. What he found—in the way of community and how people understand themselves may surprise you. In this unique book, each of these urban pioneers shares his own story, providing insider perspectives of life as homeless people see it. This heartwarming page-turner shows how John learned with, from, and about his homeless friends—who together tell an unforgettable story—helping readers’ better understand problems outside themselves and that they’re more similar to those on the streets than they may have believed.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/195233 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Buck: A Memoir Author: MK Asante Narrator: MK Asante, Adenrele Ojo Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 47 minutes Release date: August 20, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.45 of Total 11 Ratings of Narrator: 4.25 of Total 4 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A rebellious boy’s journey through the wilds of urban America and the shrapnel of a self-destructing family—this is the riveting story of a generation told through one dazzlingly poetic new voice.   MK Asante was born in Zimbabwe to American parents: a mother who led the new nation’s dance company and a father who would soon become a revered pioneer in black studies. But things fell apart, and a decade later MK was in America, a teenager lost in a fog of drugs, sex, and violence on the streets of North Philadelphia. Now he was alone—his mother in a mental hospital, his father gone, his older brother locked up in a prison on the other side of the country—and forced to find his own way to survive physically, mentally, and spiritually, by any means necessary.   Buck is a powerful memoir of how a precocious kid educated himself through the most unconventional teachers—outlaws and eccentrics, rappers and mystic strangers, ghetto philosophers and strippers, and, eventually, an alternative school that transformed his life with a single blank sheet of paper. It’s a one-of-a-kind story about finding your purpose in life, and an inspiring tribute to the power of education, art, and love to heal and redeem us. Praise for Buck   “A story of surviving and thriving with passion, compassion, wit, and style.”—Maya Angelou    “In America, we have a tradition of black writers whose autobiographies and memoirs come to define an era. . . . Buck may be this generation’s story.”—NPR “The voice of a new generation. . . . You will love nearly everything about Buck.”—Essence “A virtuoso performance . . . [an] extraordinary page-turner of a memoir . . . written in a breathless, driving hip-hop prose style that gives it a tough, contemporary edge.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “Frequently brilliant and always engaging . . . It takes great skill to render the wide variety of characters, male and female, young and old, that populate a memoir like Buck. Asante [is] at his best when he sets out into the city of Philadelphia itself. In fact, that city is the true star of this book. Philly’s skateboarders, its street-corner philosophers and its tattoo artists are all brought vividly to life here. . . . Asante’s memoir will find an eager readership, especially among young people searching in books for the kind of understanding and meaning that eludes them in their real-life relationships. . . . A powerful and captivating book.”—Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times “Remarkable . . . Asante’s prose is a fluid blend of vernacular swagger and tender poeticism. . . . [He] soaks up James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Walt Whitman like thirsty ground in a heavy rain. Buck grew from that, and it’s a bumper crop.”—Salon   “Buck is so honest it floats—even while it’s so down-to-earth that the reader feels like an ant peering up from the concrete. It’s a powerful book. . . . Asante is a hip-hop raconteur, a storyteller in the Homeric tradition, an American, a rhymer, a big-thinker singing a song of himself. You’ll want to listen.”—The Buffalo News

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/195135 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Son of a Gun: A Memoir Author: Justin St. Germain Narrator: George Newbern Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 53 minutes Release date: August 13, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 1 Genres: True Crime Publisher's Summary: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after.   Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop?   Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be.   Praise for Son of a Gun   “[A] spectacular memoir . . . calls to mind two others of the past decade: J. R. Moehringer’s Tender Bar and Nick Flynn’s Another Bull Night in Suck City. All three are about boys becoming men in a broken world. . . . [What] might have been . . . in the hands of a lesser writer, the book’s main point . . . [is] amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation. . . . If the brilliance of Son of a Gun lies in its restraint, its importance lies in the generosity of the author’s insights.”—Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review “[A] gritty, enthralling new memoir . . . St. Germain has created a work of austere, luminous beauty. . . . In his understated, eloquent way, St. Germain makes you feel the heat, taste the dust, see those shimmering streets. By the end of the book, you know his mother, even though you never met her. And like the author, you will mourn her forever.”—NPR   “If St. Germain had stopped at examining his mother’s psycho-social risk factors and how her murder affected him, this would still be a fine, moving memoir. But it’s his further probing—into the culture of guns, violence, and manhood that informed their lives in his hometown, Tombstone, Ariz.—that transforms the book, elevating the stakes from personal pain to larger, important questions of what ails our society.”—The Boston Globe   “A visceral, compelling portrait of [St. Germain’s] mother and the violent culture that claimed her.”—Entertainment Weekly

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/194097 to listen full audiobooks. Title: In Spite of Myself Author: Christopher Plummer Narrator: Christopher Plummer Format: Abridged Audiobook Length: 16 hours 38 minutes Release date: August 13, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1 Genres: Arts & Entertainment Publisher's Summary: A rollicking, rich portrait of a life. And what a life! By one of our greatest actors. Plummer tells how “this young bilingual wastrel, incurably romantic, spoiled rotten, tore himself away from the ski slopes to break into the big bad world of theatre, not from the streets up but from an Edwardian living room down,” and writes of his early acting days as an eighteen-year-old playing the lead in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. We see his glorious New York of the fifties, where life began at midnight, with the likes of Arthur Miller, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, and Paddy Chayefsky, and how Plummer’s own Broadway world developed and swept him along through the last Golden Age the American Theatre would ever remember . . . how the sublime Ruth Chatterton (“she might have been created by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis”) introduced him to the right people in New York . . . how Miss Eva Le Gallienne gave Plummer his Broadway debut at twenty-five in The Starcross Story (“It opened and closed in one night! One solitary night! But what a night!”). He writes about his film career: The Sound of Music (affectionately dubbed “S&M”) . . . Inside Daisy Clover, which brought him together with the beautiful Natalie Wood . . . John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (Plummer was Rudyard Kipling). He tells the story of accepting Sir Laurence Olivier’s invitation to join the National Theatre Company, playing in Amphytron directed by Olivier himself (“a great actor but lousy director”), and writes about falling deeply in love with and eventually marrying a young actress and dancer, Elaine Taylor—to this day, his “one true strength.” Seamlessly written, with stories that make us laugh out loud and that make real the fascinating, complex, exuberant adventure that is the actor’s (at least this actor’s) life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/194207 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Handoff: A Memoir of Two Guys, Sports, and Friendship Author: John Tournour Narrator: John Tournour Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 35 minutes Release date: August 13, 2013 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: John Tournour, known to his many listeners and fans as JT the Brick, is one of the biggest sports radio personalities in America. Making it as a sports radio host is almost impossible, and JT went about it in a fearless way, leaving a lucrative position as a Merrill Lynch stockbroker to pursue his dream. But Tournour's hardest challenge would come when his best friend and mentor, Andrew Ashwood was diagnosed with cancer. THE HANDOFF is about JT the Brick's rise to sports radio stardom, and how his entire view of life changed as his best friend fought a losing battle to a deadly disease. As Andrew heroically endured chemotherapy treatment after treatment, Tournour was at his side, marveling at his friend's bravery and trying to be there for him as best he could. THE HANDOFF is about facing your fears, the power of connection, and the incredible lessons Tournour learned from his dear friend.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/194077 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Walking with Jack: A Father's Journey to Become His Son's Caddie Author: Don J. Snyder Narrator: Graham Rowat Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 6 minutes Release date: August 9, 2013 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Celebrated for both his novels and memoirs, Don J. Snyder is also the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship. A story of love and dedication, Walking with Jack chronicles Snyder's dream to caddie for his son Jack's pro golf tour debut. At nearly 60, Snyder left Maine for Scotland--the birthplace of golf--where he learned the game and earned his spot as a full-time caddie. His journey would finally coincide with Jack's own struggles in one of the PGA's toughest qualifying events.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/194276 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me Author: Patricia Volk Narrator: Patricia Volk Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 31 minutes Release date: August 1, 2013 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: From the acclaimed author of Stuffed comes an intimate memoir, written with charm and panache, that juxtaposes two fascinating lives—the iconoclastic designer Elsa Schiaparelli and the author's own mother—to explore how a girl fashions herself into a woman. Audrey Morgen Volk, an upper-middle-class New Yorker, was a great beauty and the polished hostess at her family's garment district restaurant. Elsa Schiaparelli—'Schiap'—the haute couture designer whose creations shocked the world, blurred the line between fashion and art, and believed that everything, even a button, has the potential to delight. Audrey's daughter Patricia read Schiap's autobiography, Shocking Life, at a tender age, and was transformed by it. These two women—volatile, opinionated, and brilliant each in her own way—offered Patricia contrasting lessons about womanhood and personal style that allowed her to plot her own course. Moving seamlessly between the Volks' Manhattan and Florida milieu and Schiap's life in Rome and Paris (among friends such as Dal├¡, Duchamp, and Picasso), Shocked weaves Audrey's traditional notions of domesticity with Schiaparelli's often outrageous ideas into a marvel-filled meditation on beauty and on being a daughter, sister, and mother, while demonstrating how a single book can change a life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/180234 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Thinking In Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math Author: Daniel Tammet Narrator: Daniel Tammet Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 0 minutes Release date: July 30, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: The irresistibly engaging book that 'enlarges one's wonder at Tammet's mind and his all-embracing vision of the world as grounded in numbers' (Oliver Sacks, MD). Thinking in Numbers is the book that Daniel Tammet, mathematical savant and bestselling author, was born to write. In Tammet's world, numbers are beautiful and mathematics illuminates our lives and minds. Using anecdotes, everyday examples, and ruminations on history, literature, and more, Tammet allows us to share his unique insights and delight in the way numbers, fractions, and equations underpin all our lives. Inspired variously by the complexity of snowflakes, Anne Boleyn's eleven fingers, and his many siblings, Tammet explores questions such as why time seems to speed up as we age, whether there is such a thing as an average person, and how we can make sense of those we love. His provocative and inspiring new book will change the way you think about math and fire your imagination to view the world with fresh eyes.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/183231 to listen full audiobooks. Title: I Wear the Black Hat: Essays on Villains (Real and Imagined) Author: Chuck Klosterman Narrator: Chuck Klosterman Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 2 minutes Release date: July 9, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 4 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Social Science Publisher's Summary: One-of-a-kind cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman “offers up great facts, interesting cultural insights, and thought-provoking moral calculations in this look at our love affair with the anti-hero” (New York magazine). Chuck Klosterman, “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine, has walked into the darkness. In I Wear the Black Hat, he questions the modern understanding of villainy. When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying, and why are we so obsessed with saying it? How does the culture of malevolence operate? What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don’t we see Bernhard Goetz the same way we see Batman? Who is more worthy of our vitriol—Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson’s second-worst decision? And why is Klosterman still haunted by some kid he knew for one week in 1985? Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and imaginative hypotheticals, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the antihero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). As the Los Angeles Times notes: “By underscoring the contradictory, often knee-jerk ways we encounter the heroes and villains of our culture, Klosterman illustrates the passionate but incomplete computations that have come to define American culture—and maybe even American morality.” I Wear the Black Hat is a rare example of serious criticism that’s instantly accessible and really, really funny.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/180351 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Wallflower at the Orgy Author: Nora Ephron Narrator: Kathe Mazur Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 15 minutes Release date: July 9, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.67 of Total 3 Genres: Comedic Voices Publisher's Summary: From her Academy Award—nominated screenplays to her bestselling fiction and essays, Nora Ephron is one of America’s most gifted, prolific, and versatile writers. In this classic collection of magazine articles, Ephron does what she does best: embrace American culture with love, cynicism, and unmatched wit. From tracking down the beginnings of the self-help movement to dressing down the fashion world’s most powerful publication to capturing a glimpse of a legendary movie in the making, these timeless pieces tap into our enduring obsessions with celebrity, food, romance, clothes, entertainment, and sex. Whether casting her ingenious eye on renowned director Mike Nichols, Cosmopolitan magazine founder Helen Gurley Brown—or herself, as she chronicles her own beauty makeover—Ephron deftly weaves her journalistic skill with the intimate style of an essayist and the incomparable talent of a great storyteller.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/180353 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites Author: Kate Christensen Narrator: Tavia Gilbert Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 48 minutes Release date: July 9, 2013 Genres: Arts & Entertainment Publisher's Summary: From acclaimed novelist Kate Christensen, Blue Plate Special is a mouthwatering literary memoir about an unusual upbringing and the long, winding path to happiness. “To taste fully is to live fully.” For Kate Christensen, food and eating have always been powerful connectors to self and world—“a subterranean conduit to sensuality, memory, desire.” Her appetites run deep; in her own words, she spent much of her life as “a hungry, lonely, wild animal looking for happiness and stability.” Now, having found them at last, in this passionate feast of a memoir she reflects upon her journey of innocence lost and wisdom gained, mistakes made and lessons learned, and hearts broken and mended.    In the tradition of M. F. K. Fisher, Laurie Colwin, and Ruth Reichl, Blue Plate Special is a narrative in which food—eating it, cooking it, reflecting on it—becomes the vehicle for unpacking a life. Christensen explores her history of hunger—not just for food but for love and confidence and a sense of belonging—with a profound honesty, starting with her unorthodox childhood in 1960s Berkeley as the daughter of a mercurial legal activist who ruled the house with his fists. After a whirlwind adolescent awakening, Christensen strikes out to chart her own destiny within the literary world and the world of men, both equally alluring and dangerous. Food of all kinds, from Ho Hos to haute cuisine, remains an evocative constant throughout, not just as sustenance but as a realm of experience unto itself, always reflective of what is going on in her life. She unearths memories—sometimes joyful, sometimes painful—of the love between mother and daughter, sister and sister, and husband and wife, and of the times when the bonds of love were broken. Food sustains her as she endures the pain of these ruptures and fuels her determination not to settle for anything less than the love and contentment for which she’s always yearned.    The physical and emotional sensuality that defines Christensen’s fiction resonates throughout the pages of Blue Plate Special. A vibrant celebration of life in all its truth and complexity, this book is about embracing the world through the transformative power of food: it’s about listening to your appetites, about having faith, and about learning what is worth holding on to and what is not.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/181895 to listen full audiobooks. Title: What the Animals Taught Me: Stories of Love and Healing from a Farm Animal Sanctuary Author: Stephanie Marohn Narrator: Carrington MacDuffie Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 29 minutes Release date: July 1, 2013 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: What the Animals Taught Me is the story of how a woman came upon farm animals that needed rescuing and what she learned from them as they gradually changed her home in Sonoma County, California, into an animal sanctuary. Wishing to escape the urban rat race, freelance writer and editor Stephanie Marohn moved to rural Northern California in 1993. In return for reduced rent, she fed and cared for two horses. Life was sweet. Then more farm animals started to appear: a miniature white horse, a donkey, and sheep, followed by deer and other wildlife. Each needed sanctuary from abuse, physical injury, or neglect, and Marohn took them in, gradually turning her ten-acre spread into an animal sanctuary. With each new arrival, Marohn had to learn how to care for it, to help it to overcome trauma, and to transition back to life with other animals—and to trust people again. With each successful rescue and rehabilitation, Marohn learned lessons not only about animal care but also about love, compassion, patience, trust, and so many of the qualities we often try to cultivate in ourselves. She shares what she learned from the sheep she rescued from an animal collector and the abused donkey she helped nurse back to health. She also tells about the hilarious response from the guests at her Thanksgiving dinner when they saw wild turkeys come floating down 'like paratroopers' to land next to the miniature horse that had walked right up to the patio window. Marohn's delightful memoir illuminates how the animals have much to teach us and how they helped her to reconnect with the natural world and to see and embrace others as they truly are.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/178399 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Sex, Lies, and Cookies: An Unrated Memoir Author: Lisa Glasberg Narrator: Lisa Glasberg Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 59 minutes Release date: June 18, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 2 Genres: Comedy, Satire & Parody Publisher's Summary: One woman's misguided quest for love, sex, and as much airtime as possible . . . On The Howard Stern Show, radio personality Lisa Glasberg, aka Lisa G., is painted as a violin-playing, cookie-baking cat lady, but that's all about to change. This alleged wallflower once used her skills in the kitchen to show up at a suitor's doorstep wearing nothing but a fur coat and carrying a plate of freshly baked cookies. Now, in her unrated memoir, Lisa G. reveals all about her adventures and misadventures growing up and looking for love in all the wrong places. Her journey begins in the only place where she felt comfortable—behind the microphone. Lisa became a workaholic with a larger-than-life radio personality. But when the "on air" lights switched off, she struggled to find her true self. Through therapy and some soul-searching, she transformed from an insecure young woman who attempted to win over men with her culinary prowess into an independent adult who finally learned to love herself. Lisa's story is full of inspiration and lots of laughs. Smart, sassy, and stacked, Lisa always put her career first. While searching for the perfect job, the aspiring radio star dated her way through an urban bachelorette's predictable gallery of potential mates. In Sex, Lies, and Cookies, Lisa details her hilarious sexcapades, which include everyone from a nice Jewish doctor with a unique fetish to the classic unavailable type who wants an "open relationship." Lisa G. also shares behind-the-scenes stories from her A-list celebrity interviews, friendships, and time hanging with hip-hop royalty like P. Diddy, Will Smith, and Flavor Flav. Along the way, Lisa G. became known for having the hottest ticket in town—entry into her exclusive and legendary cookie parties. The book includes the recipes for more than twenty-five of Lisa G.'s famous desserts, like "Losing my Cherry Cookies" and "Double D-licious Oatmeal Cookies," as well as tips for hosting your own fabulous cookie party. Sex, Lies and Cookies is a tasty read that proves why the most satisfying relationship you'll ever have starts with learning to love yourself (and how a little cookie dough can help).

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/177737 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Second Suns: Two Doctors and Their Amazing Quest to Restore Sight and Save Lives Author: David Oliver Relin Narrator: Rob Shapiro Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 15 hours 21 minutes Release date: June 18, 2013 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: From the co-author of Three Cups of Tea comes the inspiring story of two very different doctors—one from the United States, the other from Nepal—united in a common mission: to rid the world of preventable blindness.   In this transporting book, David Oliver Relin shines a light on the work of Geoffrey Tabin and Sanduk Ruit, gifted ophthalmologists who have dedicated their lives to restoring sight to some of the world’s most isolated, impoverished people through the Himalayan Cataract Project, an organization they founded in 1995. Tabin was the high-achieving bad boy of Harvard Medical School, an accomplished mountain climber and adrenaline junkie as brilliant as he was unconventional. Ruit grew up in a remote Nepalese village, where he became intimately acquainted with the human costs of inadequate access to health care. Together they found their life’s calling: tending to the afflicted people of the Himalayas, a vast mountainous region with an alarmingly high incidence of cataract blindness.   Second Suns takes us from improvised plywood operating tables in villages without electricity or plumbing to state-of-the-art surgical centers at major American universities where these two driven men are restoring sight—and hope—to patients from around the world. With their revolutionary, inexpensive style of surgery, Tabin and Ruit have been able to cure tens of thousands—all for about twenty dollars per operation. David Oliver Relin brings the doctors’ work to vivid life through poignant portraits of patients helped by the surgery, from old men who cannot walk treacherous mountain trails unaided to cataract-stricken children who have not seen their mothers’ faces for years. With the dexterity of a master storyteller, Relin shows the profound emotional and practical impact that these operations have had on patients’ lives.   Second Suns is the moving, unforgettable story of how two men with a shared dream are changing the world, one pair of eyes at a time. Praise for Second Suns   “As miracles go, it’s hard to beat making the blind see. Yet that’s exactly what the eye surgeon Dr. Geoffrey Tabin can do. He services poor people in the developing world who have developed cataracts—a clouding of the lens of the eye that is the world’s leading cause of blindness. . . . Second Suns is a hopeful work, a profile of two doctors who have dedicated their lives to bringing light to those in darkness.”—Time   “A compelling and inspiring book . . . Second Suns portrays heroic health care delivered under harrowing conditions: Ruit and his teams carry their equipment on multi-day treks up steep mountain trails, sometimes hiking at night with flashlights or head lamps, to reach settlements where they typically spend several days operating on hundreds of villagers in makeshift surgical theaters.”—The Washington Post   “Second Suns should be required reading for anybody with an interest in humanitarian philanthropy—or, for that matter, a desire to feel a little better about the world.”—Outside   “A detailed, heartfelt account of the work of [two] dedicated pioneers.”—Kirkus Reviews

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/175489 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Joker: A Memoir Author: Andrew Hudgins Narrator: Jeff Cummings Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 9 minutes Release date: June 11, 2013 Genres: Comedy Publisher's Summary: A funny and insightful memoir, called “raw and risky” by The New York Times Book Review, from an award-winning poet who tells the story of his life through the jokes he loves to tell. Since Andrew Hudgins was a child, he was a compulsive joke teller, so when he sat down to write about jokes, he found that he was writing about himself—what jokes taught him and mis-taught him, how they often delighted him, but occasionally made him nervous with their delight in chaos and sometimes anger. Because Hudgins’s father, a West Point graduate, served in the US Air Force, his family moved frequently; he learned to relate to other kids by telling jokes and watching how his classmates responded. And jokes opened up to him the serious taboo subjects that his family didn’t talk about openly—religion, race, sex, and death. The Joker is then both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated him, delighted him, and occasionally horrified him as he grew. The book received overwhelming praise in hardcover: “The writer’s uncanny recall for the adolescent jokes…helping the young wordsmith determine just how he felt about each of those taboo topics—makes it stand apart…Thoughtful and…amusing” (The Boston Globe); 'Hudgins doesn't hold back in [this] rip-roaring memoir that examines how the ancient—and sometimes offensive—art of joke telling affects life, society, religion, and everything in between' (Entertainment Weekly); “If we’re lucky, [The Joker] will stir up an American dialogue about all kinds of fascinating, lurid, confounding, important subjects that reside in the great undertow of jokes” (Garden & Gun).

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/177743 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm Author: Mardi Jo Link Narrator: Karen White Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 15 minutes Release date: June 11, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: Poignant, irreverent, and hilarious: a memoir about survival and self-discovery, by an indomitable woman who never loses sight of what matters most.  It’s the summer of 2005, and Mardi Jo Link’s dream of living the simple life has unraveled into debt, heartbreak, and perpetually ragged cuticles. She and her husband of nineteen years have just called it quits, leaving her with serious cash-flow problems and a looming divorce. More broke than ever, Link makes a seemingly impossible resolution: to hang on to her century-old farmhouse in northern Michigan and continue to raise her three boys on well water and wood chopping and dirt. Armed with an unfailing sense of humor and three resolute accomplices, Link confronts blizzards and foxes, learns about Zen divorce and the best way to butcher a hog, dominates a zucchini-growing contest and wins a year’s supply of local bread, masters the art of bargain cooking, wrangles rampaging poultry, and withstands any blow to her pride in order to preserve the life she wants. With an infectious optimism that would put Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm to shame and a deep appreciation of the natural world, Link tells the story of how, over the course of one long year, she holds on to her sons, saves the farm from foreclosure, and finds her way back to a life of richness and meaning on the land she loves.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/177911 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Dear Girls Above Me: Inspired by a True Story Author: Charles Mcdowell Narrator: Kirby Heyborne Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 2 minutes Release date: June 4, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 4 Ratings of Narrator: 4.67 of Total 3 Genres: Comedy, Satire & Parody Publisher's Summary: Based on the wildly popular Twitter feed Dear Girls Above Me, a roman à clef about how thinking like a couple of girls turned one single guy into a better man.   When Charlie McDowell began sharing his open letters to his noisy upstairs neighbors—two impossibly ditzy female roommates in their mid-twenties—on Twitter, his feed quickly went viral. His followers multiplied and he got the attention of everyone from celebrities to production studios to major media outlets such as Time and Glamour.  Now Dear Girls breaks out of the 140-character limit as Charlie imagines what would happen if he put the wisdom of the girls to the test.   After being unceremoniously dumped by the girl he was certain was “the one,” Charlie realized his neighbors’ conversations were not only amusing, but also offered him access to a completely uncensored woman’s perspective on the world. From the importance of effectively Facebook-stalking potential girlfriends and effortlessly pulling off pastel, to learning when in the early stages of dating is too presumptuous to bring a condom and how to turn food poisoning into a dieting advantage, the girls get Charlie into trouble, but they also get him out of it—without ever having a clue of their impact on him.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/177746 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters Author: Mark Weber Narrator: Mark Weber Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 26 minutes Release date: June 4, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Counseling & Inspirational Publisher's Summary: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER At the pinnacle of a soaring career in the U.S. Army, Lt. Col. Mark M. Weber was tapped to serve in a high-profile job within the Afghan Parliament as a military advisor. Weeks later, a routine physical revealed stage IV intestinal cancer in the thirty-eight-year-old father of three. Over the next two years he would fight a desperate battle he wasn’t trained for, with his wife and boys as his reluctant but willing fighting force.   When Weber realized that he was not going to survive this final tour of combat, he began to write a letter to his boys, so that as they grew up without him, they would know what his life-and-death story had taught him—about courage and fear, challenge and comfort, words and actions, pride and humility, seriousness and humor, and viewing life as a never-ending search for new ideas and inspiration.   This book is that letter. And it’s not just for his sons. It’s for everyone who can use the best advice a dying hero has to offer.   Weber’s stories illustrate that in the end you become what you are through the causes to which you attach yourself—and that you’ve made your own along the way. Through his example, he teaches how to live an ordinary life in an extraordinary way. Praise for Tell My Sons   “A gift to us all . . . Every page exudes courage, honesty, and an indomitable spirit. Mark Weber’s story has touched me in such a profound way.”—Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays with Morrie   “Tell My Sons is a deeply moving, personal account of a soldier’s journey into an ultimate frontier. As I read Mark Weber’s book, I was astonished by its honesty, courage, and discipline. This book offers one of the most profound and detailed descriptions of the strange world of cancer and should be essential reading for all of us who seek to understand that topsy-turvy terrain.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies “Tell My Sons is one of the most profound and inspirational stories I have ever read. It may have been written for Mark’s children, but it may as well be a treatise for all of us about honest parenting and leadership with character in love, family, faith, and politics. For a man who is facing profound health issues, Mark is doing a remarkable job showing us all how to live with courage and integrity.”—Walter F. Mondale, former vice president of the United States   “This book is why I have always been proud to call Mark Weber my son. His ability to reach across complex boundaries and write and speak with such depth and beauty makes him a modern day Lawrence of Arabia. Mark’s passion, attitude, and thoughts about life are what is best about America.”—General Babakir S. Zibari, chief of defense, Republic of Iraq   “A poignant illustration of what being a hero is all about . . . Heroes exemplify invincible courage, character, and perseverance in times of insurmountable odds. Mark embodies these attributes. Tell My Sons will empower the reader with profound lessons of living life with hope and determination.”—John Elway, Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/200447 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Tao of Martha: My Year of LIVING; Or, Why I'm Never Getting All That Glitter Off of the Dog Author: Jen Lancaster Narrator: Jen Lancaster Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 58 minutes Release date: June 4, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.33 of Total 3 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 2 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: One would think that with Jen Lancaster’s impressive list of bestselling self-improvement memoirs—Bitter Is the New Black; Bright Lights, Big Ass; Such a Pretty Fat; Pretty in Plaid; My Fair Lazy; and Jeneration X—that she would have it all together by now. One would be wrong. Jen’s still a little rough around the edges. Suffice it to say, she’s no Martha Stewart. And that is exactly why Jen is going to Martha up and live her life according to the advice of America’s overachieving older sister—the woman who turns lemons into lavender-infused lemonade. By immersing herself in Martha’s media empire, Jen will embark on a yearlong quest to take herself, her house, her husband (and maybe even her pets) to the next level—from closet organization to craft making, from party planning to kitchen prep. Maybe Jen can go four days without giving herself food poisoning if she follows Martha’s dictates on proper storage....Maybe she can grow closer to her girlfriends by taking up their boring-ass hobbies like knitting and sewing.…Maybe she can finally rid her workout clothes of meatball stains by using Martha’s laundry tips.… Maybe she can create a more meaningful anniversary celebration than just getting drunk in the pool with her husband....again. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll discover that the key to happiness does, in fact, lie in Martha’s perfectly arranged cupboards and artfully displayed charcuterie platters. Or maybe not.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/177758 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Double Double: A Dual Memoir of Alcoholism Author: Martha Grimes, Ken Grimes Narrator: Holter Graham, Kate Reading Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 21 minutes Release date: June 4, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2.5 of Total 2 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: “A thoughtful twist on the recovery memoir” (O, The Oprah Magazine) that explains the different ways bestselling author Martha Grimes and her son, Ken Grimes, recognized and overcame their addictions, now with two new chapters—one from each author. In this introspective and groundbreaking memoir of addiction, mystery writer Martha Grimes and her son, Ken Grimes, present two different, often intersecting points of view. Chapters alternate between Ken’s and Martha's voices and experiences in 12-step program and outpatient clinics. Written with honesty, humor, a little self-deprecation, and a lot of self-evaluation, Double Double is “an honest, moving, and readable account of the drinking life and the struggle for recovery. This brave and engaging memoir is a gift” (Kirkus Reviews).

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/179945 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined Author: Scott Kaufman Narrator: Walter Dixon Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 37 minutes Release date: May 28, 2013 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 2 Genres: Biology & Chemistry Publisher's Summary: Child prodigies. Gifted and Talented Programs. Perfect 2400s on the SAT. Sometimes it feels like the world is conspiring to make the rest of us feel inadequate. Those children tapped as possessing special abilities will go on to achieve great things, while the rest of us have little chance of realizing our dreams. Right? In Ungifted, cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman—who was relegated to special education as a child—sets out to show that the way we interpret traditional metrics of intelligence is misguided. Kaufman explores the latest research in genetics and neuroscience, as well as evolutionary, developmental, social, positive, and cognitive psychology, to challenge the conventional wisdom about the childhood predictors of adult success. He reveals that there are many paths to greatness, and argues for a more holistic approach to achievement that takes into account each young person’s personal goals, individual psychology, and developmental trajectory. In so doing, he increases our appreciation for the intelligence and diverse strengths of prodigies, savants, and late bloomers, as well as those with dyslexia, autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD. Combining original research, anecdotes, and a singular compassion, Ungifted proves that anyone—even those without readily observable gifts at any single moment in time—can become great.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/178416 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Dear Miss Landau Author: James Christie Narrator: James Christie Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 49 minutes Release date: May 22, 2013 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Every morning James Christie puts on a blue rugby shirt and jeans. His wardrobe is full of identical outfits. Every day he eats the same meal and drinks from the same mug. These are not ingrained habits, but survival strategies. For James, coping with new experiences feels like smashing his head through a plate glass window. The only relief comes from belting the heavy bag at the boxing club or watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He's an autistic man lost in a neuro-typical world. Differently wired. Alien. Despite a high IQ, it seems he'll spend the next 20 years cleaning toilets. But then his life takes an amazing turn - from a Glasgow tenement to a rendezvous with a Hollywood star on Sunset Boulevard. On that road trip across America, the man who feels he lacks a soul will find it. Eight time zones and 5,000 miles away, he has a date with the actress who played Drusilla, the kooky vampire who changed his life when he saw her in a Buffy episode. Drusilla has no soul either. And maybe that's the attraction. But Drusilla is fictional. The lady he'll see on Sunset is Juliet Landau. She's real, and that's a very different proposition...